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About 68,000 federal public servants are being provided with details of the federal government’s planned early retirement program as Ottawa seeks to reduce the size of the public service.
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Letters have already been sent in the mail to the thousands of public servants who may be eligible for the program, said Mohammad Kamal, director of communications with the Treasury Board Secretariat.
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The government’s 2025 budget, passed in November, called for the public service to decline by about 40,000 jobs from its peak of 368,000 positions in 2023-24. Of that total, another 30,000 jobs will have to be shed by the end of the 2028-29 fiscal year for the government to hit its targets.
Ottawa plans to achieve the job cuts mainly by boosting the rate of attrition and by lowering the age-eligibility rules for retirement to avoid job cuts to younger workers.
“The Early Retirement Initiative is proceeding with an emphasis on voluntary, structured options to retire early with clarity and predictability,” Kamal wrote in an email obtained by the Ottawa Citizen. “We will continue to provide employees with updates on this work and the broader Comprehensive Expenditure Review as they become available.”
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How the offer works
Under the plan, workers who joined the public service before 2013 and are over age 50 or who joined after 2013 and are over age 55 will be eligible for early retirement with no penalty if they have 10 years of employment and at least two years of pensionable service.
The letter also said the program will be available only to certain employees who apply to participate under parameters set by the Treasury Board.
“These parameters would be designed to maintain essential services and business continuity,” the letter said.
“As such, acceptance of an employee’s application to participate would not be guaranteed.”
The program is expected to run for one year, pending legislative approval.
What the union says
Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest union representing federal civil servants, said in a post Wednesday on its website: “PSAC welcomes efforts to prevent involuntary layoffs. But any early departure program must be negotiated with the union and must honour the hard-fought contractual benefits enshrined in our collective agreements.
“We are pressing the government to meet with us to discuss the full details of the ERI (early retirement incentive). Once we have this information, we will provide further advice to members.”
Last month, PSAC national president Sharon DeSousa told reporters she doesn’t expect to see many members sign up for the early retirement incentive.
— With files from the Ottawa Citizen and Canadian Press
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