Unions representing federal public servants at Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada are seeking more information about the department’s plan to cut a quarter of its workforce, and warn that the proposal would hurt more than just the laid-off staff.

“Budget cuts always have unintended consequences that harm the public, and it’s those with the least that will get hurt the most,” said Rubina Boucher, national president of the Canadian Employment and Immigration Union.

“We’ve seen this movie before. The government absolutely should not repeat the mistakes of the last Conservative cuts of 2012 because those do have impacts on families, and businesses, and our members.”

IRCC announced plans on Jan. 20 to shed 3,300 positions—about a quarter of its current workforce—over the next three years. The department told staff that approximately 80 per cent of the cuts could come from “eliminating planned staffing, terms, and other temporary staffing commitments,” while the remainder would need to be reached through the “work force adjustment” process for permanent, or indeterminate, employees.

Under the workforce adjustment process, departments are required to provide alternative employment opportunities when possible, identify circumstances where retraining could help affected staff continue in the public service, and review the use of non-permanent employees and contractors. If a “reasonable” job offer is not provided to an employee whose position has been cut, they can be provided with support such as surplus priority status for 12 months, transition support measures based on years of service, or an education allowance.

An IRCC spokesperson told The Hill Times by email that letters confirming affected status for indeterminate employees would be distributed in a single wave starting in mid-February, regardless of the time at which that position will be eliminated over the three-year plan.

“When someone is affected, we want to stress that it does not lead to immediate changes in their employment, nor does it automatically mean a job loss,” the spokesperson said. “The process is long and can take months. There are a variety of options to transition indeterminate employees to another job in the public service or offer financial incentives to transition out of the public service.”

Treasury Board data showed that, as of March 2024, 13,092 people were employed at IRCC, up from 7,864 in 2019, and 5,927 in 2014. If followed through, the proposed cuts would return IRCC to a little over 2021 staffing levels.

Much of the recent growth, the IRCC spokesperson said, was to address “global crises like the pandemic, modernize systems and support record immigration levels that boosted economic recovery and addressed labour shortages. This growth relied on temporary funding, which was never meant to be permanent.”

Boucher said both the union and those affected among its 30,000-strong membership were “absolutely shocked.” She added that the uncertainty and lack of details from the department are causing further hurt to union members.

The last time there was a drop in staffing at the department was between 2012 and 2013, when the number of IRCC employees fell from 5,017 to 4,850.

The IRCC spokesperson said in the email that the department will reduce planned spending by approximately $237-million in 2025-26, with eventual cuts in subsequent years to reach about $336-millon in 2027-28, or an approximately 15 per cent decrease in current salary and non-salary spending levels.

The funding reductions will involve “evaluating how we deliver internal and external services and identifying functions within IRCC that could be streamlined or eliminated,” the spokesperson said. “Our goal is to minimize job losses by focusing on attrition and internal redeployment, and maximizing the use of existing resources.”

The planned cuts follow Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s (Ville-Marie–Le Sud-Ouest–Île-des-Soeurs, Que.) announced cuts to permanent residency targets over the next three years in October, and a 10-per-cent reduction to international student study permits in September.

According to data on the IRCC website, as of Dec. 31, 2024, 942,300 of the 2,119,900 applications in all departmental inventories were in backlog. That includes 53 per cent of temporary residence applications, 41 per cent of permanent residence applications, and 17 per cent of citizenship applications. The department’s goal is to process 80 per cent of applications within service standards.

Boucher said that the existing backlog could be exacerbated by the planned cuts at IRCC, which would then have flow-on effects to other industries.

“We need to be working on strengthening our healthcare system. We need to be building more houses. We need to be growing our businesses. All of this requires Canada to attract the best and the brightest from around the world. Our members are the ones that are working on those residency and citizenship applications,” she said. 

“We’re concerned about how this is going to hurt attracting new nurses, new doctors who are required for the health care system to run. We’re worried about not having enough tradespeople to build houses in this country. We’re worried about how this will impact businesses, anywhere from hospitality to farming.”

The IRCC spokesperson told The Hill Times that “when new pressures arise, we will evaluate the use of existing resources to address urgent priorities while continuing to streamline our operations for long-term sustainability.” In the meantime, the spokesperson said the department continued to digitize applications “and harness automation technologies to speed up processing.”

Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE), said the cuts were announced at a time of border uncertainty. 

U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders during his first two weeks in office, including an unconstitutional bid to strip birthright citizenship to those born in the U.S. to parents in the country either illegally or temporarily, the suspension of refugee programs, and mass deportation raids. 

Prier sent a letter to Miller on Jan. 20, urging the government to put the cuts on hold, “or at the very least to slow them down,” until the prorogation of Parliament ends on March 24, “and a clearer national direction can be set as we now face a looming crisis in our relationship with the United States.”

Prier said in the letter that CAPE anticipated IRCC would face a greater workload as a result of Trump’s immigration policy, with the new administration threatening mass deportations and cuts to America’s migrant intake. A reduction in Canada’s federal workforce, the letter said, “could undermine our ability to meet the evolving needs of the Canadian public and support the federal government’s response to these new challenges.”

“CAPE remains supportive of cost-cutting solutions that maintain the integrity of the public service. We support measures such as reducing reliance on outside contractors, addressing bloated senior management structures, and exploring ways to reduce real estate costs—such as by granting remote work rights to more employees,” the letter said. “These alternatives can achieve necessary budgetary reductions while minimizing the impact on our public service capacity.”

Prier told The Hill Times that cost savings and extra efficiency could be found, but not in the areas politicians have suggested. He said CAPE would continue to emphasize the points made in the letter throughout the Liberal leadership campaign and eventual federal election later this year.

“There’s an opening here to say, ‘let’s look at the actual cost of delivery that needs to be done in government.’ We can see that there’s a lot of bloat, see a lot of unnecessary costs all over the place,” he said. “But it’s not where the politicians are saying it is right now. It’s, in fact, at the top of the pyramid of senior management, it’s in the outsourcing merry-go-round that seems to be on right now, and it’s on the completely bloated and unnecessary real estate costs.”

Miller told CBC/Radio-Canada on Jan. 21 that Canada has yet to see a “spike” in asylum claims. 

When asked about the effect the IRCC cuts could have on the ability to handle an increase in asylum claims, Miller also told reporters during a Jan. 24 scrum that it was “unfortunate that people will no longer be working in IRCC,” but that the department had grown “exponentially,” particularly since 2019. He said the numbers were for “surge capacity,” including to handle the arrival of 55,000 Afghans after the Taliban takeover over Afghanistan in mid-2021, and the emergency travel measures for those fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2022.

“In the federal civil service, the minister doesn’t hire and fire people, it’s the deputy minister,” he said. “But it’s work that we’ve been doing—obviously, I answer for that at the end of the day—but I think it was the responsible thing to do, and to be able frankly to do it early, while other departments are potentially hiring those folks, so they give them notice early and to make sure that this is done in the proper way.”

sjeffery@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times

Staffing at Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada since 2010

Source: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat