Job cuts at IRCC are a tough pill to swallow for Ottawa

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The National Capital Region will bear the brunt of what one of the largest public service unions in Canada is calling the “incredibly irresponsible and reckless decision” to cut 3,300 jobs at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, starting in February.

“The initial reaction is that it’s not a good time,” Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, said in a phone interview. “We’re on the cusp of an election and (US President Donald) Trump is coming in. This is going to have a massive impact on our border policy.”

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While there are limited details so far on where exactly the cuts will come from over the next three years – affected employees are expected to start receiving letters in mid-February, according to the Canadian Employment and Immigration Union, which revealed the government’s plans on Monday – it has the potential to be devastating in the capital.

A 2023 IRCC document showed that 56 percent of the more than 13,000 employees in the department were based in Ottawa.

“The federal government is our No. 1 employer. They have a big role in our community,” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said Tuesday during his State of the City address to the Ottawa Board of Trade. “It’s going to be a tough year economically if this kind of cuts are going to continue and we’re going to have to work with the federal government on a plan.”

IRCC staff process applications for citizenship, permanent and temporary residence and passports and conduct interviews.

The initial reaction of the CEIU was shock.

“These are the jobs that make sure we bring in the talent to strengthen the economy,” Rubina Boucher, CEIU national president, said in a phone interview, citing the difficulty of bringing in doctors, nurses, farmers, hospitality industry workers and substitutes. foreign workers.

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“Right now we’re in a cross-border recession and we’re seeing what’s happening at the border. We want to grow the country, build housing. It’s our members who do the work to get that talent here. There are incredibly long wait times now. How is it going to get better if the backlog gets longer?”

At the very least, the unions argue, the job-cutting decisions should at least be put on hold until Canada has a better read on the potential impact of Trump’s immigration and economic policies. Trump, whose inauguration ceremony was Monday, has talked endlessly about what he sees as Canada’s weak border policy while also threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods entering the United States.

“IRCC may have (existing) programs wound down, but Trump’s new policy will create new problems,” Prier said.

The Canadian government, he says, will get rid of many who have “institutional memory” of what it was like to work around the first Trump administration.

“They are going to waste precious time and labor and ultimately outsource jobs to the private sector,” he predicted.

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In the big picture, the federal government has signaled in the past year that it would reduce the size of its workforce.

First, the government said it would try to cut 5,000 positions through attrition over four years, ultimately saving $15.8 million.

In November, the Public Service Alliance of Canada said the government was looking to reduce spending by cutting both temporary and casual employees, with layoffs also extending to permanent employees.

Similarly, IRCC employees woke up Monday to the bitter cold snap of cutbacks hitting their department.

A 2023 IRCC report found that 68 percent of employees were listed as “indefinite” and 25 percent were “temporary” employees. Only four percent were casual and one percent were students.

The department has grown significantly in recent years, at least in part due to increased demands during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2010, 4,752 were employed at IRCC, but this doubled to 10,248 in 2022 and rose again to more than 13,000 in 2024. Much of this increase occurred in the Capital Region.

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“We knew that by 2025 there was a risk of job cuts in the federal public service and that’s a big concern for the local economy,” Sutcliffe said.

This is not the first time Ottawa has faced widespread layoffs in the public sector, the last being under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Finance Minister Paul Martin.

“In the mid-1990s, when there was a significant reduction in jobs in the federal public service, the city and its economic development partners and the federal government had an initiative called REDO (Regional Economic Diversification Opportunities) to work on the transition for private sector jobs and retraining and retraining and that sort of thing for all the displaced federal workers,” Sutcliffe said.

“Whether it’s that or something else, we need to work with the federal government on a transition plan for federal workers.”

— With files from Blair Crawford

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