Losing work that mattered

Canada is entering another season of layoffs.

Recent reporting in the Free Press has detailed federal departments issuing workforce adjustment notices as budgets tighten and priorities shift.

In the private sector, many companies have already gone through waves of “rightsizing,” a word that sounds efficient until you translate it back into human terms.

What remains largely unspoken is the emotional toll of job loss on people who experience work not merely as employment, but as a calling.

For many public servants, their roles are held with care and pride.

Public service in Canada is often quiet work. It is about continuity rather than applause, stewardship rather than visibility. When it functions well, it goes unnoticed. Systems hold. Crises are mitigated before they become headlines. Success is measured over decades, not quarters.

That kind of work shapes identity.

So when those roles disappear, the loss is not only financial. It can feel disorienting, even existential. It raises questions that spreadsheets do not capture: Who am I without this work? Where does my sense of contribution go now?

Our public conversation tends to skip over this layer.

We speak fluently about efficiency, fiscal restraint, and productivity. These discussions are necessary.

But they are incomplete. They rarely make room for the grief that accompanies the loss of work that mattered deeply to the person doing it.

This omission matters because it affects how people respond to change. A labour culture that treats emotional response as weakness encourages silence rather than reflection. It rewards endurance without asking whether endurance is still serving anyone.

There is also a deeper belief at play, one that makes job loss feel especially devastating: the idea that a person has only one true calling.

That belief is seductive and heavy. It suggests that devotion must be tethered to a single role, department, or institution. It encourages people to stay too long in misaligned systems, interpreting strain as virtue and patience as proof of worth.

When the role ends, it can feel as though purpose itself has been revoked.

But callings are not singular appointments. They are patterns.

Service, care, stewardship, problem-solving, advocacy; these qualities are not owned by job titles. They show up in different forms over a lifetime. Losing a job does not erase them. It releases them from one container.

Seen this way, job loss is not always a personal failure. Sometimes it is a structural mismatch finally made visible. Organizations evolve. Mandates shift. Budgets tighten. Patience cannot fix misalignment indefinitely.

A healthier labour culture would allow people to hold both truths at once. It would acknowledge that it is reasonable to grieve the loss of work that carried meaning.

And it would also loosen the idea that meaning is fragile, easily destroyed by a single institutional decision.

Public servants are often expected to be steady, neutral, composed. That composure should not require emotional silence when systems reshape lives. Nor should it prevent us from recognizing that many people entered these roles out of a genuine desire to contribute, not simply to comply.

As layoffs loom, we would benefit from shifting the narrative.

Less emphasis on toughness. More attention to continuity of purpose. Less talk of “bouncing back.” More curiosity about what skills, judgment, and values are being redistributed into the broader workforce.

Because that is what is happening, whether we name it or not.

People are not being erased. They are being redistributed.

If Canada can make space for that understanding — if we can honour work as a calling without imprisoning people inside a single role — we may emerge with a more humane and resilient labour culture. One that allows devotion without demanding self-erasure.

People should be allowed to feel this moment.

And then, when ready, to carry what mattered forward — into new roles, new sectors, and new expressions of the same underlying commitment to contribute.

Marwa Suraj is a Manitoba-based health leader whose work centres equity and social accountability.