Unions rally against 3,300 job cuts, 7,000 salary reductions at IRCC

Angela Joya is unsure if she will still be employed in the coming months. She has two young kids at home and a fresh mortgage that began only three years ago.

Joya, who is the president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees’ Local 552 at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, is just one example. A colleague on a temporary contract was let go with 30 days notice and now is without work, but with a mortgage and three young kids.

“Day after day, what do we do now?” Joya asks, reflecting on the past weeks and months at IRCC. “Write Kudo cards saying goodbye to people? It feels like a funeral procession non-stop because people are leaving and all we do is sign Kudo cards.”

Joya spoke to the Ottawa Citizen on Wednesday after a rally at the courtyard of the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada building at 300 Slater St. A plastic table was being folded up after feeding around 75 union activists who rallied to oppose the 3,300 job cuts to the department announced in January. A majority of those positions were in the National Capital Region, confirmed Ruth Lau MacDonald, a Public Service Alliance of Canada regional executive vice-president. 

That amount was around 25 per cent of the department, a guillotine-style cut to its workforce. Joya also told the Ottawa Citizen that another 7,000 workers, around 50 per cent of IRCC’s workforce, would see their salaries severed to lower brackets.

The Ottawa Citizen contacted IRCC to confirm the salary cuts, but the department did not respond by publication deadline.

“Our lives are fixed. Our incomes are fixed. Our lives are fixed,” Joya said. “A lot of members are quite worried, quite concerned as to how it will play out in their financial planning and their family planning and their ability to hold onto their housing.”

Snow slowly descended and two brutalist towers cast a cold shadow on the courtyard. Joya interrupted the interview to speak to a union colleague packaging up leftover pizza. That colleague is pregnant and is now facing a layoff, just like Joya.

There’s still much uncertainty for the full-time workers who received letters from IRCC. It’s unclear how many and who among them will make it through the workforce reduction under a program bargained by public-service unions to ensure continued employment if it is available.

The cuts to IRCC point to a complex and human cost to the ballooning and popping of the public service. It’s an example of the fissures public-sector workers can fall into because of larger political forces, particularly at the tail end and beginning of political cycles. Take, for example, the sharp turn by previous Immigration Minister Marc Miller after a backlash over student visas and the temporary worker program.

IRCC spokesperson Remi Larivière told the Ottawa Citizen in January that the cuts resulted from the 2025-2027 immigration plan announced last October, slowing population growth in the short term.

Before the immigration policy change, the departmental plan for IRCC published in February 2024 showed an expected reduction of 119 full-time employees.

Joya said IRCC was the first department to be hit by significant workforce cuts, meaning Wednesday’s rally could become the first of many for public-service unions. Still, no other departments are expected to deal with cuts as sudden and as large as those to IRCC.

The breach past the fiscal guardrails set by then Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland brought pressure to cut to a government on the precipice of a re-election campaign. Programs were also set to sunset, leaving many public-service workers without roles in government.

Now signals of cuts across departments seem, if anything, inevitable. There are overt promises to trim back the public service to pay for income tax cuts as frontrunners Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre vie for voters’ trust at a time of economic insecurity.

It’s a significant shift for public-service workers, who had largely only known growth in their teams, salaries and life opportunities since Justin Trudeau took office as prime minister in 2015.

Now their future possibilities in the public sector seem to be shrinking with the size of the service itself. It remains a question on how a leaner IRCC and public service writ large will handle one of the biggest geopolitical historical shifts since the Second World War.

Nate Prier, the president of CAPE, argues that now is not the time for cuts, particularly for IRCC, pointing to geopolitical instability and the hardline immigration policies of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. He questions whether Canada is ready to handle an influx of claimants after IRCC workers survive the wave of cuts to their teams and salaries.

“When America starts vomiting up its refugees, like it is right now, when they drive more wars to create more refugees, when we need to delink from the American economy, and we’re going to need skilled workers from around the world to help build the next chapter for Canada, that is a terrible time to start gutting the federal public sector, and especially people that you’ve already trained,” Prier said.

At her office, Joya reflects on the daily tasks undertaken in a new culture of fear and anxiety. Who is next? Who will survive the adjustment?

Workers at IRCC are in fight-or-flight mode, she said. They’re checking LinkedIn and Google for job postings. Grievances have been filed for what Prier calls a haphazard rollout.

“Honestly, it just scares the hell out of me to think that, with the crises on the way around the world, we’re not going to be prepared to respond,” Joya said.