Rubina Boucher, national president of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union, which represents IRCC workers, said that the cuts would only worsen a dire situation in relation to immigration processing wait times and backlog levels. A young new Canadian holds a flag as she takes part in a citizenship ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 17, 2019.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The federal immigration department is planning to slash the size of its work force by about 25 per cent starting next month, as part of budgetary cuts across the public service after a decade-long hiring spree.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will cut 3,300 positions over the next three years, according to an internal memo sent out to staff on Monday morning and obtained by The Globe and Mail. The department has not identified which positions will be eliminated, but said in the memo that 20 per cent of the cuts will affect full-time, permanent employees.
“It’s clear our department will be smaller in the future. We’ve been working under an ever-increasing budget and need to learn to live within a defined – and reduced – budget moving forward,” the memo says.
The layoffs are set to begin in mid-February, while IRCC continues to deal with a backlog of more than two million applications for temporary residence, permanent residence and citizenship, with nearly half of those applications exceeding the department’s standards for processing times.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government significantly ramped up hiring at Service Canada, IRCC and the Canada Revenue Agency, as it doled out numerous programs to mitigate the impact of nationwide job losses. IRCC had 13,685 employees as of September, 2023 – a 48-per-cent increase from March, 2020.
IRCC attributed the cuts to budgetary pressure from the federal government. The 2023 budget targeted $15-billion in reductions to programs and services over the next four years, including work force readjustments. Last year’s fall economic statement announced an additional $3-billion in reduced spending for the public service.
Spending targets for departments are usually set annually by the Treasury Board. For the first time this year, it informed public sector unions representing federal government employees that layoffs would be part of overall spending cuts for many departments.
IRCC will have to find savings to the tune of $237-million for the fiscal year of 2025-2026, and $336-million in 2027-2028 in order to meet spending reductions targets set out by the Treasury Board, according to the memo.
Rubina Boucher, national president of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union, which represents IRCC workers, said that the cuts would only worsen a dire situation in relation to immigration processing wait times and backlog levels.
“Families longing to reunite, businesses grappling with critical labour shortages and a healthcare system desperate for skilled workers will all suffer the consequences of this reckless decision,” she said in a statement Monday.
Over the past five years, Ottawa has flip-flopped on immigration policy. Starting in 2020, in response to the pandemic, the government introduced a slew of measures and programs designed to fast-track temporary residents to permanent residency, and to bring in more international students and temporary foreign workers to fill a labour shortage during the pandemic years. The number of applicants for PR rose substantially, prompting IRCC to boost hiring.
But changing public sentiment toward immigration owing to infrastructure and cost of living concerns, coupled with a sharp rise in the number of temporary residents, has forced Ottawa to since dial back on its expansive approach to immigration. Meanwhile, IRCC staff continue to deal with a massive backlog of applications related to these policy changes.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada predicts that more job cuts will be coming to departments across the public service. Last November, 600 employees at the CRA were subject to layoffs, also owing to budgetary pressures from Ottawa.
The federal public service has grown significantly in size since the Liberal government came into power in 2015. Over the past 10 years, the number of federal public servants has increased to 367,772 from 257,034, a 43-per-cent increase, according to publicly available data.