Topic: Government Re-org and trimming

[mad dog 2020]

He says more than 60,000 federal jobs could disappear across the country by 2014.

About 5,400 would be in the four Atlantic provinces.

"We could see 1,000 positions lost in Atlantic Canada from DND alone," MacDonald said.

MacDonald also said between 11,000 and 22,000 jobs will be lost in Ottawa.

From CBC Mobile site.

[Jed]

Ok, how does this connect? It there a link or an article that missed getting posted?

[GAP]

Mad dog 2020 needs to post a link to his source....

[mariomike]

Ok, how does this connect? It there a link or an article that missed getting posted?

CTV
"Up to 68,000 public service jobs to be cut: report":
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20120123/public-service-job-cuts-120123/

[mad dog 2020]

Sorry, I thought the CBC reference would direct you.  But should have used link.  It was from
Federal cuts could hit Atlantic region hard
CBC News
Last Updated: Jan 23, 2012 10:58 AM ET
Off iPad app Nova Scotia regional

[hamiltongs]

The "report" cited is published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a "think tank" that is in fact a shill for the NDP.

Mind you, the government has been spreading word of cuts to come for a year now, but take all of the details and numbers with a grain of salt.

[Crantor]

Yes and the numbers they use also include provincial, municipal and private industry that rely on federal programs. So 60,000 jobs are not all PS jobs.  And likely this think tank did the Tories a favour.  Let's say the Conservatives come out and say actually it's only 30 000.  Well then that's not as bad (only half as bad) as what this think tank "boy who cries wolf " came up with.

Not sure what they are trying to achieve.

[Jim Seggie]

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and other orgs have one objective:

Make Harper and the "Neo Cons" look bad...no matter how many fibs you tell or how much you stretch the truth.

Don't get me wrong - the "right" has its shills as well.

[Haletown]

Only 68,000?

Well I guess it is a good start.

But then again it is the CCPA so we can expect an exceptional level of anti Harper fear mongering to be the important point of the press release.

[Colin P]

I know people in EC, DFO and CCG who have gotten their letters. It's not surprising, both departments had a habit of funding positions with nonsalaried dollars, now the chickens are coming home to roost.

[Crantor]

Language school gave out 162 notices and Public Works handed out about 250.  Class Bs are being slashed and those that haven't been have been told to watch and shoot.

[GAP]

Based on those type of numbers, they're going to have to work harder to reach 68,000

[Crantor]

Don't kid yourself, this is only the beginning.  The budget isn't even out yet.  But I doubt it will be 68,000.

[ttlbmg]

It is interesting to see how vague the article is, in terms of the who and where. It seems like complete speculation, designed to frighten the country into protest. However, I am interested to see how the cuts in terms of civilian employment through DND might affect recruitment numbers. If there are fewer public service employees through DND, will there be more work shifted onto current serving CF members? Or will there be a complete shift in the recruitment to limit the recruitment of some trades, and expand the recruitment of trades that would be required to compensate for loss of civilian jobs. (my thoughts would be in terms of conctruction-based jobs, educational consultant jobs, etc.)

[dapaterson]

The 68K is a "worst case" number that assumes that only personnel will be cut to meet the targets - that all related program spending would continue.  I assume that the actual reductions will be different, with some programs reduced or eliminated, thus saving money that is other than payroll.

The first wave of DND/CF reductions were announced in the last budget; there's a reduction of over $500M for FY 12/13, and a baseline reduction of $1B per year in FY 13/14.  Those pre-date the Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP); the DRAP reductions will be above and beyond those.

[E.R. Campbell]

A couple of points:

1.Prime Minister Harper learned from Bian Mulroney's mistakes. Canadians didn't like Mulroney's almost gleeful expression of "pink slips and running shoes" for civil servants; Harper and his ministers are saying little; and

2. My suspicion is that DND, like other departments will have to learn to do without. Good managers are going to stop doing the work for which there are no longer any PYs; better managers are going to reorder priorities and reshuffle work; the best managers are going to make their organizations stop doing unnecessary, counterproductive tasks and work smarter on the ones that matter.

There will be some political interference, there always is, to save popular but unproductive, even counterproductive work.

[GAP]

And then there are going to be those with an agenda that will make the most noisesome, painfull cuts that the public will cry about.  The more noise, the more ammunition to thwart further cuts or reestablish former positions.

example : see: Service Canada and EI cuts vs service downgrade.

[Colin P]

The Liberals would cut funding toa program, but never actaully kill it, because that generated bad PR, cutting staff without cutting regs is a really bad idea and to be fair to the CPC, they are trying to cut regs first.

[Jed]

The Liberals would cut funding To a program, but never actually kill it, because that generated bad PR, cutting staff without cutting regs is a really bad idea and to be fair to the CPC, they are trying to cut regs first.

So true. I know both Federally and Provincially, we are left with the dregs of regulations from programs past, that keep coming back to haunt us. All the legacy safety and environmental and health administration requirements that we now have will be impossible to field with staff reductions.

I am in total agreement that we must live within our means and become as efficient as possible, but it sure puts the pressure on those left to carry on with the job at hand.

[Colin P]

When you cut regs, it means some people are going to lose their sacred cows and Canadians love to complain about laws and regs, but are the first to insist that someone else needs to be regulated.

[Thucydides]

Full comment by Lorne Gunter:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/23/lorne-gunter-big-cuts-needed-in-ottawas-bloated-public-service/

Lorne Gunter: Big cuts needed in Ottawa’s bloated public service
Lorne Gunter  Jan 23, 2012 – 2:26 PM ET

The very left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) – it’s never met a tax increase, a social program or a government expansion it didn’t like – warns that over the next four years the federal Tories intend to cut 50,000 to 60,000 public-sector jobs or “private-sector jobs funded by the government.”

I wish.

My biggest disappointment with the Tories since they took office in 2006 has been the way they have continued to expand the size and cost of government, just as the Liberals before them did. I only wish they would find the courage to roll back the size of the civil service. At 17% of total federal spending, civil service pay is now Ottawa’s biggest single expense. Without cuts in the number of bureaucrats, the federal government will never be able to balance its budget again.

Not surprisingly, the CCPA study was funded, in part, by the Public Service Alliance of Canada and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), two of the largest unions in the federal public service. The PIPSC made news last November when it voted to up its radicalism and join the Canadian Labour Congress so it could wage war on the Tory government, which is charged was plotting to “change the nature of Canada” by launching an “all-out attack on unionized employees in this country, particularly those … working in Canada’s public service.”

Also not surprisingly, the Toronto Star report on the CCPA study makes no mention of the study’s very biased sponsors. No sense undermining the reports credibility by identifying the CCPA sugar-daddies behind its conclusions!

Here are some key facts to keep in mind about the federal budget in general and the cost of the civil service in particular:

Two years ago, Ottawa had a deficit of $55.6 billion, on revenues of $218.6 billion and expenses of $274.2 billion. Last year it cut that deficit to $33.4 billion, but almost entirely because revenues returned to pre-recession levels. In 2010-11, federal revenues were $237.1 billion — $18.5 billion ahead of a year earlier. That’s the second-highest revenue total on record, just behind the $242.2 billion Ottawa raked in in 2007-08.

Ottawa cut only $3.7 billion in spending between 2010 and 2011, and most of that wasn’t deliberate. It was the result of lower unemployment payments and less stimulus spending, things that occurred without the federal government lifting a finger.

The key is: Ottawa doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. In the coming budget cycle, you will hear plenty of lefty politicians, activists and think tanks (such as the CCPA and its public-sector union sponsors) claiming that if Ottawa wants to balance its budget it must raise taxes rather than cutting vital public services.

But in the last 20 years, federal-government revenues have doubled, while over the same period, inflation has gone up by 45%. Even after accounting for both inflation and population growth, federal revenues are one-quarter higher than they were in 1992. And since just over 90% of federal revenues come from individuals and businesses (just under 10% comes from Crown corporations and the sale of government goods and services), Canadians are already taxed enough.

If the budget is to be balanced again, the balance has to be found on the spending side, not the revenue side, and what better place to start than with Ottawa’s largest, single expense – civil service pay.

Each of the more than 450,000 federal civil servants costs taxpayers an average of $92,000 annually for salaries, benefits and pension contributions, according to James Lahey, a former senior bureaucrat who has done the most comprehensive studies yet into civil service pay and benefits. The cost of a federal civil servant is nearly $20,000 a year more than the cost of an average private-sector worker.

And in the past decade under first the Liberals and later the Tories, there has been an explosion in the size of the federal civil service. While the Liberals under Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Finance Minister Paul Martin did make real cuts in public-sector employment in the early years of their government, they had replaced all those jobs and then some before leaving office in 2006. While direct federal employment (not including the military, RCMP and Crown corporations) fell from 245,000 in 1994 to 195,000 in 1999, by 2004, the Liberals were once again employing 235,000 public workers.

Moreover, the 2004 civil service was costing taxpayers 50 per cent more than the lean civil service of 1999. While the number of civil servants had grown by just 20 per cent in five years, their pay and benefits had mushroomed by half because among the new hires were far more administrators and professionals and fewer blue-collar workers, clerks and secretaries.

Since replacing the Liberals in 2006, the Tories have added 13% to the rolls  of bureaucrats themselves. A large part of that has been an expansion of the military, police and border service, but Health Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research have all expanded, too. Human Resources and Skills Development Canada has grown by 47%, Aboriginal Affairs by 32% and Citizenship and Immigration by 28%.

Cutting 50,000 or 60,000 federal bureaucrats – the amount warmed about by CCPA – would merely return the civil service to 2002 levels. That would hardly be an Armageddon for public services or – as PIPSC worries – for Canada as we know it.

[E.R. Campbell]

An interesting take on the upcoming cuts, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/stephen-gordon/small-spending-cut-wields-big-axe-on-government-jobs/article2317248/

Small spending cut wields big axe on government jobs

STEPHEN GORDON

Globe and Mail Blog
Posted on Friday, January 27, 2012

The federal government’s plan to cut program spending by $4-billion doesn’t sound like much on the face of it. That’s less than 2 per cent of total federal spending, and a fraction of a percentage point of GDP. Reductions of that size look tiny in comparison to the cuts of the Chrétien-Martin years, in which spending was cut by more than 2.7 per cent of GDP in two years (source is the Department of Finance’s Fiscal Reference Tables). So why are public sector unions kicking up such a fuss?

The answer is in the structure of the cuts. Paul Martin’s 1995-96 austerity budget reduced spending across all sectors: payments to individuals, transfers to other levels of government and direct program spending. But the Conservatives have vowed not to make cuts in the transfer payments that make up most of federal government spending: Table 5.9 of the June 2011 budget projects that they will continue to grow in line with GDP.

But that means little when it comes to the effect on employment: it doesn’t take many people to change the numbers on the cheques sent out by the federal government. Instead of spreading the cuts across all sectors, the Conservative plan is to focus on direct program spending – the component that involves hiring people to implement policy. This concentration has the effect of making the effect of the anticipated budget cuts on employment comparable to – although still less severe than – the austerity years of the mid-1990s.

Federal program spending accounted for 7.4 per cent of GDP in the fiscal year that preceded the spring 1995 austerity budget, and this share fell by 1.3 percentage points over the next two years. In 2011-12, federal program spending was projected to be 7.0 per cent of GDP, and was to fall by 0.8 percentage points by 2013-14. In other words, the cuts in program spending announced in last year’s budget were roughly 60 per cent as large as what we saw in the mid-1990s.

Federal public service employment fell by 29,000 in 1996, and by an additional 26,000 in the following three years. If the effects of the planned cuts are proportional to what was experienced in the 1990s, then the number of job lost would be on the order of 30,000.

The Chrétien-Martin austerity program involved deep cuts spread across individuals, the provinces and the public service. The Harper-Flaherty program is to make much smaller cuts, concentrated almost entirely on the public service. Public sector unions are alarmed at the prospect of these job losses -- and perhaps also because they are more isolated than they were fifteen years ago.

I'm pretty sure the public sector unions do not have many friends in the government - not in either the political or policy areas of government.

[E.R. Campbell]

And yet more on the subject, this time on the political realities, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/john-ibbitson/conservatives-agenda-bold-and-fraught-with-political-risk/article2319035/

Conservatives’ agenda bold – and fraught with political risk

JOHN IBBITSON

OTTAWA— From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Jan. 30, 2012

Way back in 1996, a rising young Ontario backbencher explained why premier Mike Harris was moving so quickly to implement his conservative agenda.

“We can’t put things off, because we’ll get too close to an election and we’ll lose our nerve,” Tony Clement said. This is why Stephen Harper has chosen now to launch the most ambitious economic plan in two decades: cutting back on the Old Age Security program even as Mr. Clement, now Treasury Board President, slashes public spending.

Simply put, the Prime Minister, who has never had the luxury of a majority government before, has a year-and-a-half left to be bold before the ticking of the election clock drowns out everything else.

Here is what we are going to see in the coming weeks, after Parliament resumes Monday.

+ a budget that balances the books in two or three years;
+ departmental spending slashed by upward of 10 per cent in order to achieve that target;
+ major reforms to the immigration system, with a big push to bring in skilled workers who speak English or French, at the expense of reuniting families;
+ passage of the bill to create pooled retirement plans for workers who currently don’t have pensions.

Most contentious of all, the government plans to raise the age for receiving the Old Age Security pension supplement, probably from 65 to 67.

“The need for it is quite clear,” Government House Leader Peter Van Loan said in an interview. The cost of the plan will triple over the next two decades if nothing is done.

“It’s a question of having it sustainable over the medium and long term,” Mr. Van Loan maintained.

Both Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien vetoed their finance ministers’ proposals to reform the OAS, fearing the political cost of meddling with pensions. Susan Eng of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons is already at battle stations.

“Increasing the age for OAS right now is the wrong thing to do at the wrong time,” she said Sunday on Global TV’s The West Block. “They can find the money elsewhere.”

In hoping that any blowback from raising the OAS qualifying age will dissipate long before the next election, the Conservatives may want to bear in mind Brian Mulroney. He introduced the goods and services tax in 1989, soon after winning his second mandate. Voters still hadn’t forgiven the Tories four years later.

But Mr. Harper brings forward his proposals against a backdrop of a Europe riddled with profligate, bankrupt governments and economic decline. The Cameron coalition in debt-saddled Britain is slashing spending far more drastically than the Harper government is contemplating. The U.S. system is paralyzed even as federal finances spiral toward a crash. And Japan? Don’t go there.

Canadian voters are among the most economically literate in the world, thanks to decades of debate over spending and deficits. They may be prepared to sacrifice now to avoid becoming any of these countries later.

There is, of course, the political calculation, as well. The Tories hope that cutting spending and tightening pension requirements, however unpopular, will cement in voters’ minds the conviction that only Conservatives can be trusted to keep the books in the black.

And the government can further insulate itself by making sure the new rules apply only to those many years from retirement.

Nonetheless, this is the farthest the Conservatives have ever gone in the direction of reform. For a government relatively flush with cash to take such a politically risky step is “courageous,” as Sir Humphrey used to say on Yes Minister when he meant “suicidal.”

No government has tried anything this bold, and this risky, since Paul Martin vowed to slay the deficit “come hell or high water.”

The Chrétien-Martin "slaying" of the deficit (primarily by shifting spending from Ottawa's books to those of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario) also paid political dividends - which Martin frittered away by being honest, a mistake Jean Chrétien would never have made.

[GAP]

+ major reforms to the immigration system, with a big push to bring in skilled workers who speak English or French, at the expense of reuniting families;

[/size]

While this makes economic sense, rather than the "bring me your poor and destitute" mantra the Liberals followed, I suspect it has more to do with China.

China has invested in the tar sands in a big way, but they have been lobbying to bring over Chinese workers. The economics of this over paying Canadian labour rates and production standards will vastly increase the profitability of their acquisitions.

[Rifleman62]

“Increasing the age for OAS right now is the wrong thing to do at the wrong time,” she said Sunday on Global TV’s The West Block. “They can find the money elsewhere.

It is not "right now" if you would only listen and try to understand.

"They" is us/we/you the taxpayer.

The elected government decides how to spend tax dollars based on what they feel the the majority of taxpayers will not object to.