Canada

Generally speaking, reducing public servants increases consultancy requirements, not reduces.

If you don't have someone with the capabilites/skills/corporate knowledge/experince/capacity to do X thing on the payroll, then you need to hire a consultant to do it.

Now obviously I couldn't tell you what ministry/department/etc needs, but let's take the Alto contract as an isolated example.

We don't have any rail expertise in government at all, so we need to consult it in, and we pay a premium for that. In the lens of a single rail project, that makes a a lot of sense, we aren't paying payroll and maintaining expertise for a once in a generation project.

The alternative is having something like a national rail crown corp or department, like SNCF in France. Now all the experience is at the national level whenever you need it. SNCF has a lot more staff, planning, and engineering capacity than it requires; so that gets farmed out to regions and municipalities to help them with their rail/metro/tram projects. This is instead of each of them needing consultants, driving up the costs for municipal governments/capital projects.

In this manner increased federal spending becomes an accelerant for other levels of government and reduces regional and municipal spending, and thus the overall tax burden for everyone.

So if we had something like SNCF then the Alto project might cost a little more, but the Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal recent/ongoing lines would be cheaper; plus medium cities like Victoria, Winnipeg, Québec City, and Halifax would have rail projects in their reach; and smaller cities like Red Deer, Regina, Thunder Bay, Kingston, Trois Rivières, and Fredericton would have tram projects in their reach.