OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney’s promise to cut the public service through attrition is “misleading” and “reckless,” says the head of a federal union.

Carney was asked by reporters last week whether he plans to keep his election promise to cap — not cut — the public service as his government looks to find operational savings. The prime minister responded that the cap “relates to the overall level and the adjustments that will happen naturally through attrition.”

“There’s a certain age cohort in the public sector. People leave employment, whether it’s in the public or private sector, for a variety of reasons. Attractive opportunities outside, retirement on the other side. So we’ll be managing through that,” Carney said.

Sharon DeSousa, national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said Carney’s claim that public service cuts will happen through attrition is “flat-out misleading” and ignores “the hard truth facing Canada’s public services.”

DeSousa said thousands of permanent public servants have been told already that their jobs are being cut, not through retirements or voluntarily departures but through direct layoffs.

“These job losses are already weakening the public services people rely on, from Canada Revenue Agency tax services to employment insurance and child care benefits, and thousands more cuts are expected in the months ahead,” DeSousa said, adding that the federal government’s austerity agenda is “lazy, reckless (and) short-sighted.”

Finance Minister François Philippe Champagne said earlier this month that “adjustments” are coming to the public service as Ottawa looks to trim its operational spending in the fall budget.

Champagne said he had received responses from his cabinet colleagues to his request earlier this summer for cuts of 15 per cent in spending over the next three years.

When asked whether the spending reduction plan might include public service layoffs, Champagne said the government “will find adjustments.” He added that the pace of public sector growth during the COVID-19 pandemic was “not sustainable.”

Multiple federal departments and agencies have announced staffing cuts this year, with some of the latest cuts hitting employees at Library and Archives Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Evert Lindquist, a professor at the University of Victoria’s school of administration, said while the Carney government hasn’t yet announced the results of its current spending review, departments may have been cutting positions already in response to the spending review announced by Anita Anand when she was Treasury Board president.

Lindquist said that as the government pursues its cost-cutting exercise, the normal outflow of people leaving the public service will continue — and many of those people may not be replaced.

Governments often overshoot their targets when they cut staff, he said.

“And then what they discover is they don’t have enough people to do things that the government cares about, or to provide services to citizens, so then they wind up hiring again,” Lindquist said. “So that’s always something to watch.”

Most of those who lost their jobs last year were “term” employees — people hired for a limited period of time — and more than three-quarters of them were under the age of 35.

Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick said the government’s plan to reduce the size of the public service seems passive and “kind of random.”

Wernick said the government should draft a labour force strategy that outlines where it wants to shrink payrolls and where it wants to expand them. He said that strategy could include a plan to accelerate attrition.

“If you’re relying on attrition, you’re saying a random pattern of where people die or get sick or retire or leave for other jobs is going to guide you and it begs the question … then what?” he said. “At the end of the day, you have to make decisions.”

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives warned in a recent report that budget austerity could cut almost 57,000 jobs from the public service by 2028.

Marc Lee, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said he’s “skeptical” of the government’s claims about relying on attrition to shrink the public service.

Lee said the upcoming federal budget, expected in November, will probably be “one of the most significant budgets that Canada’s had in decades.”

Treasury Board data indicates that just more than 12,800 people left the public service in 2023-24, a cut of four per cent. That number included about 8,000 retirements and about 2,200 resignations.

The data — which excluded some employees and agencies due to a lack of information — said the federal public service employed 319,877 people that year.

Lee said that even if the federal government hires no public servants at all over the next three years, it still wouldn’t hit the 15 per cent savings target.

Lee said the government will have to make deeper cuts to the public service or find other savings by cutting transfers to other levels of government, non-profits, businesses and individuals.

“They seem to be saying, ‘No, we’re not going to actually cut any services, we’re not going to cut transfers to provinces or people.’ But if they want to meet that target, something’s got to give at the end of the day,” he said.

— With files from Kyle Duggan

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2025.