Council’s public works and infrastructure committee on Monday agreed to advance a staff recommendation for a new transportation plan for the central Ottawa neighbourhood.

This includes a 12 to 15 month pilot project to create rush-hour bus-only lanes on a stretch of Bank Street from Highway 417 to the Rideau Canal. The proposal also calls for four segments of permanent bus-only lanes near Lansdowne Park.

The target start date is summer 2027.

Staff originally proposed the pilot would run 15 months, but Coun. Shawn Menard — whose ward includes the Glebe — asked for it to be trimmed to a year.

City council will ultimately decide on the length of the pilot when the proposal is brought forward for final approval.

Setting up bus-only lanes will cost $250,000, and the broader strategy — which will include what city staff call pedestrian and cycling improvements — will total $2.5 million.

Menard called the pilot a “long-time coming,” and praised staff for comprehensive consultations with businesses and residents in the Glebe.

“I think we’re in a much better spot now than we were before, and [I’m] very interested to be around, hopefully, when these results come out, and to see that proven data utilized in a good way for this streetscape.”

Transit advocates who spoke at the committee meeting on Monday largely supported the plan, saying buses running through the Glebe are often slowed by traffic along Bank

But Ajay Ramachandran of advocacy group Better Transit Ottawa called on the city to go further than having bus-only lanes in peak directions in the morning and afternoon. He warned that bus delays in one part of the city create a “cascade” effect elsewhere.

“If there are bus lanes only in the peak direction, the buses in the peak direction will still be canceled or delayed because of the non-peak direction buses,” he said.

Still, Ramachandran said it was “exciting to finally see this proposal getting close to being implemented,” and urged council to fast-track the plan to “give riders the relief they deserve during our bus reliability crisis.”

Darrell Cox, executive director of the Glebe Business Improvement Area, said his members opposed removing on-street parking spots for the bus-only lanes.

City staff said the permanent segments would eliminate 17 on-street parking spots, and the pilot project would restrict 146 spots in peak periods in the morning and afternoon.

Cox warned that most trips to Glebe businesses are made by car and making it more challenging to park could turn away customers. While there are spots available in nearby parking garages, he said the BIA’s research shows that customers overwhelmingly prefer on-street parking.

“Ensuring that the Glebe remains easy to reach is not a matter of convenience. It is matter of economic necessity,” Cox said, adding that some 80 members of the BIA signed an email petition opposing the project.

“At the end of the day, if access becomes too difficult, customers will not adapt. They will leave. If we get this wrong, we won’t just lose parking spaces, we lose businesses.”

Responding to a question from the committee, Cox said there are roughly 290 businesses located between Holmwood Avenue and the Queensway, but suspected more would sign the petition if BIA members went door-to-door.

A motion from Barrhaven East Coun. Wilson Lo to make the pilot conditional on the approval of two-thirds of businesses along the strip was handily defeated. Only Lo and Orléans East-Cumberland Coun. Matt Luloff voted in favour.

Coun. Laine Johnson, who supported the pilot, said she believed the goal is “to try and unlock the potential for this site for as many people as possible.”

“Right now, different users are being shut out or avoiding it for… a whole host of reasons, and right now, the city is making an investment to try and figure out how to maximize the potential for this site,” she said.

Johnson said proposals like bus-only lanes in the Glebe are needed to ensure that city investments in transit bear fruit, likening it to buying a pricey Peloton bike but only using it to hang your clothes on.

“I think as the city we do need to start being a little less apologetic about putting transit first,” she said.

Johnson also commended staff for promising to set up a website to update residents on developments on the pilot, and asked for regular updates during the length of the project.

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The transit provider said that trains had return to running the full-length of the line between Tunney’s Pasture and Blair stations shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday.

Trains had been halted from moving east past the UOttawa station on Wednesday after an overhead catenary cable snapped and one vehicle experienced a power issue just before Lees, the next station east of UOttawa.

Video on the day showed sparks coming from the cable.

It came after the city experienced a freezing rain storm.

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The federal government has committed to cutting the number of public service jobs by about 40,000 from a 2023-24 peak of 368,000 as it looks to find savings.

Departments and agencies across the public service have started notifying staff of coming job cuts.

Barb Couperus, a spokesperson for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat — which oversees government operations — said the office does not collect information centrally on the impact of workforce adjustment on employment equity designated groups.

Equity groups include women, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and members of visible minorities.

Couperus said heads of departments are responsible for managing their workforces.

She said departments will continue to pay “close attention” to maintaining representation and meeting their obligations under the Employment Equity Act.

The act requires federally regulated employers, including the government itself, to take steps to eliminate employment barriers and maintain proportional representation in the workplace for members of equity groups.

During layoff periods, Couperus said, departments can prioritize keeping staff from equity groups if there are gaps in representation.

Nicholas Marcus Thompson, president and CEO of the Black Class Action Secretariat, said he is “disturbed” to learn the Treasury Board isn’t tracking the impacts of job cuts.

“What that suggests is that this is not a priority for this government,” he said.

Over the past five years, the government has hired approximately 5,000 Black workers throughout the entire federal public service, said Thompson. It also has increased the number of Black executives from around 99 in 2020 to more than 220, he said.

“What we’re seeing now is that those gains are being lost as a result of workforce adjustment,” said Thompson, adding his organization has started tracking data on workforce adjustment. “Many folks have reached out to us to find out what their rights are.

“Usually with workforce adjustment, the first to go are folks that were the last to come … So far our data is showing that, despite these equity gains, it’s now turning out to be equity losses.”

Thompson said his organization wants to see the government require equity impact assessments before workforce adjustment decisions are made. It also wants the government to be transparent about the process and publish data on which demographics are being affected.

Rabia Khedr, national director of Disability Without Poverty, said people with disabilities working in the public service will be feeling anxious.

“Generally speaking, a lot of times people with disabilities may be at an entry level position, so that makes them vulnerable,” said Khedr.

The most recent employment equity report for the public service says that as of March 2024, 9.7 per cent of federal executives were people with disabilities, up from 4.6 per cent in March 2019.

Khedr also said she’s unhappy about the lack of central tracking of the impacts of job cuts on equity groups.

“That then leaves it to the individual leadership within departments to make those critical decisions,” she said.

“It really depends on the leadership and their commitment to diversity and inclusion … There’s a risk that equity-denied groups might be more vulnerable in terms of who gets cut and who stays.”

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The plan focuses on enhancing security, improving pedestrian spaces and revitalizing the main market building at 55 ByWard Square.

While business owners are largely supportive of these changes, there’s some concern over whether any of this will come to be.

In an interview with the Ottawa Compass, Deek Labelle, the owner of the  Chateau Lafayette, the city’s oldest pub and a staple of the Market, said there’s optimism about the proposed improvements but she would like to see action first.

“They have been talking about this revitalization for 10 years now, they have put some money on the table, but there has been no plan to actually start doing the work,” said Labelle.

Labelle’s hardly alone.

David Mangano, a co-owner of The Grand, one of the Market’s most well-known restaurants, said support from the city for businesses has dried up and called on city hall to listen to those who have a stake in the area.

Still, he’s hopeful about what comes next.

“It’s good to see programs coming into place it’s long overdue,” said Mangando.

Sueling Ching, the CEO and president of the Ottawa Board Trade, said while there have been promises of revitalization in the past, the pandemic and its after-effects have slowed down plans.

But she credited the city for working collaboratively with key partners on this latest effort, pointing to efforts to reach out to the Ottawa police, social housing providers and the Royal mental health hospital to address issues such as chronic homelessness and mental health.

“I’m actually very proud of our civic and private sector leaders for working together, and I believe it’s a competitive edge and should give confidence to our business owners and to our community as a whole,” said Ching.

Coun. Stéphanie Plante, who represents the Market and surrounding neighbourhoods at city hall, said this latest plan has to go beyond platitudes and start delivering results.

“Residents and business owners have been patient. They deserve timelines and transparency, not just frameworks,” she said in a statement.

City council’s finance and corporate services committee will discuss the plan in March.

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Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe announced the strategy at an event at the Rogers Centre on Thursday, promising investments to pedestrianize streets in the neighbourhood, revitalize public spaces and address concerns around safety. 

“When people hear that we’re talking about creating new attractions, new spaces, that’s going to attract more private sector investment, and it’s going to bring more people to the market,” Sutcliffe said, adding the new plan would make sure “people are feeling safer going to the Byward Market.”

The Market, as it’s known to residents, is one of Ottawa’s busy tourist haunts, known for its produce and gift vendors in the summer and holidays, as well as its concentration of trendy restaurants and nightlife spots.

But it’s hardly immune to the challenges with crime and addictions issues seen across the country, and as the centre of the city’s nightlife, has a reputation of being rowdy on the weekends.

With the action plan, the city is looking to taking some big leap forwards on redeveloping the district in advance of its 200th anniversary in 2027.

Victoria Williston, ByWard Market District Authority executive director, said the association is already advancing plans for main thoroughfare George Street to be more pedestrian-friendly, and bringing tother social service partners, law enforcement, businesses and residents for their public safety initiative.

The city has also committed $1 million dollars over the next two years towards private security to supplement Ottawa police services. 

“The goal is to create an environment where people feel comfortable staying, not just passing through,” Williston said. 

Social challenges 

Aside from the progress in building more businesses in the market, Sutcliffe acknowledged there are social challenges in the Market the city has yet to address. 

The district is home to some of the city’s largest homeless shelters.

Sutcliffe said the city has taken steps to build more transitional housing beds in other parts of the city to “reduce the pressure on Byward Market.”

According to the city’s Point In Time Count, 2,952 people experienced homelessness in October 2024 in one night. 

Sutcliffe added that ByWard Market can’t be fully revitalized until the city has provided solutions to people who are suffering from the drug crisis. 

Coun. Stéphanie Plante, who represents the district at city hall, had a more measured response to the unveiling. She raised concerns about governance, transparency and the nearly $200-million capital assumptions underlying the proposal. 

In an interview with iPolitics, Plante said that while she’s “happy that there’s a plan,” the city still needs an “actual strategy” to address placemaking and safety. 

Specifically, Plante said the city must confront the concentration of “low barrier” services in the area, such as shelters, injection sites, and day programs. She said transitional housing alone does not address the needs of the broader population experiencing homelessness, as it typically serves people who meet specific eligibility criteria. 

“Nothing will change until we spread out social services,” Plante said. 

When asked how having private security could help revitalize the ByWard Market, Plante said the city needs to deal with the core issues by addressing community needs. 

“We have parks, libraries, schools spread out all over the city, because there’s a need everywhere for those services. We have to look at social services in that same capacity,” she said. 

In a statement emailed to iPolitics, the Ottawa Police Service said they are developing a downtown core safety plan that aims to strengthen visible policing and enhance prevention efforts. 

“This plan builds on existing initiatives already underway and will bring our operational and community resources together in a focused, sustainable approach,” Ottawa Police Services spokesperson Fern John-Simon wrote.

They will be presenting the strategy to the Ottawa Police Service Board in April. 

The plan for financing will move to the city’s financing committee in March before heading to the council. A financing plan will then be finalized in 2027.

A full report of the action plan will be released this Friday.

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The corridor between Quebec City and Toronto aims to carry up to 24 million riders annually by 2055 to boost economic growth, foster tourism and expand access to jobs by slashing travel times on dedicated electric tracks.

But as plans become clearer, so too does the need for large amounts of energy to power the line. Experts say planning needs to start now.

The proposed network would host 72 trains a day running along a 1,000-kilometre track at speeds of up to 300 km/h. It would make for a three-hour trip between the country’s two largest cities and less than an hour between Montreal and Ottawa.

Construction on the first phase between Ottawa and Montreal is currently expected to start in 2029 or 2030. Conceived as a public-private partnership, Crown corporation Alto will oversee the project while a consortium dubbed Cadence will design, build and operate the line.

Alto CEO Martin Imbleau is aware of the challenge the line could pose to already burdened power grids. But he says part of the project’s design phase now underway with utilities looks to head off any potential power shortages.

“It’s a significant block,” Imbleau said in an interview, referring to the amount of energy the line would consume daily.

“But we’re already in discussion with Hydro-Québec to make sure the capacity is there, and there’s no issue either in Ontario.” At least not at the moment.

Ontario expects electricity demand to soar 75 per cent by 2050, while Hydro-Québec aims to boost capacity by 100 per cent within a quarter century, as grids come under strain from artificial intelligence processing sites, electric vehicles and population growth.

The planned rail line would drain between one and three per cent of Ontario and Quebec’s current electrical capacity, said University of Ottawa associate professor Ryan Katz-Rosene. In percentage terms, that puts it on a rough par with steel plants or AI data centres in Ontario, or a large aluminum smelter in Quebec.

That owes partly to the sheer number of trains on the tracks — nearly twice Via Rail’s current average of 39 along the various legs of the Quebec City-Toronto corridor.

Speed plays a big role too. Approaching 300 km/h, the trains would require roughly double the energy of standard electric ones, given the power needed to reach high velocity and sustain it in the face of much greater drag.

Hence the need for high-capacity electrical substations for exclusive use by the rail line along the corridor.

Imbleau expects to build up to a dozen substations, which act as intermediaries between the grid and the railway, allowing electricity to be transmitted at different voltages.

“I haven’t done the calculations on a yearly basis, but at any one point in time we need 50 megawatts of power to supply a train running at 300 kilometres safely,” Imbleau said.

Asked Katz-Rosene: “Each of those little substations is like powering a small town. So then the question becomes, can the existing grid handle it?”

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request point to where that power will flow from.

One-third would come from Hydro-Québec and the rest from Ontario’s Hydro One, according to an overview from a 2023 study by Alto’s precursor. At that point, the project was still envisioned as high-frequency rail — with speeds of only up to 200 km/h — rather than high-speed rail and its much heftier electrical demands. But experts expect the proportions from the two provinces to remain roughly the same.

While Alto has declined to lay out a hard timeline, it has projected passenger figures for 2055. By then, many other sectors will already be guzzling energy from the provinces’ grids.

And the need for more juice is urgent. Last month, extreme cold forced Hydro-Québec to temporarily suspend its energy exports to Massachusetts. There is also less water in the utility’s reservoirs at the moment due to a three-year drought.

Once overflowing with excess electricity, Hydro-Québec has rejected several industrial development projects that would have required 21,500 megawatts of power — less than half of the rail line’s threshold — because it lacked the energy to supply them.

In Ontario, pressure on the grid driven in part by EV battery plants and data centres has caused demand projections for the coming decades to skyrocket. Industrial demand in the province is expected to grow 58 per cent by 2035, the Independent Electricity System Operator said in October 2024, marking a big leap from outlooks the year prior.

Experts say they hope the emissions reduction achieved as travellers abandon cars and planes for trains will make up for the high electricity consumption.

Construction of the rail line, with all of its attendant carbon emissions, habitat erosion and use of raw material — not least a 1,000-kilometre ribbon of steel, whose production is emissions-intensive — will take a hefty environmental toll.

“Building something of this scale requires huge amounts of ridership in order to cover those proverbial carbon costs,” said Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.

“The way you pay off that bill, so to speak, is by having a ton of people ride this and transfer from more polluting modes of transportation,” he said.

“If it’s people shifting from the bus and the existing train, that’s actually not a huge win for the environment.”

As for financial costs, no business case specifying the precise route, budget, ridership forecast and fare projections has been presented to the public, though one is expected in the coming years.

Alto estimates the full project will cost between $60 billion and $90 billion. The government has not yet made a final decision approving funding for the entire rail line.

Hydro-Québec and Hydro One say they’ve had preliminary talks with Alto, but that specific energy use projections have not yet been made because a precise route remains to be finalized.

“Once Alto identifies its energy needs for the project, Hydro One, along with the province’s energy planner the Independent Electricity System Operator, will have a clearer understanding of potential impacts to the electricity system and the requirements to energize this project,” said Tiziana Baccega Rosa, a spokeswoman for the provincial utility, in an email.

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However, the frigid temperatures Ontarians are currently experiencing likely aren’t going away any time soon.

Environment Canada meteorologist Mitchell Meredith said cold warnings could return to large swaths of southern Ontario next Saturday as the next wave of cold air comes in.

Sub-zero temperatures in southern Ontario could stick around until mid-to-late-February, Meredith said, marking a noticeable long stretch of cold temperatures not seen in the region in recent years.

In Toronto and Ottawa, for instance, temperatures have been below freezing since Jan. 18. By the time temperatures rise above 0 C, those cities may have a month or more of continuous freezing temperatures in the books, the meteorologist said.

The current cold snap is a consequence of the polar vortex, according to Meredith, a large area of frigid Arctic air that commonly stretches south during the winter and causes temperatures to plummet in Central Canada.

Record snowfall in Toronto may also be dragging temperatures down in Ontario’s capital.

“When you get a lot of snowpack and ice on the ground, that can also help keep things cold,” Meredith said.

Some Torontonians, undeterred by the cold, have been continuing to take advantage of the snow leftover from last Sunday’s historic storm.

Nicolas Zucco, an urban planning consultant from Toronto, was armed with a red toboggan Saturday afternoon, ready to sled again for the first time since he was a kid.

Zucco said he’s been mostly staying at home amid the cold warnings but was drawn outside by mostly sunny conditions on Saturday.

“It definitely feels like the coldest winter in Toronto we’ve had for a long time,” he said. “But it’s too depressing if you stay at home.”

Toronto could see a wind chill of -25 overnight before temperatures are forecasted to warm to a high of -8 C  Sunday, Meredith said. In Ottawa, temperatures were expected to drop to -31 with wind chill overnight before rising to a high of -11 C Sunday.

As cold warnings persist in southern Ontario, Environment Canada has warned of frostbite, which can develop within minutes on exposed skin and cause numbness, a tingling sensation or swelling.

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In an update on its website, Alto says it plans to burrow from just north of the river that rims Montreal’s north side to downtown in a north-south corridor that would exceed 10 kilometres.

“To reach Montreal, the current hypothesis involves building a tunnel under the Rivière des Prairies and Mount Royal to access downtown directly, reducing integration challenges in a dense urban setting,” states Alto’s preamble to an online survey about the proposed railroad.

It is also considering tunnels or elevated tracks to reach downtown Toronto “from the north or the east,” terminating at either Union Station or a nearby location.

Rail tunnel construction has proven a pricey undertaking in recent years, ballooning the budgets of Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown light-rail line and Ontario Line subway plans as well as Ottawa’s Trillium Line.

The Eglinton line’s budget soared beyond $13 billion from an initial $5-billion estimate, due to a slew of complex challenges that included moving gas and water pipes. More than 10 kilometres of the 19-kilometre Eglinton line are underground. The bill for that project works out to nearly $700 million per kilometre.

For Montreal’s Blue line metro extension, it tops $1 billion per kilometre.

So would the cost of a high-speed rail tunnel through Montreal, said Ahmed El-Geneidy, a professor at McGill University’s School of Urban Planning.

At that rate, the proposed tunnel would account for between 12 and 18 per cent of the project’s budget, estimated at $60 billion to $90 billion.

“It’s very hard from a civil engineering standpoint and from a safety standpoint,” El-Geneidy said.

“We’re not talking about the standards of the 1900s when we built the Mount Royal Tunnel.”

Alto spokesman Benoit Bourdeau stressed that while a tunnel demands a bigger investment up front, it can prove cheaper over its life cycle.

“A surface alignment in a dense urban area like Montréal would require costly expropriations, relocations, utility diversions and long‑term operational constraints — all of which accumulate into substantial recurring costs over decades,” Bourdeau said in an email.

“A tunnel, by contrast, provides a protected, unconstrained corridor with a lifespan exceeding 100 years, offering predictable maintenance costs, high performance and the ability to scale service without triggering new surface impacts or political resistance.”

The tunnel would also allow for a more direct route that would shave 30 minutes off of a trip to or from Montreal, he said.

The government has not yet made a final decision approving funding for the entire rail line.

Construction of the first phase of the 1,000-kilometre corridor is set to kick off in 2029 or 2030, linking Montreal and Ottawa in an effective test case for a massive infrastructure project intended to transform rail travel in Canada’s most densely populated region.

The proposed network would host locomotives running on dedicated electric tracks at speeds of up to 300 km/h, slashing current travel times. It would make for a three-hour trip between the country’s two largest cities and less than one hour between Montreal and Ottawa. Some 20 to 30 departures are expected daily on the Montreal-Toronto segment.

In its recent update, Alto said it is weighing two possible corridors between Ottawa and Peterborough, Ont. One is a more direct line between the two cities and the other curves south, closer to Lake Ontario.

The first option “reduces travel distance and community impacts but involves complex work in remote and sensitive areas” where rock formations make for slower, costlier construction, the update said.

The second simplifies construction, but runs through densely populated areas.

Either way, the number of stations — seven — remains unchanged. They are planned for Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Laval, Que., Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Que., and Quebec City.

Transport Canada decided on the stations before a business case specifying the precise route, budget, ridership forecast and fare projections was presented to the public. One is expected in the coming years.

The stations alone mark a major cost.

Those above ground require about 42,000 square metres, “about the size of six football fields,” according to Alto.

In Montreal, the stop will be at Central Station or a spot nearby — above or below ground — CEO Martin Imbleau told The Canadian Press in an interview last week.

The rough route charted so far would see some 72 trains daily integrated into corridors that currently house rail and power lines, roads and highways, on top of the fresh-cut tunnels.

Rail bridges will also need to be built across the Ottawa River and the Rivière des Mille Îles that borders the north end of Laval, an island suburb north of Montreal, Alto says.

A three-month public consultation for the corridor kicked off last week.

A C.D. Howe Institute study last year found that the promised line would generate between $15 billion and $27 billion in value for Canadians over six decades, or less than half of the minimum cost of the project at best.

Alto’s projections are one or two orders of magnitude higher.

It says the rail service could generate up to $24.5 billion economic impact each year, equivalent to 1.1 per cent of Canada’s economic output and amounting to $1.5 trillion over 60 years.

The line would create more than 50,000 jobs during construction and require thousands of staff to run it afterward, the Crown corporation says.

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Although most of the meeting was closed to the public, councillors and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe emerged about two hours later to publicly vote on a motion to delegate authority to the city manager to negotiate, enter into, finalize, and execute an asset purchase agreement of the landfill property located in Ottawa’s Carlsbad Springs community. 

“I want to remind everyone that we are not deciding today whether this site will be a landfill,” emphasized Mayor Mark Sutcliffe. “The future use of the site has already been decided. It is a provincially approved landfill, it will operate as a provincially approved landfill.” 

Indeed, Taggart Miller Environmental Services completed the environmental assessment process in May 2025. Sutcliffe underscored that the decision being made at this meeting was really about who would be in charge of the landfill’s management.

“The question is whether it will operate as a publicly owned or privately owned provincially approved landfill; whether it will be owned by the people of Ottawa or the residents of another municipality or a private corporation,” he said. “If we don’t own it, someone else will.” 

In a recorded vote, 19 councillors and the mayor voted in favour of the motion, with five councillors dissenting (Osgoode Coun. Isabelle Skalski, Orléans South-Navan Coun. Catherine Kitts, West Carleton-March Coun. Clarke Kelly, Rideau-Jock Coun. David Brown, and Orléans East-Cumberland Coun. Matthew Luloff). 

During the media availability after the meeting, questions surrounding the fundamental meaning of the motion were raised. Will the City of Ottawa own the Recovery Centre or not? 

“Staff now have the authority to proceed with a purchase,” clarified Sutcliffe. “But obviously there are details to be worked out, and we can’t say with 100 per cent certainty that the transaction will be completed.” 

City staff confirmed that nothing seems to be holding back the purchase. “All of the conditions have been met, so there’s no impediment moving forward.” 

Although most questions could not be answered concretely due to confidentiality under the non-disclosure agreement, City staff explained that the landfill would be paid for through debt. 

“When the report becomes public, we will be sharing the details related to that. . . The expenses that we’re looking at now are really advancing expenses that we had anticipated at some point in the future,” city staff explained, referring to the Solid Waste Master Plan. 

“This fits within the envelope of funding that we had identified for future expenditures on solid waste management,” added Sutcliffe. 

“If there’s a silver lining to this, despite the fact that [residents] will have concerns and worries, it’s that their elected officials, the people who represent them at City Hall, will have control over the decisions that are made about this site going forward,” concluded Sutcliffe. “In a scenario where it’s owned by a private company or another municipality, they would not have that accountability in the form of their elected officials being responsible to them on the future decisions that are made.”

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Carter Mann, spokesperson for the national statistical agency, said Statistics Canada will inform affected employees within the next two weeks.

Data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat shows 7,274 people worked at Statistics Canada as of March 31, 2025, and 99 of them were part of the executive team.

Several departments, including Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Environment and Climate Change and Employment and Social Development, told their staff late last year that news on job cuts would be shared this month.

Sean O’Reilly, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said workforce adjustment notices have been issued to 3,274 workers, including 940 of the union’s members.

O’Reilly said it’s still not clear which programs will be affected.

The union said it’s concerned about the job cuts coming as the agency prepares for a census in May.

“It’s a really dark day for us here and I think for Canadians,” O’Reilly said. “StatCan produces data that really underpins all the government decision-making and is used by businesses and communities.

“I have real concerns about this also causing more generational damage to the data that Canadians rely on every day.”

Ottawa is looking to cut program spending and administration costs by about $60 billion over the next five years through its “comprehensive expenditure review.”

The latest federal budget said the exercise will involve “restructuring operations and consolidating internal services.” It said it also will deploy workforce adjustments and attrition to return the size of the public service to “a more sustainable level.”

O’Reilly said the union has been informed that job cuts will soon be announced by Shared Services Canada, and hundreds of staff members are likely to be affected.

“They’re sort of the backbone of the IT infrastructure of Canada and the federal government, and they do a lot of work in cybersecurity. And to see cuts there also, it seems like we’re basically hollowing out all these key underlying services that Canadians and the federal government rely on,” O’Reilly said.

Nick Wells, a spokesperson for Shared Services Canada, said the agency is in the process of notifying employees and executives that their position is affected and may no longer be required.

“We are unable to share the number of employees who will be receiving letters until we have finished this process,” he said.

The government plans to cut the number of public service jobs by about 40,000 from a peak of 368,000 in 2023-24. About 10,000 jobs have been eliminated already.

The plan will see a reduction of 1,000 executive positions over the next two years, and a 20 per cent cut to spending on management and consulting services over three years.

The federal government has sent letters with information on its planned early retirement program to almost 68,000 public servants who may be eligible.

The government says it’s trying to boost the rate of attrition and avoid cutting younger workers by offering a voluntary program allowing workers to retire earlier without incurring a pension penalty.

The recent federal budget said the government intends to implement the one-year early retirement program as soon as this month.

Alex Silas, national executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said cutting hundreds of Statistics Canada workers puts the quality, accuracy and timeliness of data collection at risk and “impacts everyone who relies on this information to plan, respond, and make decisions.”

“It’s time for the government to be clear about the impacts of these cuts because slashing public service jobs undermines the critical services communities rely on,” Silas said.

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