Anand says Global Affairs cuts won’t harm consular access for Canadians abroad

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand says budget cuts at Global Affairs Canada won’t affect the ability of Canadians in trouble abroad to get help from embassies.

“I’m confident that these reductions will have no impact on the services on which Canadians rely while abroad,” Anand testified Thursday to the House foreign affairs committee.

This month’s budget included a $561 million cut to the department’s budget next year, which increases to a $1.1 billion cut two years later. It said GAC would be “revamping emergency preparedness and modernizing consular services” to cut costs.

Earlier this year, bureaucrats warned Anand that deteriorating stability worldwide and an increase in travel are causing a massive expansion in the work required to protect Canadians abroad, citing costly evacuations from the Middle East, Sudan and Haiti.

In the introductory binder prepared for Anand when she took on the portfolio in May, Global Affairs Canada said the number of evacuations it has staged to extract Canadians from crisis situations abroad has increased 3.4 times in the past five years.

The binder suggested “calibrating and managing expectations of service delivery” for consular cases that can involve anything from severe illnesses and child abductions to lost passports.

On Thursday, GAC’s chief financial officer testified that the budget cuts will affect consular services.

“We did have to make some reductions to our consular program,” Shirley Carruthers said. “Some of our services will be moved to an online portal.”

She did not offer a timeline for that shift.

“For those more complex cases that we have, they’ll continue to receive in-person support,” Carruthers added. “The reductions that we have put forward with respect to our consular program are in the spirit of modernizing how we actually deliver our services.”

The Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers said GAC staff have heard of some sort of automated system that might help with initial intake of cases.

The union’s president Pamela Isfeld said could help save on costs and speed up help for citizens. But she expressed concerns about the use of technology in helping Canadians in distress, particularly in regions with poor Internet access.

“They need to explain to everyone what exactly this is specifically, and what precise areas they are hoping to use it in,” Isfeld said of the tool.

She noted the criticism GAC faced in the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation, when Ottawa requested those fleeing the Taliban fill out forms that required advanced software or a printer.

Isfeld said consular supports are necessary for businesses to rise to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ambition of diversifying trade. “Now is not the time to be undermining those foundational services,” she said, particularly when it’s less clear if U.S. embassies will help allies during crises.

“If we have Canadian business out making deals in different countries, dealing in systems where they might be less familiar, there might be more risk. You need more people in the field to help them if they get into trouble — not fewer.”

On Thursday, Anand told MPs that the cuts “will not impact the government’s ability to diversify its trading partners and bring more investment” to Canada. That could suggest the cutbacks will disproportionally hit branches that don’t have an economic focus.

“Our network of diplomatic missions abroad has received clear instructions to deploy all necessary resources to advance trade diversification and economic diplomacy,” she said.

The budget set aside $1.7 billion for measures to make Canada more competitive in trade, including trade missions.

“When we were undertaking the exercise to identify reductions within the department, it was necessary for us to look across all of our business lines,” Carruthers said.

She said the department looked at “what we needed, what we could reduce … the areas where we could find efficiencies and were of lesser value to the department.”

Carruthers said the department will need to cut jobs, including some of the roughly 92 per cent of the department’s staff she said are classified as “indeterminate employees.”

She said the first announced cuts should come in January and will start with executives. She said GAC is not trying to stop all recruitment because that led to “mistakes” in previous episodes of belt-tightening.

Isfeld was encouraged by that comment, saying that cuts between 2012 and 2014 under the Harper government left entire branches with no new staff and kept employees in salary scales and positions for which they were overqualified.

But she also said “anxiety is through the roof” at Global Affairs Canada’s headquarters and in missions abroad.

“There are very few people who are actually out there on the pointy end, dealing face-to-face with foreign governments, foreign contacts, gathering intelligence (and) knowing the relationships,” she said. “Now is not the moment to mess with that, if you are serious about having Canadians out there.”

The budget said the government is looking to consolidate its foreign service footprint abroad. That could mean combining trade offices, consulates and even ambassadorial residences into single facilities.

The budget said that could involve “co-locating some offices with allies where appropriate,” or purchasing buildings that Canada has leased abroad.

Anand said that reviewing Canada’s diplomatic footprint is a regular process.

“With every new government, with every set of new foreign policy priorities, there is also a necessity to readjust the places of focus, especially in terms of missions,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 28, 2025.