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.
Cuts at Employment and Social Development Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will mean longer waits for assistance with vital income supports, such as Employment Insurance for the unemployed and new parents, as well as Old Age Security, child benefits, and disability supports.
Job losses among PIPSC members working for Health Canada could put public safety at risk, as systems for ensuring food, medicine and medical device safety are weakened.
At the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, 1,371 job cuts are set to compound several years of downsizing, with the union there underlining the potentially dire implications of an insufficient number of food inspectors.
The Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE), in denouncing the plan to cut about 850 jobs at Statistics Canada, warned these workforce reductions will “have severe negative consequences for our government’s ability to make policy decisions based on quality evidence and information.”
Taken together, these planned cuts are a full-frontal attack on workers and the public.
Moreover, in the context of these looming job cuts, unions are trying to bargain for new contracts. The conditions are increasingly unfavourable. As a growing number of public servants fear for their jobs, federal public employers are pushing hard for concessions while refusing to discuss the cuts. For example, PSAC reports that the CRA is yet to table a wage proposal and seeking to weaken rights related to remote work, artificial intelligence, and job security.
The process of workforce adjustment, while providing some important job security protections for impacted workers, also forces members to compete for a shrinking number of positions. The intra-union competition generated by austerity and job losses can be corrosive to solidarity and make member mobilization and contract bargaining that much more difficult.
All of this amounts to a repeat of past failed campaigns of politically motivated austerity.
As CAPE president Nathan Prier and director of policy and engagement at the Broadbent Institute Clement Nocos argue, federal governments frequently scapegoat public servants as the source of overspending. The Carney Liberals’ current offensive is thus another in a long series of attacks on public services ostensibly meant to demonstrate fiscal prudence and political rectitude.
But slashing away at the federal public service in the midst of an economic “rupture,” as Carney characterized our moment in Davos, doesn’t improve Canada’s economic position. Instead, austerity undermines the foundation on which we could build a better, fairer economy that is less dependent on the increasingly authoritarian and unreliable U.S.
Public sector austerity not only destroys good union jobs, but also erodes the knowledge, expertise and capacity necessary to transform our unequal economy. Unions and the broader public have the same interests in this fight. Only the ulta-wealthy stand to benefit from the disastrous course we’re on.
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