Earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney went viral after declaring the supposed end to American economic hegemony in Davos, Switzerland. The current “rupture,” Carney said, necessitated rethinking the economic relationships that “middle powers” like Canada have with stronger nations like the United States.
At home, Carney’s Liberals claim to be “Trump-proofing” the economy to protect Canadian jobs threatened by US tariffs and Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy. At the same time, however, the minority Liberal government is engaged in the biggest attack on federal public sector workers since the devastating austerity of the 1990s.
Over the past year, thousands of “workforce adjustment” notices have been sent to federal public servants as part of the government’s plan to cut more than 40,000 positions and slash spending by 15 percent.
As one union president put it, federal public sector workers are in a pitched battle against a “DOGE experiment” in Canada.
The number of downsizing notifications issued to federal public servants since early last year has been dizzying. In response, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), the largest union of federal government employees, has launched a “workforce adjustment tracker” just to keep track of all the impacted workers. So far, some 13,400 public servants have received letters notifying them that their jobs may be eliminated.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the second-largest union of federal public servants, has characterized the forecasted cuts as a “generational rollback of public services” that is producing “Hunger Games–style anxiety” among its members. With a flurry of letters reaching workers every week, the government’s plan for mass downsizing resembles death by a thousand cuts. Moreover, many of the affected jobs are vital to building the public capacity needed to protect the Canadian economy from Trump’s…
Auteur: Adam D. K. King
