Conservatives suggest attrition to shrink federal public service

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OTTAWA — The Conservative party added more detail Wednesday to its leader’s plan to shrink the federal public service, saying the bureaucracy could be cut by 17,000 jobs a year just by not replacing employees who leave their jobs.

Poilievre vows to shrink size of federal public service: ‘Work isn’t getting done’

“Each year, more than 17,000 employees leave the public service and reductions can be made by simply not backfilling vacant positions,” Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman said in a statement to National Post.

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had raised his plan to shrink the federal service in a discussion Tuesday with a Quebec radio station. He said there are “way too many bureaucrats” and that if his party were elected to government it would find ways to monitor the productivity of civil servants because “work isn’t getting done.”

“We… need fewer bureaucrats,” he said in French. “I’m going to reduce the size of the bureaucracy and the state.”

“Right now, I see that the work isn’t getting done in the federal government,” he added. “We must put in place methods to ensure the work is done.” Neither he nor his office detailed what kind of methods he had in mind.

In her statement, Lantsman said the leader’s comments shouldn’t shock anyone.

“The notion of demanding value for taxpayer dollars should not be controversial. Nor should it be controversial in any workplace to ensure work is completed to standard in a timely manner,” Lantsman wrote.

She also reiterated a point made by Poilievre that the public service’s size and cost had grown tremendously under the Liberal government since 2015.

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“Yet public services haven’t gotten better, in fact, they’ve gotten dramatically worse,” she noted.

“Not only that, but the Liberals massively expanded the use of external contractors and consultants, spending $20 billion every year for work that could be done internally,” she added.

Poilievre also said in his Tuesday interview that it’s not important to him if public servants work from home or the office, as long as they deliver results.

It was the first time Poilievre commented on the government’s return-to-office mandate for public servants, which requires most bureaucrats to work from the office three days per week, and four days for executives.

There happens to be a disproportionately high number of federal public servants who live in Poilievre’s Ottawa-area riding of Carleton.

Data compiled by Statistics Canada for National Post show that 16.4 per cent of workers who live in Poilievre’s riding declared that they work for the federal government. The national average is just under three per cent.

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

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