Thousands of federal public servants received workforce adjustment notices last week warning their jobs may be cut under Ottawa’s comprehensive expenditure review. The Public Service Alliance of Canada says 1,775 of its members were notified in a single week, and Statistics Canada alone plans to eliminate about 850 positions.
Notices across the big departments
The unions’ tallies show how broad the latest wave is. PSAC says 2,273 of its members have received notices since the November budget, across departments including Public Services and Procurement Canada, Shared Services Canada, Statistics Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat. The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada says 1,849 of its members were served last week alone, and the Canadian Association of Professional Employees counts more than 2,800 of its members notified since the budget, over 1,900 of them at Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada has confirmed it will cut about 850 staff over the next two years, along with 12 per cent of its executives. Internal plans reported by CBC indicate the agency, which employed 7,274 people as of last March, will send some 3,274 notices to employees whose services “may no longer be required.” Spokesperson Carter Mann said affected employees would be informed within two weeks.
Other departments — Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Environment and Climate Change, and Employment and Social Development among them — told staff late last year that details of their cuts would arrive this month.
$60 billion in savings, 40,000 fewer jobs
The notices are the human edge of the Carney government’s comprehensive expenditure review, which aims to cut program spending and administration costs by about $60 billion over five years. The budget plan would shrink the public service by roughly 40,000 jobs from its 2023–24 peak of 368,000; about 10,000 have already been eliminated. It also targets 1,000 executive positions over two years and a 20 per cent cut in spending on management and consulting services over three years.
That last number fuels the unions’ sharpest complaint. Government records show Ottawa spent more than $19 billion on external professional and special services in 2024–25, up nearly $2 billion in a year. “We are hearing directly from members that consultants are still working alongside employees who received layoff notices this week,” said PIPSC president Sean O’Reilly, whose union has called the process a “Hunger Games-style fight for jobs.”
PSAC national president Sharon DeSousa said the rollout lacks transparency about which services will suffer. “It’s impacted our members, their mental health, they don’t know if they’re going to be next,” she said.
A notice is not yet a layoff
Workforce adjustment notices warn employees their positions may be affected; they do not say how many recipients will ultimately lose their jobs. Some will be reassigned to other roles, and Ottawa is trying to raise voluntary departures so fewer people are forced out. Letters about a planned early retirement incentive — allowing eligible employees to retire without the usual pension penalty — have gone to almost 68,000 public servants, with the one-year program expected to launch as soon as this month.
The government’s stated aim is to use attrition and the retirement incentive to avoid cutting younger workers, even as the unions warn that more waves of notices are coming in the weeks ahead.
