Treasury Board report shows employment equity not affected by early phases of public service job losses in 2024-25

2026/04/07 2 Comments

My assessment:

The most recent report on diversity in the public service says hiring dipped by 40 per cent last year as the bureaucracy began reversing course on a decade of significant growth. But this appears to have had limited impact on equity efforts.

New data on employment equity in the federal public service shows initial attempts to shrink the population had a limited effect on the proportions of equity-seeking groups. But one expert on public policy and governance says coming job cuts are “agnostic” to these efforts, and a large public-sector union says the government isn’t doing enough to ensure diversity is maintained amid sweeping job cuts.

“I can’t see evidence that minority groups are being penalized compared to majority groups,” said Andrew Griffith, a former public servant who was a director general of citizenship and multiculturalism at then-Citizenship and Immigration Canada….

Griffith noted concerns about job cuts in the public service hampering progress in employment equity, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“Now, it might change in the current year, given the cutbacks are more significant this year,” said Griffith, referring to the approximately 24,000 public servants who have already received notice that their jobs might be at risk, and the some 9,000 jobs expected to be cut….

“The numbers don’t tell the whole story”: Turnbull

Lori Turnbull is a political science professor at Dalhousie University, a senior adviser at the Institute on Governance, and worked in the Privy Council Office from 2015 until 2017.

Speaking to The Hill Times, she said the high percentage of women “really makes it look like the public service is doing well,” in terms of equity among its ranks, but “that doesn’t really speak to what’s going on for other groups,” she said.

“I don’t think anybody would come away from that and think, ‘Oh, we better be worried because the share of women [being hired] decreased by three points,” Turnbull said, noting the high number of women in executive positions as well as the broader public service.

However, she noted the current spending review that is expected to shed thousands of jobs from the public service is “agnostic” to employment equity considerations.

“It just doesn’t really sound like there’s much co-ordination in that,” she said.

“The way they’re measuring [it] is by the numbers, by the money, and not by the function and the specific people,” she said.

“You get the numbers, and it doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Sean O’Reilly, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, one of the largest federal public service unions, said the government isn’t doing enough to protect equity-seeking groups from cuts.

“There are big concerns,” he said. “Some of the correlation we’ve seen in the past with cuts, and we fear that, we do fear that these groups will be unjustly affected by all these cuts.”

Source: Treasury Board report shows employment equity not affected by early phases of public service job losses in 2024-25 Paywall

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Lynch and Mitchell: The government must change in these three key ways to meet challenges of the moment

2026/04/02 Leave a comment

Usual excellent diagnostique as well as usual weak analysis of the how. Lynch was clerk when Service Canada’s more ambitious approach of service driving policy rather than the usual policy driven service was killed:

…The key operational culprit is complexity — the dense web of rules, reporting requirements and oversight mechanisms originally meant to safeguard the integrity of government operations but whose cumulative effect has been to make operational delivery slower, more cautious and less effective — at the cost of public confidence.

What is needed is a focus on operational simplification and end-to-end results. When there is too much oversight, or too little, results suffer. When the process itself becomes the benchmark, results become secondary. When accountability for delivery is opaque, results decline. When there are too many priorities at one time, results become a casualty. When there is too much centralization and second guessing, results deteriorate. It is tangible delivery results that the public wants to see.

These are incredibly challenging times. They require an urgent transformation of state capacity. To preserve our economic, political and territorial sovereignty, Canadians need a federal government operating at its very best.

Kevin Lynch is a former clerk of the Privy Council. Jim Mitchell is a former senior public servant in the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board. 

Source: The government must change in these three key ways to meet challenges of the moment | Opinion

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Across-the-board executive job cuts won’t address ‘staggering’ growth in bureaucracy’s upper ranks, says ex-civil servant 

2026/04/01 Leave a comment

In preparation for being interviewed, I developed some tables to highlight the impact, based upon this open data table: Population of the federal public service by executive level:

EX-1 and EX-4 impacted more than other levels. The other striking change is of course in the higher increase rates over the past 10 years of EX-2, EX-3 and EX-5.

Source: Across-the-board executive job cuts won’t address ‘staggering’ growth in bureaucracy’s upper ranks, says ex-civil servant

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Lisée | L’absurde guerre contre le télétravail

2026/02/16 Leave a comment

While I can understand the political impulse in these return to office protocols, mirroring the private sector, the “rough justice” of universal application without considering job specific requirements reflects general policy and management weaknesses.

As an executive, I tried to reserve one day every two weeks to work from home. Allowed me the time and space for deeper thinking than the transactional:

….Pour environ la moitié de la population, le télétravail est maintenant possible. C’est une révolution. Au pire, neutre pour la productivité, mais certainement bonne pour la famille, les enfants, le sommeil, la santé, la réduction de la congestion. Les syndicats se battent pour inscrire le droit au télétravail (partiel) dans les conventions collectives. Ils ont raison. J’affirme que dans un avenir pas très lointain, on inscrira ce droit dans les normes minimales du travail. Honte au gouvernement Carney, à Amazon et aux autres qui freinent ce mouvement. Ils retardent le groupe.

Source: “Chronique | L’absurde guerre contre le télétravail”

…. For about half of the population, teleworking is now possible. It’s a revolution. At worst, neutral for productivity, but certainly good for family, children, sleep, health, reduction of congestion. The unions are fighting to include the right to (partial) teleworking in collective agreements. They are right. I affirm that in the not too distant future, this right will be included in the minimum labour standards. Shame on the Carney government, Amazon and the others who are slowing down this movement. They delay the group.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

How is Carney’s government filling high-level jobs?

2026/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting change. The test will come when we see the annual reports on GiC and judicial appointments that have included diversity data under the Trudeau government. While presented as “transparent and merit-based,” considerable latitude for the government to develop and encourage nominations and thus influence results:

…Since March 2025, only one position — parliamentary budget officer — has been advertised on the government’s appointments website or in the Canada Gazette. For months, the website said it was not accepting applications for any positions. Currently, it says “appointment opportunities will be posted in due course.”

At the same time, the Carney government has made 122 governor-in-council appointments. Some of the openings filled were last advertised years ago. Government insiders say previous postings resulted in pools of qualified applicants that can still be tapped for positions.

Some openings, like chief public health officer and official languages commissioner, were publicly advertised before Trudeau left power. The government has still not named a permanent successor to former public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam, who retired in June. Officials won’t say if Canada’s new official languages commissioner Kelly Burke, who was named last week, was selected through the 2024 open application process.

On March 19, 2025, the governor-in-council (GIC) appointment website advertised 23 job opportunities — some to fill multiple positions.

Ten months later, many are still vacant.

Last week, cabinet approved nine appointments to the new Employment Insurance Board of Appeals. While openings were advertised, they were posted on the board’s own website — not the government’s GIC appointments page.

While the number can fluctuate from day to day as appointments are made and mandates expire, currently, there are around 251 vacant GIC positions.

In the Senate, seven of 105 seats are vacant and eight more senators are scheduled to retire over the course of 2026. However, the website set up under the Trudeau government to open up Senate appointments and allow Canadians to apply to be a senator has said for months that “new applications, nominations or the creation of new profiles for Senate appointments are not being accepted at this time.”

By Tuesday, 24 of the 29 seats on the board Trudeau set up to advise the prime minister on potential senator appointments will be vacant. Only three federal representatives and the two representatives for Nova Scotia will remain.

‘Transparent and merit-based’ process

Carney’s office says that the government is using a “transparent and merit-based selection process” to make appointments….

Source: How is Carney’s government filling high-level jobs?

Filed under Government Tagged with

May: The Executive Cuts

2026/01/26 1 Comment

The latest overview of the approach in considerable detail:

Too many layers. Everyone knew it.

The executive ranks have been climbing for decades despite warnings about bloat and slow decision-making. Now a 12-per-cent cut is coming: about 1,120 executive jobs disappearing across 90 or so departments.

The cuts will ensure Canada’s executive hierarchy is “a pyramid, not a cylinder,” says one senior bureaucrat. The big driver is saving money. But it’s also about speed. Fewer layers, faster decisions. That’s the plan, anyway.

There are 9,155 bureaucrats who occupy five levels of executives (EX-1 to EX-5) between directors and assistant deputy ministers. But it’s not just them.

Many expect PCO clerk Michael Sabia to also trim the deputy minister ranks, too, as he reshapes the senior bench of public service leaders. He started with a pre-Christmas shuffle — bigger than any seen in years — and promised another. No one at the top is safe, it seems.

“The cuts are a shock to the system, like a taser,” says one senior official. But can cutting layers fix the public service and speed up decision-making like the Carney government expects?…

Source: May: EXs, cuts and layers

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Usher: Farewell Cakeism, Welcome Trade-offs, Effectiveness and Efficiencies

2026/01/21 Leave a comment

While focused on the education sector, applies more broadly as Carney’s Davos speech makes clear (with the hard trade-offs to come):

… But look, cakeism is everywhere. I mean, just look at the last federal election, where every party competed to cut taxes/increase spending in the midst of threats from the US that were going to slow economic growth and require increases in national security spending. Nary a trade-off in sight. Politicians in Canada and many other countries have come to the conclusion – perhaps erroneously, perhaps not – that voters simply dislike trade-offs so it’s better not to make any. Once upon a time – in the mid-late 1990s when we finally got our fiscal house in order – Canada was pretty good at thinking about trade-offs. But it’s basically all been downhill since the turn of the century.

Now, if you wanted to put the shoe on the other foot, you could say that all politics is a bit cakeist. After all, loads of people ask for government money to fund their favourite cause or institution and never think too hard about where the money is coming from. So is it cakeist to ask for more money for universities and student aid? Well, sort of. But one expects stakeholder groups to be cakeist/selfish – they are pushing their set of priorities, and it’s not really their job to think through trade-offs. It’s the job of governments. And increasingly over the past decade or two, governments just forgot how to do that and started saying yes to more and more people. 

But times are changing. Neither our federal nor our provincial governments are in particularly sound financial footing. Thanks to the Cheeto Chaos Agent in the White House, we are in for an extended period of economic dislocation and lowered growth prospects, not to mention a massive re-orientation of fiscal spending priorities to advantage national security. For the next half-decade at least, public resources are going to be much scarcer than they have been at any point before. We as a country, therefore, need to re-learn how to talk about trade-offs, and perhaps more importantly, how to talk in terms of efficiencies.

To take our own sector as an example: when asking the public for money, institutions are going to need to be a lot more explicit both about what immediate obvious benefits will accrue to the public or the government if the money arrives, as well as about immediate specific costs which will occur if the money does not arrive. That means “asks” are going to have to get a lot more specific: not “we would like $50 million please”, but “we would like $50 million please, which we will spend on X, Y and Z, and if we don’t get it we will need to cut A, B and C in order to fund these priorities, which means the community will lose L, M and N”. This may sound simple, but institutions going in this direction would be the biggest tonal shift in university government relations in my lifetime, because universities choke on the idea of doing less or being seen to do less. But this is what the language of trade-offs requires….

Source: Farewell Cakeism, Welcome Trade-offs, Effectiveness and Efficiencies

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

ICYMI: The government is still not hiring enough disabled people: PSC report

2026/01/13 Leave a comment

Of note (I await the EE report to assess the impact of the cuts on EE groups):

…The report found that public servants with disabilities “were consistently under-represented in acting appointments in comparison to their representation in the public service.”

In comparison, all other equity groups (Indigenous people, women and visible minorities) were represented on par or exceeded their representation in acting appointments….

The report also found gaps in other equity groups, particularly with the upkeep of Indigenous applicants, who had been applying to public service jobs in numbers that were lower than their overall workforce availability.

Around 2.8 per cent of applicants to the public service in 2024 to 2025 identified as Indigenous, while their workforce availability was 4.1 per cent….

Source: The government is still not hiring enough disabled people: report

Filed under employment equity, Government Tagged with

An impatient Mark Carney would rather bypass the public service than reform it

2026/01/12 4 Comments

Public service reform is a thankless task politically and takes an inordinate amount of time, effort and political support. Needed but rarely executed given previous failures like UCS.

Former deputies need to share some of their concrete experiences with efforts in public service reform and lessons learned, rather than more general diagnostiques and recommendations. More on the how and less on the why:

…Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Sabia took over as Clerk of the Privy Council with decades of business experience under his belt. That makes him an oddity in Ottawa, where most senior bureaucrats have never worked outside the capital, much less outside government.

Therein lies the problem that Mr. Carney and Mr. Sabia face as they try to inject new dynamism into a public service that has long operated according to the principles of risk minimization and strict adherence to procedure. The senior bureaucracy is almost exclusively composed of individuals who climbed the ranks during an era of increasing centralization of power and policymaking in the Prime Minister’s Office. Their skill set revolves around keeping the dust down, rather than disrupting the status quo. 

As in any organization, however, disruption is a necessary component of innovation. And the federal public service is desperately in need of it. 

“[N]otwithstanding the massive increase in hiring over the last decade, too few public servants have been hired for the leading-edge skills required for modern government,” write former PCO clerk Kevin Lynch and ex-PCO official James Mitchell in their newly published book, A New Blueprint for Government. “When Amazon can deliver a package to almost anyone in Canada the next day, public expectations for government service standards increase accordingly. Yet those expectations are too often not being met.”

Source: An impatient Mark Carney would rather bypass the public service than reform it

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , ,

How productive is the public service? We’ll never know | Denley

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Some things easier to measure than others but productivity in service delivery, HR, finance and property management should be doable and are needed:

…One need be only moderately cynical to identify the reason for rejecting productivity measurement. There’s a big clue in the task force’s report. The advisory group states, “Without reliable data, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of government services or identify areas for improvement.”

That might seem like a problem to concerned taxpayers, but for those in government, it’s an ideal situation.

The problem with assessing performance is a political downside. If you set a goal and don’t meet it, that’s a visible failure. Better to keep it vague and talk only about the volume of money spent. Easier, too. It saves all the thinking about how to actually accomplish things, as opposed to just promising them.

What little reporting the federal government does on its own effectiveness illustrates the pitfalls of telling people how you are doing. A recent report by the Treasury Board showed that government departments that deliver high-volume services fell woefully short of expectations in 2024-25.

It’s pretty obvious that effective digital service delivery is critical to productivity and expanding output per worker, but in 2024-25, only 52 per cent of those high-volume departments met digital service standards, down from 55 per cent the year before. The target is 80 per cent, in itself a pretty modest number.

The Treasury Board report says the 80 per cent target “reflects Canadians’ expectations of simple, secure and efficient delivery of services and benefits.” If so, those expectations would be dramatically less than the ones we have of Amazon.

The underlying problem can be seen in the percentage of government business applications “assessed as healthy.” That number was only 38 per cent in 2024-25 and the target is a mere 40 per cent. Not exactly a recipe for efficient and effective service delivery.

Let’s put all of this in a broader context. In Canada, the federal, provincial and municipal governments combined employ more than 20 per cent of the population, and their spending equals 40 per cent of gross domestic product.

If those governments don’t use money productively, they are a drag on the whole economy, wasting people and money that could be more effectively deployed in the private sector.

Instead of spending so much time on the issue of where public servants work, the Carney government should focus on the far more important problem of what they do and whether it’s done effectively. The public service is too big, expensive and important to be run by guesswork.

Source: How productive is the public service? We’ll never know | Opinion

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

← Older posts