Affected employees are expected to start receive letters in mid-February, according to the Canadian Employment and Immigration Union.
The National Capital Region will bear the brunt of what one of the largest public service unions in Canada calls the “incredibly irresponsible and reckless decision” to chop 3,300 jobs at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, beginning in February.
“The initial reaction is that it’s not a good time,” Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, said in a telephone interview. “We’re on the cusp of an election and (U.S. President Donald) Trump is coming in. This is going to have a massive impact on our border policies.”
While there are so far limited details on where exactly where the cuts will be coming from during the next three years — affected employees are expected to start receive letters in mid-February, according to the Canadian Employment and Immigration Union, which revealed the government’s plans on Monday — it has the potential to be devastating in the capital.
A 2023 IRCC document showed that 56 per cent of the more than 13,000 employees in the department were based in Ottawa.
“The federal government is our No. 1 employer. They have a big role in our community,” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said Tuesday during his State of the City address to the Ottawa Board of Trade. “It’s going to be a tough year economically if these kind of cuts continue and we’re going to have to work with the federal government on a plan.”
IRCC workers process applications for citizenship, permanent and temporary residency and passports as well as conducting interviews.
The initial reaction from the CEIU was shock.
“These are the jobs that ensure we’re bringing in the talent to strength the economy,” Rubina Boucher, CEIU national president, said in a telephone interview, citing a logjam in bringing in doctors, nurses, farmers, hospitality industry staff and temporary foreign workers.
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“Right now, we’re in a borderline recession and we’re seeing what’s happening at the border. We want to grow the country, build housing. It’s our members that are doing the work to get that talent here. There are incredibly long wait times now. How is it going to get better if the backlog gets longer?”
At the very least, the unions charge, the decisions on cutting jobs should at least be put on hold until Canada has a better read on the potential impact of Trump’s immigration and economic policies. Trump, whose inauguration ceremony was Monday, has talked endlessly about what he sees as Canada’s weak border policies while also threatening 25-per-cent tariffs on Canadian goods entering the United States.
“The IRCC might have (existing) programs winding down, but the new policies of Trump will create new problems,” Prier said.
The Canadian government, he says, will be getting rid of many who have “institutional memory” of what it was like to work around the first Trump administration.
“They’re going to waste precious time and manpower and eventually outsource jobs to the private sector,” he predicted.
In the broad picture, the federal government has been signalling for the past year that it would be reducing the size of its workforce.
At first the government said it would be seeking to cut 5,000 positions through attrition during the course of four years, which would ultimately save $15.8 million.
In November, the Public Service Alliance of Canada said the government was looking to reduce spending by cutting both term and casual employees, with layoffs also extending to permanent employees.
Just the same, IRCC employees woke up Monday to the bitter cold snap of cuts hitting their department.
A 2023 IRCC report showed that 68 per cent of employees were listed as “indeterminate” and 25 per cent were “term” employees. Only four per cent were casual and one per cent were students.
The department has grown significantly in recent years, at least partly due to increased demands during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2010, 4,752 were employed at IRCC, but that doubled to 10,248 in 2022 and increased again to more than 13,000 in 2024. Much of that increase occurred in the National Capital Region.
“We knew coming into 2025 there was a risk of job reductions in the federal public service and it’s a great concern for the local economy,” Sutcliffe said.
It’s not the first time Ottawa has faced extensive layoffs in the public sector, the last being under the Liberal government of prime minister Jean Chrétien and finance minister Paul Martin.
“In the mid-1990s, when there was a significant job reductions in the federal public service, the city and its economic development partners and the federal government had an initiative called REDO (Regional Economic Diversification Opportunities) that was meant to work on the transition to private-sector jobs and reskilling and retraining and that kind of thing for all those displaced federal workers,” Sutcliffe said.
“Whether it’s that or something else, we need to work with the federal government on a transition plan for federal workers.”
With files from Blair Crawford
