☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆Ottawa is cutting 40,000 public-sector jobs. What it could mean for Canadians
floofloofCutting the public sector just like the Conservatives do. Carney’s government is conservatism under another name.
Avid AmoebaAusterity is common to both liberals and conservatives as both support the primacy of business over workers. More workers on the street increases the willingness of the workforce to work for less or do shittier jobs at someone else’s business. The economic lib-con difference tends to be in degree (and lately competence), not in priorities.
Is it austerity when the Liberals ballooned spending past their own fiscal guardrails, where Freeland wrote a letter condemning Trudeau, and now Carney ran an even bigger deficit?
Austerity rarely means reduced total spending. Rather it usually shifts money from going to the working people and into large private business owners. Any talk about concern for the size of deficit and budget is usually bullshit. Look who’s getting more of that spending and who’s getting less. That’s what it’s almost always about.
I don’t have percentage number. I do however have an ideal percentage unemployment - really fucking low - as that gives workers some bargaining power to get higher wages and better working conditions. And for me the government should play a role of an employer to regulate the labour market, like it has done in the pre-neoliberal era. Removing workers from well paid jobs during 6.5% unemployment adds more people to the unemployed pool, competing for the same private sector jobs, lowering wages for everyone. This is what the layoff part of the austerity measure does. It lowers wages across the board. In other words it favours the interest of business owners, by having them pay lower wages and therefore collecting higher profits.
If on the other hand the private sector is short on workers and need these people, I think firms should up their wages to attract them.
So no welfare, but but more like Chinas system. I’d be curious about second order effects if there are any.
Welfare has to be a part of the system too, as it is in China (China’s as well as ours could be considerably better). I was just talking about public/private jobs. Funny you mention China because Canada’s, as well as most western countries’ economies between the Great Depression and the neoliberal era used to be much more like China’s today. Mixed public-private systems with a lot more economic planning than after. Growth was stronger as well as wages. I’ll come back to you in the other thread with post-war inflation numbers. They weren’t high. Just no time to write something coherent.
The number of private sector organizations and staff who should be in a position to interface with the public and safeguard or provide for public service services is 0.
At no point should they be in a position to make bad choices to keep or get some bonus, and at no point should services be seen as a profit center or a well to plumb for cust-cutting measures.
Wow, StatsCan is hit particularly hard.
As an orange man once said, if you don’t count, you don’t have a problem.
So as someone who does a lot of stats in the private sector, and has known a lot of stats can employees…
They are still woefully behind industry in practices and efficiency.
It’s still incredibly difficult to just pull data from statscan, and they could be storing/distributing it 100x more efficiently with modern open formats like parquet – which would massively cut costs. The vector system they use is incredibly confusing.
They do now have containerized notebookd and an on demand cluster. So that’s something we had 10 years ago.
From the people I know there, they don’t feel they’re learning, they feel their skills are useless and atrophying, and leadership sounds like it’s filled by brown nosing morons. There’s also a lot of people who I would never have hired there – but same with big corps.
It’s funny, I’d love access to their data, or to do work for them, but I could never work there.
They do now have containerized notebookd and an on demand cluster. So that’s something we had 10 years ago.
Containers violate iso27002. The pros know that chasing the sparkle is a bad idea.
spend your whole career in one place, from university to retirement. Frankly, that’s a horrible idea in the 21st century. You need to bring in people with expertise
No. You train your staff because you value them – you don’t ditch experience. You’ll discover the truth of this eventually.
I really want to agree with you.
No. You train your staff because you value them – you don’t ditch experience. You’ll discover the truth of this eventually.
I wish this was common sentiment. The modern company only values you on the way in or the way out. Otherwise you don’t have any leverage.
I’ve always believed in the idea of hiring either experienced technical leaders you want to keep around and who will mentor, and junior staff who can be mentored into roles where they’ll be happy+productive for the long term.
Around 2021 I stopped being a manager and companies stopped doing this.
But this does come back to my point: Stat Can needs fresh blood to bring in new ideas. I don’t think they have those modern technical leaders the way they should, and they’re still stuck on legacy tools that make it impossible to pull in private sector veterans.
Also, how do containers violate iso27002? Not familiar with it.
And when I said containers, what I mean is the ability to spin up an environment on-demand with specified resources and a notebook environment.
Just want to point out this “news” is a month old.
Most departments already informed the people who’d be cut.
As it’s always the case with these massive cuts, the entire thing is deplorable. The only things I believe they got right, is that they did not kick people to the street immediately, instead they alerted people that their positions will end months or years ahead. Hopefully, plenty of time for them to arrange a transition
The Trudeau era of hiring was not sustainable, and frankly, fucking ridiculous.
If you take the change in population, the peak of this graph makes the number of public service workers per capita about the same as it was at the beginning of the graph in 1990.
- 9200 per million in 1990
- 9100 per million in 2025
- About 0.009 per capita in both cases
And here’s going a little further back as percentage of pop:
Yet they’re going to contract more consultants and with RTO4 they need to rent more space.
It’s the classic thing where you cut social services, then turn around to say how terrible public sector is, and use that as a justification for privatizing