CFIA vows to beef up inspection with 250 jobs while hundreds of staff remain in limbo
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents some workers at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, says 250 new inspection and oversight positions have yet to be filled, while hundreds of employees wait for news as to whether their jobs will be lost amid spending cuts.
The agency has slated 587 positions for elimination as part of the federal government’s spending review, according to the agency’s March 2026 transition materials for its new president after a sweeping deputy minister shuffle.
In the same March materials, CFIA said it would make a $30-million food-safety “reinvestment,” with most of the funding supporting 250 new inspection and oversight positions. The agency said the new funding is meant to direct more inspection resources toward the areas it considers most at risk.
But none of those 250 positions has been filled yet, Agriculture Union national president Milton Dyck told The Hill Times. The union is part of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) and represents about 4,180 CFIA employees.
Public servants whose jobs may be at risk have been invited to apply for the new positions, he said, but the CFIA is still working out how the new unit will be structured, what work it will perform, and which employees it will need.
Meanwhile, among PSAC members who have received notice their jobs may be affected, about 390 are still waiting to learn whether they will keep a job, move into another position, or be laid off, Dyck said, while roughly 160 have been confirmed as keeping jobs at CFIA. About 80 have left CFIA because of the workforce reductions, Dyck said. The figures cover PSAC members who account for roughly half of the workers caught up in the reductions agency-wide.
Dyck described the process as a redistribution of resources within the agency. He added the creation of new inspection positions does not change what he sees as the basic purpose of the restructuring.
“These cuts are about cutting,” Dyck said. “They’re not about making the CFIA better.”
Dyck said the roughly 390 PSAC members are in limbo: some could move into the 250 new inspection and oversight positions, while others are waiting on internal selection processes that will determine who keeps a job and who is laid off.
Those selection processes are used when more staff occupy a type of position than the employer intends to keep, requiring workers to be assessed against one another to determine who remains in those jobs.
“The wait is a huge amount of stress,” Dyck said. “You’re sitting there wondering, ‘Will I lose my job or will I have to compete against my fellow coworkers to keep my position?’”
While most of the cuts the Agriculture Union has seen so far have been to clerical and support positions, Dyck said, some of those jobs play a direct role in overseeing inspection work.
“They maybe don’t do the inspections, but they do the quality control of inspections,” Dyck said. “So, it’s concerning when you’re losing those.” He added those losses would have a tangible impact on the inspection process.
CFIA did not respond by deadline to The Hill Times' questions about how many staff have left through the restructuring, how the reductions are distributed across food-safety functions, the status of the 250 inspection and oversight roles, and whether the changes have affected inspection work.
In the transition materials prepared for CFIA president Harpreet S. Kochhar, officials wrote that the government-wide comprehensive expenditure review, which is driving the job reductions, “does not change CFIA’s legal responsibilities, inspection standards, or scientific rigour, nor does it introduce new food safety risks."
“Safeguards and core public health protections remain intact, and the CFIA continues to maintain required inspection capacity for slaughter, imports, exports, and food processing,” the document reads. "The CFIA intends to reduce non-core research activities to focus on high-priority diagnostic methods and consolidating laboratory services to focus on essential testing."
Inspection serves as a deterrent: food science expert
Keith Warriner, a food science professor at the University of Guelph, said CFIA’s food-safety work extends well beyond inspectors visiting food-processing plants. Its work includes supporting foodborne-illness investigations and recalls, developing diagnostic services and risk-based inspection systems, and monitoring animal and plant pests that could threaten food production.
CFIA uses a risk-based inspection system that gives more frequent attention to facilities considered higher risk, while lower-risk facilities may be inspected less often.
Warriner said that if CFIA has fewer staff available to carry out inspections, facilities already receiving less frequent attention could go even longer without an inspector visiting.
He said inspections also serve as a deterrent by giving food producers an incentive to maintain safety standards.
“I liken it to police patrols on the highway when drivers will slow down,” Warriner said.
CFIA’s own inspector general found that the agency completed fewer than half of its planned manufactured-food inspections in 2024-25 because of inspection-resource capacity challenges. In response to the review, CFIA committed to conducting risk-based inspections of more than 2,400 licensed manufactured-food establishments that had not yet been inspected, with the work scheduled for completion by fall 2026.
Warriner also cautioned against assuming every staffing reduction will have the same effect on food safety. He said the cuts he understands to be underway are concentrated more heavily in science and diagnostic functions than in frontline inspection.
He said some scientific and diagnostic work can also be carried out by the Public Health Agency of Canada, private laboratories, and universities.
“I don’t think there will be a major impact on food safety given there was significant redundancy in the system,” Warriner said.
He said he would be more concerned about reductions to surveillance for animal and plant diseases or frontline inspection. If staffing cuts begin to weaken food-safety oversight, signs could include less frequent inspections, more non-compliance findings and licence withdrawals, or increases in recalls and outbreaks.
Calls to pause the cuts
At a protest in Ottawa on Aug. 25, Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) president Sean O’Reilly said his union is calling on the government to pause the reductions until it provides a clearer accounting of which services and functions will lose staff, and consults unions about the changes.
O’Reilly said PIPSC believes food-safety capacity is lower than it was during the union's February protest, but acknowledged the union does not have data identifying which specific functions have lost capacity. He also stressed the effects of the reductions may not surface right away.
"You really don't notice it at first," O'Reilly said.
The Hill Times