Federal Departments Plan Job Cuts of 5%, Lower Than the Promised 10%: Budget Watchdog

Cyclists make their way along the Ottawa River and past Parliament Hill in Gatineau, Quebec, on Sept. 18, 2020. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) says five federal departments have released plans to cut nearly 2,000 jobs by 2030, representing workforce reductions of 4.7 percent.

“Information on service-level impacts was limited and varied across organizations, but all indicated that the planned reductions are expected to have a ‘low’ or ‘limited’ impact on existing service levels,” the PBO said in its Jan. 8 report.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said in November that as part of the federal government’s Comprehensive Expenditure Review (CER) to reduce government spending, it would be cutting the size of the public service by 10 percent.

But the figures published by the PBO show the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Canada Economic Development for the Quebec Regions, Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Correctional Service of Canada, and Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada would cut 1,927 positions by 2030. When divided by the five departments’ combined total workforce of 40,683 employees, that comes to a 4.7 percent reduction, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.

The PBO said that in November it requested a breakdown of plans to cut expenditures through the CER from five departments. The CER has called for departments to find savings of up to 15 percent, but the PBO said it is difficult to “assess the fiscal and operational risks to achieving the stated savings.”

The five departments said they would implement $1.5 billion in planned savings over the next four years, including $501 million in savings in 2029–30.

The PBO said it will submit information requests to all remaining departments and agencies affected by the CER to obtain the same information. “Ongoing monitoring will assess whether the implementation of the CER aligns with the planned savings presented in Budget 2025 and whether the reductions will result in ‘low’ or ‘limited’ service-level impacts,” the PBO said.

In July 2025, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne sent letters to all cabinet ministers asking them to reduce their departments’ spending by 7.5 percent in the upcoming fiscal year starting on April 1, 10 percent by the following year, and 15 percent by the 2028–29 fiscal year.

The RCMP, Canadian Border Services Agency, and the Department of National Defence were initially exempted from the 15 percent savings, with the government requiring them to cut lower amounts from their budgets.

The 2025 budget released in November showed that eight other departments are required to find savings lower than 15 percent, including Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Communications Security Establishment, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, Indigenous Services Canada, and the Department for Women and Gender Equality, and the federal research funding councils. The departments are required to find savings of around 2 percent.

The budget said that Ottawa plans to find savings under its current CER, saying it will save $13 billion annually by 2028–29, which will total $60 billion over five years alongside other savings and revenues.

Budget 2025 also outlined plans to slash the number of public servants by around 40,000 positions by the end of the 2028–29 fiscal year, to reach roughly 330,000, which is a 10 percent decrease from the peak of nearly 368,000 in 2023–24.

The government said this would be achieved through “normal attrition through retirements, voluntary departures, and previous savings exercises,” as well as further measures the government is taking to slow down spending and return the public service to a “sustainable” size.