by ADAM D. K. KING
Austerity undermines the foundation for a fairer economy that is less dependent on the United States.
Prime Minister Mark Carney recently made international waves at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, following his frank diagnosis of our current economic “rupture.” The weaponization of trade by “great powers,” (i.e., the United States) calls for rethinking our economic relationships, according to Carney.
Back at home, however, his government is engaged in a brutal program of public service job cuts, issuing thousands of “workforce adjustment” notices to workers in the span of a year as part of their plan to ultimately axe more than 40,000 positions.
The number of workforce adjustment letters issued to federal public servants since early last year alone has been dizzying, leaving unions and their members with little sense of the full scale and implications of the planned cuts.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), the largest union in the federal public service, has launched a “workforce adjustment tracker” just to keep track of all the impacted workers. As of January 30, more than 11,800 PSAC members had received notice that their positions could be terminated. Moreover, these cuts are in addition to the 5,500 term employees who were not renewed last year.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the second largest union of federal public servants, has characterized the planned job cuts as a “generational rollback of public services” that are producing “Hunger Games-style anxiety” among its members.
Instead of building an economy of resilience to meet the challenges of the economic “rupture,” the Carney Liberals are supercharging austerity and slashing the capacity of the federal public service.
Since it became clear in the 2025 budget that the government planned this devastating and scattershot series of cuts to the federal workforce, unions have been sounding the alarm about the negative impacts likely to be experienced by their members, but also the threat these cuts posed to services across the country. Behind the language of “efficiency” and “modernization,” they warned, were drastic reductions in service capacity and quality. Not just jobs, but whole programs were under threat.
Each week it seems a new group of workers receives workforce adjustment notifications, indicating that reductions are planned for their department and their job may be terminated. The government’s plan for mass downsizing has therefore appeared as death by a thousand cuts.
In early December, 200 members of PSAC at Natural Resources Canada received warnings that they may lose their jobs. These workers support essential research and fieldwork related to Canada’s natural environment. Cutting their jobs diminishes the federal government’s capacity to “research, monitor, and respond to climate change,” the union said.
In the same week, 92 workers at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and 74 members at the Department of Finance also received notice of potential job losses.
During the second week of January, 1,775 PSAC members providing critical services, such as national statistics, IT infrastructure and economic development policy work, were notified that their positions could be cut. These included 730 positions at Public Services and Procurement Canada, 530 positions at Shared Services Canada, 350 positions at Statistics Canada, and 125 positions at Treasury Board Secretariat.
Then, on January 23, PSAC reported another round of deep cuts as nearly 6,000 public servants were warned of coming job losses. Affected departments in this case included: Global Affairs Canada; Transport Canada; Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada; Health Canada; Environment and Climate Change Canada; Fisheries and Oceans Canada; and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
A smaller round of workforce reduction notices were also issued to: 391 workers at Public Safety Canada; 303 workers at Canadian Heritage; 206 workers at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; 22 workers at the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada; and 10 workers at the Canada School of Public Service.
“Job cuts to departments like these threaten to slow service delivery, increase wait times for crucial benefits, reduce oversight and administrative capacity, disrupt critical research that informs policy making, and impact?critical government operations. The impact of these cuts will be felt across the country, particularly by the more marginalized in our communities who depend on these essential services to be there when they need them,” PSAC said in a press release published on January 28.
Beyond the sheer scale of the jobs then are the direct threats to public safety and public services.
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