Canada's public service is feeling the effects of the first wave of the job cuts announced in last year's federal budget.
The Government of Canada announced last year when they released the budget for 2025-2026 that they are planning to make significant cuts to the public sector, aiming to reduce 10 per cent of the total jobs - meaning 40,000 positions - by the end of the decade.
Blake Lambert, a social sciences professor at Humber Polytechnic, said he is curious to see if the federal job cuts will affect the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
Lambert said the one point of contact people have with the federal government is the CRA and it is hard to get in touch with them.
He said people can be expected to be placed on hold for hours and it can get really hard for people that don’t have a flexible schedule.
“And so, if there were any less workers at CRA, that would absolutely not be a good thing, especially as tax season is approaching,” Lambert said.
He said he would not be surprised if they were the ones targeted first.
Lambert said anytime a government cuts jobs, it is the others in that department that have to do more work.
“There’s this idea, you know, doing more with less. It’s a BS idea. Somebody has to make up for the shortfall of somebody else not being there,” he said.
Lambert said cutting federal jobs means taking salaries out of the market, making it harder for people to buy things, the economy slows down.
“I understand there’s a need, the prime minister thinks there’s a need to do it, and maybe there is, but the consequences are generally negative,” he said.
Lambert said he has been laid off jobs as well and it is a “terrible” feeling.
“You personalize it, you think you’re the problem and it’s depressing,” he said.
Lambert said he does not think the official justification for these job cuts is convincing.
Carney government tried to justify these job cuts by saying they are a “necessary sacrifice.” It argues the public service expanded too quickly in recent years and needs to be “right sized.”
Savings from these job cuts are going to be redirected to housing, defence and economic growth. Lambert said the government is trying to reorient the economy away from the U.S. and to other partners.
Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) said in an email that the government has not said how these cuts will impact programs and services.
“The letters members are receiving is to let them know they *may* be impacted by cuts, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they will lose their jobs,” a PSAC spokesperson said.
“However, the employer has not been upfront about the process they’re using to determine who will be laid off and how many people will lose their jobs in each department.”
PSAC said more than 6,500 PSAC members have received Workforce Adjustment (WFA) notices since January 2025, including 3,500 this month alone.
“That doesn’t include the 5,500 term employees who were terminated early or not renewed. And with the government planning to cut 30,000 more jobs, we know many more members will be affected this year,” they said.
PSAC also launched a WFA tracker that they update every Monday with the information about all the cuts to date.
Based on PSAC's data, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) staff is taking one of the biggest hits so far followed by Transport Canada (TC) and CRA.
Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) said in a statement that they decry the announcement from Statistics Canada that the department will be cutting hundreds of jobs over the next two years.
“This announcement sounds like a warmed-over rehash of Stephen Harper’s anti-data playbook. The Harper era cuts to StatCan represented a hostile attitude towards facts and reality. Mark Carney’s government seems to be taking us in the same direction,” CAPE president Nathan Prier said.
Statistics Canada responded to this in an email statement to Et Cetera.
They said that this adjustment will reduce our workforce by approximately 850 positions, in addition to a reduction of about 12 per cent of our executive team.
Since the announcement on Jan. 12, 2026, Statistics Canada said the executives have been meeting personally with affected and surplus employees.
“The process will follow the Workforce Adjustment Directive and/or the applicable collective agreement. Statistics Canada remains focused on serving Canadians and adapting to future needs as we move through this period of change,” they said.
Ian Lee, a business professor at Carleton University, said the IRCC cuts come after the decision made last year to significantly cut the number of immigrants.
Lee said there are fewer files to process following that decision which is why the numbers were cut so dramatically.
As for the CRA, he said he is guessing it is because of the tax filing process moving online.
Lee said this could be following the e-government policy launched in 1999 where the idea was to go as paperless as possible as technology prospered.
“Then starting from 2005 to 2010, they made a complete transformation to shift from paper based to digital,” he said.
Lee said the argument at the time was that it was going to increase the productivity of the public service.
He said there were public service cuts former Prime Minister Stephen Harper because of the 2008-2009 recession.
“They had put a lot of extra people in payroll, and then they said, look, we got to get back into balance. And so, they got rid of those, you know, quite a few people,” Lee said.
He said he thinks that in the public sector there is room for more efficiency, especially once they went to e-government.
“I think that governments can become more efficient with fewer workers, once you digitize everything, which the Government of Canada has done,” Lee said.
He said he also believes use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector could improve how work is done and at what speed.
Lee said he does not think that these job cuts are the end of the world.
“The Conference Board of Canada has a new study out maybe four months old, and I think it was an excellent study. They did a very big picture, looked at the totality of the Canadian economy and they said look about one-third of all the jobs are not going to be affected by AI,” he said.
“The downsizing of 1995 to 1998, largest in Canadian history, 70,000 public service. There are a lot of people predicting doom and gloom. Ottawa is gonna go bankrupt and go into a deep depression. It never happened,” Lee said.
He said following that in a period of five years, Ottawa boomed.
“Partly because these public servants got kind of big bonus cheques or severance cheques,” Lee said.
He said he does not believe this is going to hurt the local economy. In terms of national economy, he said 30,000 is a small chunk considering the employed population of Canada
