{"id":254533,"date":"2025-11-01T12:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/254533\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T12:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:31:09","slug":"public-service-braces-for-billions-in-spending-cuts-ahead-of-tuesdays-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/254533\/","title":{"rendered":"Public service braces for billions in spending cuts ahead of Tuesday\u2019s budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Finance Minister Fran\u00e7ois-Philippe Champagne latest prebudget comments suggest deep staffing cuts are coming.Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Public servants across the country are bracing for Tuesday\u2019s federal budget, where Prime Minister Mark Carney\u2019s<\/a> references to austerity and sacrifice will be translated into hard numbers and job cuts. <\/p>\n

Unions are already preparing their members, sharing information packages on the \u201cwork force adjustment\u201d rules that kick in when departments decide to shed staff.<\/p>\n

The budget represents Mr. Carney\u2019s first real opportunity to reshape the federal government, spending billions more in areas such as defence and trade infrastructure while cutting back elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The challenge for the government will be to make the case for cuts in some areas, while also defending major new deficit-financed spending overall. Staffing cuts also risk upsetting the demographic balance of the public service, as younger people on temporary contracts will likely be among the first to lose their jobs. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The size of the federal government has grown sharply since the Liberals formed government in 2015, and Finance Minister Fran\u00e7ois-Philippe Champagne said Wednesday that the budget will bring those totals back to \u201csustainable\u201d levels, hinting at a reversal of growth since the pandemic.<\/p>\n

It has been more than a decade since the federal government went through an ambitious spending review. The Conservative government\u2019s Deficit Reduction Plan, launched in 2011, eliminated more than 16,000 positions. <\/p>\n

The steep budget cuts of the mid-1990s went even further, when then-prime minister Jean Chr\u00e9tien\u2019s government brought in budgets that ultimately reduced the public service by 45,000 employees.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Mr. Champagne\u2019s latest prebudget comments<\/a> suggest deep staffing cuts are coming.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to bring back the civil service to a sustainable level,\u201d he said Wednesday. Union leaders were quick to point out that returning to prepandemic levels implies a cut in the range of 70,000 jobs. \u201cThe people of Canada are going to be shocked,\u201d said Sharon DeSousa, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, earlier this week. <\/p>\n

Some former senior federal officials say Ottawa should learn from past cost-cutting exercises. <\/p>\n

Michael Wernick, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, said hiring freezes or eliminating temporary positions is an easier option for departments than laying off more senior workers with permanent positions. <\/p>\n

But that approach risks creating demographic problems, leaving the public service with fewer young employees with important skills the government needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy view is the current toolkit is biased and skewed. The cuts will fall hardest on the newest, youngest workers,\u201d he said in an interview. <\/p>\n

Protecting those workers may involve spending more money to fund buyouts or other incentives for older workers, he said.<\/p>\n

The government has not yet said whether it will be offering incentives for workers to leave the public service.<\/p>\n

Mr. Wernick said ministers will also have to weigh the fact that in some cases, eliminating entire programs may be better than across-the-board cuts based on percentages. But eliminating specific programs risks stronger blowback by those who are affected.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more hawkish people in this area always argue that it\u2019s better to kill a program or close a location completely, rather than just leave it wounded,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Carney pledged during the April election that he would \u201cspend less\u201d on day-to-day operational spending in order to \u201cinvest more\u201d in large capital projects like port expansions that will support longer-term economic growth.<\/p>\n

The cuts will inevitably have a significant impact on staffing, given that at $71.1-billion, personnel costs are the largest part of Ottawa\u2019s operating budget. <\/p>\n

There are two main ways of measuring the size of the federal public service. Both show significant increases since the Liberals formed government in 2015.<\/p>\n

The number of full-time equivalent positions, which measures the extent to which an employee represents a full-time budget expense, stood at 440,984 in 2023-24, up from 342,129 in 2015, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.<\/p>\n

Treasury Board also releases head count figures<\/a>, which are slightly more current. It measures all active employees.<\/p>\n

Those figures show the federal government\u2019s ranks stood at 357,965 as of 2025, down about 10,000 from the year before but still about 100,000 above 2015 levels. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Treasury Board totals are smaller than the full-time equivalents because they measure the \u201ccore\u201d public service and separate agencies, which is a narrower definition of government workers.<\/p>\n

The federal government spends about half a trillion dollars a year on programs and debt servicing, but Mr. Carney has declared much of that spending off-limits.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Transfers to the provinces and territories and core social programs won\u2019t be touched, the government has said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Champagne asked ministers in the summer to find \u201cambitious\u201d spending cuts ahead of the budget. He said ministers should reduce program spending 7.5 per cent in the first year, followed by 10 per cent in savings the next year and 15 per cent in the 2028-29 fiscal year.<\/p>\n

This works out to $15-billion in the first year, $20-billion in the second year and $30-billion by year three, according to a recent analysis by Desjardins.<\/p>\n

An analysis of past spending reviews published this year by the government\u2019s Canada School of Public Service said a clear lesson is to make sure the \u201creview base\u201d that is available for cuts isn\u2019t too small to meet the overall targets.<\/p>\n

Allen Sutherland, a former senior Privy Council Office official responsible for machinery of government who is now president and chief executive officer of the Institute on Governance, said the Carney government may have declared too many spending categories as off-limits to cuts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt may be that in future years, they\u2019ll have to broaden it out and put other elements on the table that they\u2019re not ready to put on now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Union leaders say they are frustrated with the government\u2019s focus on public servants, rather than on other options such as reducing the use of outsourcing or raising more tax revenue.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re sick of being the scapegoat for deficits we didn\u2019t cause,\u201d said Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees.<\/p>\n

Another option for spending cuts is to simply not renew programs that are set to expire.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

A report this week by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reviewed 84 federal departments and found 52 will likely use the non-renewal of programs to meet their spending reduction targets.<\/p>\n

CCPA senior economist David MacDonald predicts specific cuts will be made via \u201cstealth\u201d over the coming months. He does not expect them to be clearly laid out on Tuesday. <\/p>\n

Mr. Wernick, the former PCO Clerk, said history shows politicians need to weigh the potential for blowback. He points to the decision by the government of Stephen Harper to declare some lighthouses as surplus and to cut<\/a> funding to a fisheries research centre in Northwestern Ontario as issues that generated stiff opposition.<\/p>\n

\u201cChange always brings resistance, and some of it\u2019s going to be more painful than others,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Finance Minister Fran\u00e7ois-Philippe Champagne latest prebudget comments suggest deep staffing cuts are coming.Sean…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,714,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-254533","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-politics","11":"tag-top-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topnews","14":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}