Few new PS cuts in budget, Baird says
‘Certainly the worst is over’ after last year’s spending slash
Cuts to the public service aren’t done yet but at least the worst is over, says John Baird.
Thursday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty delivered a new budget promising more spending cuts to try to get the federal government’s books balanced by the next election in 2015.
‘There’ll always be some nipping and tucking, but (with) an organization with 350,000 people, with 9,000 to 13,000 people who leave every year, that’s normal and expected.’
JOHN BAIRD
Ottawa West-Nepean MP
Friday, Baird said that shouldn’t create any new panic in the public service here. The foreign affairs minister and Ottawa West-Nepean MP said the intention was always to cut 19,000 positions from the federal rolls — meaning, after attrition and bumping and all the other machinations of downsizing, about 5,000 actual people would lose their livelihoods. Sixteen thousand of those jobs are accounted for, so more pink slips are on the way but no more than were expected this time last year, he said.
(The federal government has always told a different story from public-service unions, who have argued that less-visible cuts to contract jobs are still cuts and that Baird’s figures don’t include cuts ordered in previous budgets that hadn’t taken effect yet.)
“I think we laid out last year, when we went through the deficit reduction action plan, I gave a speech the morning after the budget that laid out in great detail” the Tory government’s plans, Baird said. “Certainly the worst is over. There’ll always be some nipping and tucking, with some people going up and some people going down, but (with) an organization with 350,000 people, with 9,000 to 13,000 people who leave every year, that’s normal and expected.”
Nor, he said, is there a particular policy of moving people’s offices around and outside the downtown core, even if that’s been the practice lately — the RCMP to a former JDS Uniphase campus in south Nepean, for instance, and the Department of National Defence to the former Nortel complex near the west end of Carling Avenue in Baird’s riding.
“There were great opportunities for taxpayers, for real estate, for employees. Obviously we want to manage those as best we possibly can,” Baird said. But the government isn’t deliberately pushing employment out of downtown into the suburbs, he said.
For the city, which is focusing on shortening people’s commutes by getting more people living downtown and improving transit with things like its $2.1-billion rail plan, those moves have created some problems by disrupting traffic patterns and forcing it to hurry up plans for suburban busways.
Public servants used to getting to jobs in and near the core are having to adapt quickly.
Yes, said Baird, but the JDS Uniphase and Nortel properties are no tougher to get to now than they were when they were stuffed with hightech employees and the city had plans for transit and other services.
“There’s not a lot new required there,” Baird said. “Maybe ramping up some things that had been ramped down.”