Province year ahead on promise to reduce civil service by 1,200

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This article was published 01/10/2018 (2606 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government has all but kept its promise — one year ahead of schedule — to reduce the size of the provincial civil service by 1,200 employees.

According to the Manitoba Civil Service Commission annual report, there were 13,721 civil servants as of March 31. That compares with 14,162 on the same date the previous year, and 14,876 in 2016, just a few weeks before the PCs were elected.

A year ago, then-finance minister Cameron Friesen promised a reduction of 1,200 civil servants by the time the Pallister administration reaches its three-year mark in the spring of 2019.

As of March 31, the government had already achieved a reduction of 1,155 government employees in two years.

The last time there were fewer civil servants in Manitoba was in March 2006, when the number stood at 13,701 during the NDP administration of Gary Doer.

The number of provincial bureaucrats peaked in 2012 under former NDP premier Greg Selinger, at 15,300.

Michelle Gawronsky, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union, said she’s not surprised by the newly released figure. She said Monday she’s been hearing about staff shortages throughout the province for months.

“This hurts the services Manitobans rely on,” she said.

Gawronsky noted the government was able to reduce the number of employees to the extent it has despite a no-layoff clause in the civil servant contract, which expires at the end of March 2019.

“So imagine the cuts to our services that we might be facing when there’s no limit to what they can cut,” she said.

According to the commission report, there were 13,337 regular, term, technical and departmental civil servants as of March 31. In addition, there were 366 casual employees and 18 contract workers.

The report said over the course of the last fiscal year, 2,051 employees left the provincial civil service, 45.6 per cent due to resignation and 28.9 per cent due to retirement. Another 20.9 per cent of the exits came following the expiration of a term or contract.

As of March 31, 54.3 per cent of civil servants were women (53.8 per cent in 2010), 14.3 per cent (12.8 per cent in 2010) were Indigenous, 5.6 per cent (3.3 per cent in 2010) were persons with disabilities, and 12.1 per cent (6.2 per cent in 2010) were visible minorities.

A year ago, Friesen said the size of Manitoba’s civil service had grown considerably under the NDP compared with bureaucracies in other provinces. He said it was 20 per cent larger than the national average.

Two years ago, the PCs announced they would reduce the number of government middle and senior managers by 112 positions, claiming management ranks had ballooned 33 per cent since 2005.

Friesen said last year the overall reduction in civil servants would occur mainly through attrition.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca