Continued deficit spending in this week’s federal budget, the first in two years because of the pandemic, is likely to inflate an already-expanding public service that has grown 11.5 percent, or by more than 39,000 full-time equivalent employees, in the five years between 2015–16 and 2019–20. “There was a huge downsizing under Chretien, and then Harper held the line. And what’s happened is basically all those layoffs or downsizing—it’s all been reversed, plus-plus,” Carleton University business professor Ian Lee said in an interview. “Trudeau’s clearly grown the size of the [bureaucracy] in spending terms more than any other prime minister since the Second World War. And this started pre-COVID.” A recent report by two Fraser Institute economists showed that under the current government, per-person spending increased from $8,063 to $9,500 between 2015 and 2019, and projected that it will reach $17,091 in 2021—approximately double the amount spent during the 2009 …