‘Each year, more than 17,000 employees leave the public service and reductions can be made by simply not backfilling vacant positions’
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.
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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.
“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.
“Yet public services haven’t gotten better, in fact, they’ve gotten dramatically worse,” she noted.
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.
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
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