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
Cutting the public sector just like the Conservatives do. Carney’s government is conservatism under another name.
Austerity 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.
What’s your ideal government worker percent vs private sector?
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.
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.
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.
you mean the one caused by a global pandemic that lasted multiple years plus the lovely gift of Phoenix?
I agree it was not to last forever, but to think it was ridiculous is just silly
Wow, StatsCan is hit particularly hard.
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.
ETA: I should clarify, I don’t think the problem is entirely too many people, it’s shit leadership, overly burdensome rules, lack of tech innovation (admittedly, they are improving).
I think one issue that really bites government workers is the idea that you 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, you need diversity of thought, and you need people who have worn many hats in their lives.
The field of analytics has changed a lot in 10-15 years, and Stat Can has not had a good pace.
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.
As an orange man once said, if you don’t count, you don’t have a problem.
