Are public service jobs tariff proof?

There are no immediate or short term threats to federal public servants’ jobs under Trump tariff threats, public service experts say.

In recent months, public servants and the unions that represent them have been reeling since the federal government signalled the jobs of with permanent employees could be on the chopping block in a current review of public spending. The federal government has started to try to curb the size of the public service as its ranks ballooned since the Liberals were elected in 2015.

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But observers say that the economic uncertainty and a potential recession that may come from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs could give federal public servants some temporary relief from layoffs.

“During a massive recession, during a massive debate on tariffs, the appetite for cutting the public service is never there,” Donald Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the University of Moncton, told the Ottawa Citizen.

Both Mark Carney, the prime minister designate, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre have said they would limit the size of the public service. And experts agree that once Canada weathers Trump’s tariff threats, cuts are likely to alter the public service under the direction of a new prime minister. But Savoie believes that whoever forms the next government will have to wait until the Trump tariffs and subsequent recession are over before any serious review and reforms of the public service can take place.

On March 9, Carney was elected the new leader of the Liberals and will become Canada’s 24th prime minister in the coming days. Carney’s crowning has set the battlefield for a highly contested general election under the shadow of Washington’s imperialist rhetoric. With Trump’s stormclouds looming large over election issues, any proposed change to the public service will take a back seat.

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“I think the Trump tariffs are going to suck all the oxygen in the room, in the prime minister’s office, in cabinet,” Savoie said. “What’s going to be priority number one, two, three, four and five? The next few months will be the Trump tariffs, as they should be.”

Last year, the federal government announced it would look to cut the size of the public service by 5,000 full-time positions primarily through natural attrition over the course of four years, as part of an effort to save $15.8 billion over five years and reallocate it elsewhere. The government originally had said that layoffs for permanent employees were not on the table, but that changed in November 2024, when Treasury Board officials met with unions and said it was opening the door for departments to slash permanent employees’ jobs.

Since then, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has announced it will slash 3,300 jobs over three years.

The size of the public service grew significantly during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Treasury Board data, the public service’s headcount expanded to 367,772 workers in 2024 — up from 300,450 in 2020.

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Experts agree that too many variables remain unknown to be able to forecast what changes are in store for public servants once Canada weathers Trump’s tariff storm. What party forms government and whether they have a majority or minority in the House of Commons could alter the direction of the public service.

While Carney and Poilievre have both said spending needs to be reined in, they’re sending slightly different signals about how they would approach reforms to the public service. Poilievre’s party has mused about being able to cut 17,000 jobs annually by not hiring replacements for the workers that leave the public service each year. Meanwhile, Carney has signalled his intentions to cap the size of the public service, create efficiencies with AI, and balance the operational budget within three years.

“Ultimately, the major force shaping the future of the public service will be politics and the political outcome,” Michael Wernick, the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa and Canada’s former top civil servant told the Ottawa Citizen.

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For Wernick, Canada is charting new territory under Trump’s tariffs and threats of annexation. An existential threat to the federation had not been seen since the 1995 Quebec referendum, Wernick added.

“This isn’t about, you know, the economic impact of some tariffs on cars and soybeans; this is about whether we’ll be a country five years from now.”

It’s left public servants staring down what could be two existential threats: the barrel of Washington aggression that all Canadians face, and potential cuts to the public service that a new majority government could take once the danger of Trump’s tariffs is over.

But Savoie says it’s a natural part of the public service’s cycles, that a program review take place after a decade, particularly as a new leader is set to come into power in Ottawa.

“They will arrive with their own agenda and their own priorities, and they will need to finance what they want to do, that in itself, calls for a program review,” Savoie said.

Still, with the double uncertainty public servants are under from the changing guards in Washington and Ottawa, it remains a question of what the next years will bring. Former program reviews from the Liberals in the 1990s saw a reduction of the public service by around 20 per cent, while in 2011, cuts under the government of Stephen Harper saw a reduction of about 10 per cent, Wernick said.

Savoie acknowledges that being a public servant is “not easy,” especially when they see Trump advisor Elon Musk wielding a loud chainsaw at American government workers’ livelihoods.

“A sledgehammer or chainsaw is not the way to do it, in my view,” Savoie said. “But who knows.”

With files from Catherine Morrison.

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