Government Operations Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2026

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Was early retirement something you negotiated for Correctional Service Canada years ago?

[Sharon DeSousa]

It was many years ago.

I'll turn it over to Liam to speak to it a bit more.

[Liam McCarthy]

I believe it was around 26 years ago that PSAC would have negotiated it for basically everybody who works in corrections offices and parole offices across the country.

We've been advocating ever since then for it to be expanded to a number of other occupations, because the Income Tax Act was initially amended to allow that expansion across jurisdictions. It named firefighters and other public safety occupations.

We've been trying to get the federal government to play catch-up ever since.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

This is a direction that you support. You understand the rationale, and you're able to defend it.

Moving forward with the implementation, are you comfortable with communicating and engaging with your members in discussing the various early retirement options or workforce adjustment programs that are available to them?

[Sharon DeSousa]

I need clarification. Are you referring to “25 and out” or the early retirement incentive?

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

I'm referring to “25 and out”.

[Sharon DeSousa]

On “25 and out”, I can tell you without a doubt that our members want pension reform and have been lobbying hard for it. I don't think there's one MP who hasn't heard from us in regard to this. I think it's long overdue, and I will tell you that it will help with recruitment and retention.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

It's good news for your organization and for all the members.

[Sharon DeSousa]

Yes.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

I'm good with that.

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Next is Madam Gaudreau.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. DeSousa, I'll tell you something, because I'm quite concerned. I'm delighted that, after 26 years of fighting, you have prevailed.

Moreover, I'm trying to draw a positive correlation between workforce reduction and service improvement. The maintenance of our current services is inefficient. I'm telling you. I've been a member of Parliament for six years, and things have gone from bad to worse in recent years. Some days, I feel like a branch of Service Canada. That's to say nothing of the pandemic. This afternoon, I feel like a branch of the Canada Revenue Agency. In addition, as the veterans affairs critic, I'm the gateway to helping the department.

How is this possible? We understand that we can have tools to help with speed and efficiency, but how is this possible? We're talking about 30,000 people in the public service. Does this mean that, ultimately, the number of potential contracts awarded outside the government will grow exponentially?

Where do you stand on this?

[Sharon DeSousa]

I can say to you without a doubt that the work isn't going to go away. We've seen this happen under various governments. What has resulted is longer wait times, issues where people are not getting the services they need, and then a band-aid solution is created. They hire a bunch of terms, casuals, to bridge that service, and we end up in the same place.

Cutting right across the top does not work. What you need to do is look at each and every single program and what you need for it to be successful. We saw this recently at Canada Revenue Agency when they got rid of a whole bunch of terms who worked in call centres and then indeterminates. The result was a 4% service.... It was 4%. This is the agency that brings the money into the country.

There's a problem when cuts happen across the board and there's no coordination. They're done by the deputy heads. That is my concern right now, because what will end up happening.... A multitude of notices are going out. People don't have information. They're expected to compete for jobs, but what are the jobs they'll be doing? We won't find out until after the fact when the dust settles. That's not a good way to manage.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I would like to point out that I didn't talk about all the immigration cases. Since members of Parliament were no longer able to manage the immigration cases, the House of Commons authorized a group of MPs—10 of us—to access a telephone line to try to understand where things stood with the process. There are 10 of us MPs who paid for this out of our budget, which is really quite limited. We have a resource that replaces the department and that gives us privileged access to people's cases. The cases could involve family reunification, and the delays are considerable. This situation is unprecedented.

Lastly, I would like to know what type of consultation should take place as part of a radical workforce adjustment or an allocation or streamlining process but also as part of regulatory sandboxes, where conflicts of interest aren't considered serious. In terms of the public interest test, even if it's only around 1%, it's in the public interest. Should you be consulted? Have you been consulted?

[Sharon DeSousa]

There has been no consultation with any of the unions.

I would say that you'd want to consult with the workers doing the job first to find out what their day-to-day is but also to consult with your stakeholders, because there's community that has investment in the decision-making.

We talk about IRCC and the cuts there. I can tell you that, right now, we're looking at about 3,600 cuts to immigration, and more are on the way. The numbers have increased. This is just one department.

I'll talk about the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They're getting rid of 20%. They weren't staffed up during former prime minister Harper's time. There was a reduction, and nothing has happened. These are the people who take care of our food safety. Three research centres will be closed, in Guelph, Lacombe and Quebec City. There is something wrong in how this is being managed.

Just look at Health Canada and the cuts that are currently happening to the regulatory operation and enforcement branch.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you very much.

Mrs. Jansen, go ahead, please.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Thank you.

This bill, as I understand it, expands early retirement options to government workers, including frontline roles like border service officers and correctional officers. This is at a time when Canadians are asking for stronger borders and safer communities.

Mr. McCarthy, do you believe that these incentives will lead to experienced frontline personnel leaving early and reducing our operational capacity?

[Liam McCarthy]

That's one of the challenges with the way the early retirement incentive appears to have been rolled out. It's not clear what the scope is. About 68,000 people received letters telling them they might be eligible. We don't know what that means. It would make more sense if it were the same universe as those areas that were being cut so that it would mitigate some of those challenges.

There continue to be quality problems for CBSA. It takes a fair amount of time and training at Rigaud to become fully trained. Instead, they give a significant amount of duties to student workers at the Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver airports. They may only get a couple weeks of training, so there's a real concern about the level of quality there.

The government could also be doing more in the areas in which it said it will invest. It's not doing everything it can to retain employees in areas being cut to move them into other areas that it's looking to expand. There are significant opportunities to retain a lot of talent there. People are already security cleared, which takes a long time. The Department of National Defence especially is going to have a real challenge in that way.

The government is not doing all it can to make sure there's a seamless transfer within such a large employer so that talent is retained.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

We keep hearing that we're going to hire another 1,000 CBSA officers because of the crackdown on smuggling.

I live on the border and I'm stumped. We're going to hire 1,000, but we're going to lay off 68,000. How does that work? When you say 68,000 letters, is that just CBSA or is that everybody?

[Liam McCarthy]

Those are people who are actively part of the superannuation plan and could potentially retire early based on the provisions of the early retirement incentive.

The challenge for us is it starts off making it sound like you're entitled to it, but then the fine print says your department might not give it to you. It seems arbitrary. We still don't know what it is, and it's overlapping with these somewhat complicated workforce adjustment layoff processes at the same time.

One of our biggest concerns is that people might make the wrong decisions. It's not clear who will actually be accepted. It's not clear whether people, in some of those areas where they're saying they're going to expand, will actually have the opportunity, even though they've been given letters suggesting they might be entitled to such a thing.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

You've maybe already answered this question, but I'm still going to ask it.

First of all, early retirement packages let people leave earlier without the usual pension hit. That's what I understand from this, but that money doesn't come out of thin air. It comes from the public pension pot, which is funded by taxpayers and future workers.

Do you have an estimated cost for these early retirement packages? Has anybody mentioned anything?

[Liam McCarthy]

The estimate in the budget was $1.5 billion.

For the early retirement incentive on its own, the money would come out of the joint contributions from workers and the money that's accumulated in the pension plan.

That's different from the last set of cuts we saw under Harper. Normally, when an employer is looking to lay off a large number of employees, there's money that is transferred into the pension plan, if they're giving early retirement incentives, in order to shore it up. You pay out some money to people to mitigate them losing their jobs.

Here, the pension is in such a good surplus position that the government has decided to raid that surplus to pay for it, as opposed to the Harper government, which kicked in, I think, about $3 billion in the last year—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I'm sorry, but we're past our time.

We'll go over to Ms. Khalid for five minutes.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

I have a question with respect to the PBO. It published a report last week, which stated that in the majority of cases, the savings that would be realized with these measures would have “minimal or no impact on service levels.”

Can you help me in reconciling where that disconnect is? As Madam Gaudreau also said, if the levels of staff right now in these frontline service providers, like IRCC and CRA, are already not doing that great.... In fact, I have anecdotal evidence where people are actually sending people, our constituents, to MP offices to get service instead of doing their jobs at the front lines.

How do you reconcile the PBO's report versus what you are saying versus what we're seeing on the ground?

That question is for Mrs. DeSousa, please.

[Sharon DeSousa]

First, I want to say this. It's remiss of me not to say it, but it's been almost 10 years since the government contracted out our pay system, Phoenix, to IBM. It's cost taxpayers over $5 billion.