The Conservatives just got a good piece of advice for dealing with the nearly 370,000-strong federal workforce from the man who once headed the Liberals’ public service: get ready to get firing.
On this topic, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre hasn’t offered much of a plan beyond acknowledging the need for fewer bureaucrats and more efficiency. Last month, his deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman, suggested the tactic of attrition: wait for staff to leave, and don’t replace them. (On this front, the Liberals are one step ahead, having deployed a “natural attrition” plan to save costs in the 2024 budget.)
It’s a start — or at least, we have to hope it’s a start, because waiting for employees to age out and leave by diffusion is a losing strategy that will leave Canadians with a still-gummed-up government staffed by Liberal-oriented people years after Trudeau is gone.
I’m not alone in seeing the problem here: on Wednesday, Michael Wernick, the Privy Council clerk from 2016 to 2019, expressed his own doubts about the wait-for-them-to-retire play.
“I think attrition is the worst way to get to a smaller, leaner public service, and that applies to the current Liberal government and to the Conservative platform,” Wernick told the Canadian Press.
“There’s no plan there,” he continued. “That’s just coasting on retirements and departures. It’s not a mindful way of pruning … It’s not strategic.”
Wernick, you may recall, was the voice in that phone call with once-attorney general Jody Wilson Raybould saying that the prime minister really really wants her to exercise her prosecutorial discretion a certain way. He quit afterwards, citing a lack of mutual trust between Opposition leaders and himself. He’d served the past Conservative government with good reviews, however. And while his son has worked for a Liberal MP in the past, he has no political affiliations.
Whether in private he’s friend or foe is hard to say, but what is certain is that he knows a thing or two about the work of governing — and hence the futility of waiting as a method to thin staff ranks. He said something similar to Amanda Lang in a podcast for The Hub a couple years back: “These exercises of culling and weeding and dethatching the public sector are a good idea, but they come down to political choices about ‘this is important to keep’ and ‘this we can stop doing.’ So if we’re going to do it again, I think politicians have to be clear about their ‘stop doing’ list.”
Conservatives in Canada need a “stop doing” list, not a commitment to hope that federal staffers fade away.
There was a time when big cuts would have seemed otherworldly, but nowadays they’ve become the norm. Just look around: in Argentina, President Javier Milei campaigned in part on axing entire government departments after having witnessed years of public overspending; he followed through; in 2024, he took out 35,000 jobs, a decrease of seven per cent.
And then there’s the United States, which after assuming power, the new administration almost immediately got to work on squishing down the ranks. While their judgment on international trade leaves much to be desired right now, their take on swiftly cutting down payroll is somewhat of an inspiration.
In just the first month of office, President Donald Trump put an offer on the table for all public federal staff: leave now and receive eight months’ pay in severance. It’s so swell a deal that 60,000 staff have already signed up to take it. As for removing staff incompatible with the new government — diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) workers — the Trump administration is angling to close their offices and terminate their employment if possible. There was a time this work was considered sacred, but it was a fleeting one.
This hasn’t come without roadblocks: Trump’s buyout deal has been blocked temporarily by the courts as its legality is being figured out, and that’s probably only the beginning of the drama. And scorned DEI employees aren’t likely to let go of their thrones without a fight. There will be costs to all of this: lofty severance packages for 10s of thousands of employees alone will cost millions, and then there are the legal costs.
But what’s key is that the new administration didn’t sit and timidly contemplate layoffs and consult endlessly with lawyers, all while crossing its fingers that the most extreme activists in government leave on their own volition. No — it knows very well that the next four years will fly by, and that accomplishing its goals requires a reshaped civil service from the get-go. Yes, this comes with a steep up-front cost, but it’s a necessary one.
Conservative governments in Canada typically try to penny-pinch where they can, and often look on even as their governments continue to employ activists who would be a better fit for an NDP campaign office. It’s a case of severance-phobia. See Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has allowed the public education system to double as an incubator for the left’s most absurd ideas, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who has only now started to publicly hint at a DEI cull.
If Poilievre and his team want to get anything done in a future government, they need to be prepared to move faster than Ford and Smith. A significant chunk of staff will have to be cut, and their nonsensical programs dismantled with intention. It’ll cost — but that’s just the price of doing business as a conservative government.
National Post