The Parliamentary Budget Office has dug deep into the obscurity of hundreds of departmental reports on plans and priorities and used the government’s own numbers to come up with a unique government employment forecast, which shows that the public service will lose more than 6,000 jobs over the next three years.Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page told The Hill Times that a clear picture of government employment is important as the government tries to balance the budget by trimming the public service.
He said his office has been working to determine whether the government’s austerity plans will actually achieve the results it wants, without greatly damaging the work of the public service.
“Do we have an employment forecast from departments consistent with the level of reduction necessary to achieve targeted savings? And, do deputy ministers have a plan in place to address potential risk implications related to maintaining service levels?” he said.
The PBO looked at the spring Reports on Plans and Priorities of 99 departments and agencies. The reports are formatted differently by each department and they vary in the amount of detail reported and in length.
By 2013-2014, a total of 39 departments and agencies will have fewer staff, while 31 will have more workers, and the employment levels of 28 will remain the same. One department, CIDA, did not post planned staffing numbers past 2012-2013.
The number of full-time equivalent employees in the entire public service will go down from 371,390 in 2011-2012 to 364,999 in 2013-2014, according to the numbers the PBO collected. The government does not measure how many people it has working for it, but rather staffing levels in the equivalent amount of full-time jobs.
The Public Service Commission which monitors staffing activities in the civil service does not produce an employment forecast. Spokesperson Annie Trépanier said it would be the responsibility of the Treasury Board Secretariat to put together a forward look at staffing plans.
To the PBO’s knowledge, the government does not compile its own government employment forecast. Treasury Board Secretariat was unable to respond to questions from The Hill Times in time for this story.
Liberal public accounts critic Gerry Byrne (Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, Nfld.) said he thinks the government is likely compiling staffing numbers for its own use, but there is an inherent benefit to the Parliamentary Budget Office doing it too.
“The difference here is that this is an independent officer … that allows Parliamentarians a broader and unbiased view,” he said.
He added that having a sense of employment levels to come is “essential.”
New Democrat Treasury Board critic Alexandre Boulerice (Rosemont-La Petite Patrie, Que.) agreed that such a forecast could be “extremely useful.”
“We must be capable of knowing how money is spent, how it will be cut in each program, the jobs that will be affected. This must be detailed,” he said.
Conservative MP Mike Wallace (Burlington, Ont.), vice-chair of the House Public Accounts Committee, said that the numbers are already transparent when they appear in the annual Reports on Plans and Priorities.
“I don’t think the Parliamentary officer has found any magic, that information has always been available if you know where to look for it,” said Mr. Wallace.
The biggest job losses, according to the PBO’s compilation, are in Human Resources and Skills Development, and Environment Canada, which will lose 3,800 and 1,200 positions, respectively.
Other departments posting significant decreases include Canadian Heritage, which will lose one-third of its positions in the next three years, going from the equivalent of 2,310 jobs to 1,731.
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada will lose 619 positions between 2010 and 2014, going from 5,202 to 4,583 positions, a decrease of 13.5 per cent.
Some of these losses, including those at HRSDC and Environment have already become public. The numbers compiled by the PBO include any job losses as a result of the 2010 strategic review.
More than 2,000 strategic review-related job cuts have already been made public as workers and unions are notified. The strategic review required departments to review the cost of running programs, identify lowest-priority or worst-performing programs and re-assign five per cent of program spending to higher-priority initiatives.
Of the departments that will be seeing an influx of staff, the most new bodies will go to Correctional Service Canada, Canada Revenue Agency, Citizenship and Immigration, and Justice.
“We are interested in employment numbers for a few important reasons. One, the wage bill for federal public services represents a significant proportion of federal program spending. Two, the government has made a decision to focus its fiscal consolidation efforts on spending restraint,” said Mr. Page.
On top of the results from the strategic review, the public service’s operating budget is frozen at 2010-2011 levels.
Mr. Page said the savings from 6,000 fewer jobs is just a small portion of the savings the government is looking for.
“At $100,000 per full time employee [a generous assumption for salary, benefits and related goods and services], this roughly works out to $600-million per year. This is only about one-third of the ongoing savings expected to arise from the operating budget freeze. In this regard, the government needs to provide more details to Parliament and Canadians on where the other two-thirds of savings are coming from,” he explained.
The government is looking for more savings through the strategic operating review. A committee of Cabinet ministers has been tasked with finding at least five per cent, or $4-billion, in savings from the public service’s $80-billion annual operating budget in order to balance the budget by 2014-2015.
Any job cuts stemming from the SOR would be additional to the whittling already reported by departments.
The results of the SOR will be reported in the 2012 budget. Mr. Boulerice and Mr. Byrne said that either the auditor general or the Parliamentary Budget Office should be able to analyze the austerity plans for their efficacy and their impact on services.
“Those that are involved in the integrity and the quality of the decisions surrounding taxpayers’ dollars have a role to play,” said Mr. Byrne.
Mr. Wallace said that examining the strategic and operating review plans is outside the PBO’s scope.
“The role and mandate of the budget officer, in my view, is to look at legislation, … not to review the decisions of government with regards to the delivery of programs,” he said.
Mr. Boulerice said that as public service jobs are disappearing, people should remember that the people working at those jobs aren’t imaginary, and that it takes real people to deliver real services to Canadians.
The unions representing public service employees have begun push back campaigns, stating the cuts will do great harm to the public service’s ability to work effectively for Canadians.
Over the summer, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which has a membership of more than 170,000 people nation-wide, started a publicity campaign to remind Canadians that public servants are their neighbours, and help contribute to the local community’s economy.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents 57,000 workers across Canada, most of them federal public servants, held a rally on Parliament Hill last Friday.
PIPSC president Gary Corbett told The Ottawa Citizen recently that federal public servants will be in the “fight of their lives” against an anti-union government.
On Nov. 3, the government tabled both the Public Accounts for 2010-2011 and the 2011-2012 supplementary estimates B. The supplementary estimates list $6.6-billion in expenditures in addition to the main estimates, $4.3-billion of which will be voted on.
The 2011-2012 main estimates, tabled in June, listed $250.8-million in spending, down from $261.2-million in 2010-2011. Along with supplementary estimates A and B, this year’s estimates total $257.1-billion to date. The government may introduce another round of estimates this winter.
Supplementary estimates B includes additional funds for 68 government organizations. Some of that money was earmarked earlier in the year but didn’t make it in time to be included in the main estimates, which were tabled in June.
Some of the larger items in supplementary estimates B include $708.6-million for the infrastructure stimulus plan, $473.5-million for clean energy programs and $179.4-million to pay for settlements to residential school survivors.
The Public Accounts are compiled by Canada’s receiver general and they report on the government’s spending last fiscal year, April 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011.
According to the Public Accounts, government revenue was $1.5-billion higher than expected, and spending was $1.2-billion lower than expected.
The government’s deficit in that time was $33.4-billion, $2.8-billion less than predicted by the government in its June 2011 budget. Roughly half of that was due to the economic action plan, which ended March 31.
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