A day after the federal government released Budget 2025, CAPE and other federal unions held a press conference to address the impacts on the public service. Below are CAPE President Nathan Prier's opening remarks.
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Yesterday’s budget was nearly 500 pages and still fell short on some pretty crucial details. We know they want to cut the public service by 40,000 jobs, and they want to cut almost 60 billion dollars in programs to Canadians. What does that mean exactly? Which programs and services are they sacrificing to make that happen? Who exactly is going to do the work to deliver on the big commitments they just made to Canadians, which includes opening up entire new offices like Build Canada Homes? How exactly does this government plan to square its promises to stop the gravy train of paying consultants 25 percent more than we pay public servants for the exact same work? These details were left out of what we read yesterday, and that’s probably not an accident – either they don’t know how they’re going to do all of this, or they’re not ready to tell Canadians what they’re about to take away from them.
To be clear, we spend less proportionally now on public servants than we did under Harper – we spent about ten percent of the operating budget on public servants under Trudeau, and we spent about 14 percent under Harper. That shocks most people, given how often public servants get scapegoated for a deficit caused by governments not squaring their big promises with their big tax cuts. What we are actually discussing here is gutting programs and services ordinary Canadians depend on, and this government isn’t ready to own the details of that yet. We’re talking about getting pushed into a rushed mass deployment of AI into critical government operations by a profit-motivated tech lobby, without the checks and balances in place to make sure it doesn’t cost us more than it saves. And frankly, despite all the promises otherwise, we’re probably talking about the old shell game of cutting public sector jobs for cheap optics only to see consultants pick up the slack, billing taxpayers 25 per cent more for the same work while we bleed out our national institutional memory.
We’re a union that’s made up mainly of economists – we despise seeing inefficiencies build up and big opportunities get missed. There are real solutions to cut government operating costs but gutting your workforce while making massive new commitments to Canadians is not one of them. The fact that remote work for public servants was not even considered as an opportunity – which means we could save almost the exact same amount of money they very dubiously claim we’ll save with job cuts on real estate costs instead, while converting our offices to housing – means this is just an ideological attack on the public service exactly when we need it most. There are human costs to these ideological games, and public servants are tired of being scapegoated.
We expect all parties to come together and propose real and creative solutions that retain the hardworking public servants we’ve already invested in training up, take up actual opportunities to cut back on operating costs where it actually makes sense (like cutting our office costs in half), and attract more of Canada’s best and brightest workers to the public service so we can get to work and face down the very, very real threats our country is up against in these dark times.
