The government explained its decision by citing a 'deterioration in the Canadian financial outlook'
The federal government rejected an independent commission’s recommendation to raise judicial salaries a day before releasing its first budget under Prime Minister Mark Carney this week, citing slowed economic growth, new expenditures such as increased pay for military members, potential public sector job losses, and other factors.
The government also dismissed the commission’s argument that low salaries made it challenging to fill judicial vacancies with talent from private practice, describing a historic spike in vacancies between 2021 and 2024 as “now fully remedied.”
Released Tuesday, the 2025 federal budget allocates $81.8 billion over five years to “rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the Canadian Armed Forces,” which includes recruitment, pay raises, the expansion of ammunition and training infrastructure, upgrades to digital defence infrastructure, and more.
The budget also outlined a plan to reduce the size of the public service workforce to roughly 330,000 workers by 2028–2029 – a decline of approximately 40,000 or 10 percent from 2023–2024.
The government’s announcement on judicial salaries on Monday was a response to a report the Judicial Compensation and Benefits Commission submitted in July.
In that report, the three-member commission, which is empowered by the federal Judges Act to review judges’ compensation across the country every four years, recommended increasing judicial salaries by $28,000. This would be in addition to the adjustments made to judicial salaries every April, based on Statistics Canada’s Industrial Aggregate Index, a measure of the average increase in weekly wages and salaries across the country.
The commission also recommended that associate judge salaries increase from 80 percent to 95 percent of a puisne judge’s salary.
In its report, the commission said that the current salary and benefits paid to judges are inadequate, resulting in “an ongoing adverse effect” on attracting talent to the bench. The commission concluded that increasing judicial pay will help ensure “that more outstanding candidates are not discouraged from seeking judicial appointment.”
According to the report, federally-appointed judges at most courts across Canada earned $414,900 as of April 2025. They earned $396,700 the previous year.
In its response, the government said its decision to reject the commission’s requests “reflects a significant deterioration in the Canadian financial outlook.” The government cited slow economic growth due to US tariffs and ongoing uncertainty over future trade moves by the US, as well as a rising unemployment rate.
Canada’s spending on defence has meanwhile gone up. The government pointed to its obligation to meet new defence spending targets established by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for its members, in response to changes in US defence policy, as well as once-in-a-generation pay hikes for members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
“Based on the evidence before this commission, judicial salaries are adequate and, in any event, cannot be the source of new fiscal expenditure at a time of comprehensive expenditure review, including possible public sector job losses,” the government said in its response. It noted that judicial salaries have experienced steady long-term growth due to annual adjustments and are likely to continue growing over the next four years.
The government also rejected the commission’s argument that higher pay would help address judicial vacancies, which had reached nine percent among federally-appointed courts in May 2023 – or 88 out of 995 full-time positions. By April 2025, that number had decreased to 15 vacancies and 1,224 full and part-time judges in office.
As of November 2025, the number of vacancies had climbed back up to 50, with a total of 1188 full and part-time judges in office, according to the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada.
The government acknowledged that, between late 2021 and early 2024, the number of judicial vacancies had been higher than historical averages, but stated that this number had fallen “well below historic averages” by the start of 2025.
It pointed to other factors besides salary levels that could have contributed to low salary levels. These include the election period in 2021, during and after which judicial appointments could not be made, and the fact that the government had created more than 100 new superior court judicial positions that were subsequently registered as vacancies in reports by the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada.
Jeremy Opolsky, a partner and litigator at Torys LLP, told Canadian Lawyer that while the government’s response demonstrates how “judicial compensation isn’t immune from macroeconomic considerations,” its decision is nonetheless disappointing.
“We see the vacancy issue continue to affect our ability to have speedy access to the justice system across Canada,” he says, noting the issue has factored into Ontario’s ongoing efforts to improve access to justice via an ongoing historic overhaul of its civil rules. “But at the end of the day, part of that picture is having enough judges.”
He notes the government and commission’s disagreement over whether the judiciary can attract talent from the private sector, “where the federal government doesn’t see an issue and the commission seems to acknowledge the ongoing issue as the gap between compensation of the private sector and the judiciary [continues to] grow.
“I would expect that gap to continue being a concern, and we'll have to watch to see how that's addressed in the future,” he says.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Judicial Council told Canadian Lawyer on Tuesday that the council is reviewing the government’s response and has no additional comments to make at this time.
Spokespeople for the Supreme Court of Canada, the Federal Court of Appeal, and the Federal Court declined to comment on the government's decision.
