CMEDIA: Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budget reportedly to result in 40,000 job cuts, says the head of the federal public service.
With the budget commitment to spend less and invest more, the head of the federal public service, Michael Sabia says it will result in the loss of 40,000 jobs as programs are scaled back or eliminated.
In a letter to federal employees, Sabia says cuts will begin subject to when the federal budget passes in the Parliament
Sabia, clerk of the Privy Council, made the statement in a memo sent to federal employees a day after Canada’s PM Mark Carney’s government delivered its first budget.
According to the memo, the government’s promise to cut $60 billion over five years is a “big number” and will have to come with sacrifices.
“That number has real consequences for people who serve their country and for their families. I am not going to try to diminish those consequences. They are real,” said Sabia.
Sabia explained that some programs will be reduced or limited in scope to hit the government’s targets while others will be terminated altogether.
“In all, the public service will need about 40,000 fewer people, including some reductions already underway,” he said.
Canada’s 2025 budget cuts would weaken the government’s work, Federal public service unions say, as it proposes to eliminate 16,000 more jobs over more than three years.
As part of the government’s larger goal of reducing the workforce, the cuts starting next year would affect about 330,000 public servants by March 2029 which means about 40,000 fewer than the all-time high in March 2024, according to the budget.
As of March this year, there were about 358,000 public servants across Canada, more than 40 percent of them in the Ottawa-Gatineau area.
Carney’s government said the changes, if passed, would streamline the public service and free up money to invest, but union leaders say it would come at the cost of an already efficient system.
“Behind every cut is a service delay, a slower emergency response, or a system that’s one failure away from crisis….These cuts don’t make us leaner — they make us more fragile,” said Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) President Sean O’Reilly in a statement.
“When governments make big promises, somebody needs to deliver on them,” said Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) President Nathan Prier in a statement.
“This is not the time to start attacking the public sector or cutting funding,” said Larry Rousseau, executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). “We know that the economy is really running on fumes.”
‘I don’t know anyone who can retire in this economy’
A new plan being offered through the federal service’s pension plan is a $1.5 billion voluntary early retirement incentive program next year.
According to the new offer, public servants with at least 10 years of employment and at least two years of pensionable service could apply to retire with a pension based on years worked, without any penalty for leaving early.
Those who signed onto the pension plan before it was changed in 2013 could retire as young as 50 and those who signed on after the pension plan changes could retire at 55.
