Lack of clear picture on job cuts with ‘blunt instrument’ approach, say ex-civil servants
With thousands of public servants approved to retire early, and tens of thousands more warned that their jobs may be at risk, there’s still no clear picture of which jobs will be preserved and which will be cut, unlike in previous exercises that brought about sweeping changes to the federal public service.
“As a member of the public … I’m thinking, you're sending all these people home. Do you really understand what the impact will be of them going?” said Pamela Isfeld, president of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO).
“I want to give some credit because I know I’m not the only one thinking of this, but I haven’t seen it yet. It’s something to keep an eye on,” said Isfeld, whose union represents 2,200 people who work abroad for Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.
She said it’s hard to determine the impact of the early retirement and workforce adjustment on the work that the public service does.
In the case of those seeking early retirement, “a lot of them are leaving before they planned,” amounting to “a lot of knowledge and skill out the door,” though Isfeld added she’s not certain how many of her union members have put their hand up to exit early.
Isfeld said her union keeps telling management that priorities need to be set as their ranks potentially dwindle. Among GAC's 7,657 staff, more than 3,000 workers and 406 executives have received notice that their jobs could be at risk, and more than 500 positions total are expected to be cut.
“One thing we keep saying as a union is, look, we need to have priorities: there’s things we do, and things we don’t do,” Isfeld said. “From my point of view as a foreign service officer, the second part is the hard part to get anyone to stick to.”
The Hill Times asked the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), as the employer of the core public administration, whether it is tracking, co-ordinating, or monitoring which positions and programs are being cut under the comprehensive expenditure review.
Spokesperson Martin Potvin pointed towards two web pages that track the number of early retirements and the number of workforce adjustment (WFA) notices, saying both pages are updated regularly. The retirement webpage does not offer breakdowns by department, nor does the WFA link specify roles or positions being cut.
As of July 24, TBS received 10,006 applications for early retirement, and has approved 87 per cent—or 8,718 people—but denied 65. The latest possible date for retirement is Jan. 20, 2027.
Early retirement was only an option for public servants who joined the public-service pension plan on or before Dec. 31, 2012; are at least 50 years old; have at least 10 years of employment in the public service and two years of pensionable service; or those who joined the public service pension plan on or after Jan. 1, 2013, are at least 55 years old, and have at least 10 years of employment in the public service and two years of pensionable service.
The program was sharply criticized by unions for circumventing collective agreements, which cover hundreds of thousands of public servants nationally.
Additionally, Potvin said federal organizations provided details about their planned reductions in departmental plans for 2026-27, “including the specific measures that departments are planning to undertake and the number of budget and FTE [full-time equivalent] staff reductions over a three-year period.”
David McLaughlin, the executive director of the Task Force for Modernizing Government, said it appears the government is approaching the spending review—which aims to shed billions of dollars in government spending and trim the size of the public service by 16,000 full-time equivalents by the end of the decade—in a quantitative manner as opposed to a qualitative one.
“You’re going to get situations where you will lose some good performers who you would not normally want to lose,” said McLaughlin of the government’s strategy of focusing on voluntary departures and limiting the amount of involuntary layoffs.
“They’re voting with their feet, and yes, sure, that gets the numbers down and you’re able to post savings, but you’re potentially compromising on the quality and the effectiveness of the public service,” said McLaughlin, who was chief of staff to former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
McLaughlin said he has sympathy for public service managers who don’t have the same leeway as the private sector and must follow layoff processes that are heavily codified by collective agreements.
“It’s such a blunt instrument,” he said. “You really don't have that flexibility in the public service.”
McLaughlin noted that Prime Minister Mark Carney (Nepean, Ont.) emphasized this country’s strong fiscal position in his address on Aug. 22 after trade talks collapsed between Canada and the United States.
“He was talking about having the financial firepower to deal with tariff retaliation,” McLaughlin said, after vowing to rein in public spending with a “spend less to invest more” mantra.
In Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia’s 33rd annual report on the public service, he said Carney's spending review was on track to cut $13-billion in annual spending by 2028-29.
“The public service sharpened the focus on priorities and re-oriented organizations to deliver on them,” Sabia wrote of the past year’s seismic shift. “This will set us up to deliver better results, sooner.”
Former Privy Council clerks Jocelyne Bourgon and Mel Cappe recently told The Hill Times that public service cuts require the government to prioritize what functions it should preserve, redesign, or abandon. Both, in their tenures, helped steer then-prime minister Jean Chrétien’s Program Review in the 1990s, which saw the public service of the day shrink by some 45,000 jobs.
The Chrétien government’s Program Review began in 1994 as part of its effort to eliminate a federal deficit equal to 5.3 per cent of GDP. The exercise reassessed which programs Ottawa should continue, redesign, transfer, or end; over five years, federal public-service employment fell by 19 per cent, including roughly 8,000 positions transferred outside the public service.
Don Drummond, a past assistant deputy minister at the Finance Department, recalled a common saying from Cappe:
“He’d say, far too often, ‘there’s no such thing as the good old days, there's only people with bad memories,’” Drummond said. “But I do have a good memory of the 1995 Program Review, and I can't for the life of me understand why they don't do an exercise like that one.”
Such an exercise could be chaired by the Privy Council Office and require deputy ministers to choose which programs to prioritize, he said.
“So it seems to me, we were state of the art, and we’re moving backwards,” Drummond said. “We should be moving forward.”
Drummond, also a former chief economist with TD Bank, said there has been a “lack of transparency” when it comes to the public service since its ranks ballooned under former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
“First of all, we’ve never known what the 30 per cent [headcount] increase did,” he said. “One can’t imagine they did it terribly productively, and certainly not very efficiently."
“So the whole exercise has been enshrouded in secrecy, and we'll probably never find out what happens to people.”
The Hill Times