Article contentIf you think you’ve seen this suggestion work out poorly somewhere before, may I bring to your mind an image of billionaire tweeter Elon Musk brandishing a chainsawduring the Conservative Political Action Conference this past February. I know, it seems like a lifetime ago, but it has been only five months since that one bizarre event among so many others.Article contentBack when he was still in U.S. President Donald Trump’s good graces, Musk promised that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would find $2 trillion in lost revenue to waste and fraud. He demanded every public servant in the country send him an email every week with five items they accomplished. With a workforce of something like three million people, that’s already a lot of time wasted figuring out how to begin each bullet with the letters F, U and so on.Article contentAnd it went downhill from there.Article contentArticle contentArticle contentSafety and securityArticle contentFirst, there was the embarrassing episode where DOGE fired multiple staff at the National Nuclear Security Administration and then tried to turn around and rehire them when they realized what the employees did was crucial to American safety and security. However, with their government email addresses terminated as quickly as their employment, there was no way to contact the lucky re-hirees. Article contentMore recently, many are blaming DOGE for the 600 National Weather Service personnel that have been fired, retired or left their jobs between February and the onset of the deadly Texas Hill Country floods. As Henry D. Jacoby wrote in The Texas Observer, Trump’s DOGE cuts are a Texas-sized disaster, “The administration is trying to kill every program that pops up in a search for the word ‘climate.’ In the process, the heart is being cut out of agencies that produce information that the state needs to manage its environmental threats.”Article contentArticle contentThose kinds of sweeping and ill-conceived program cuts are not being contemplated in Canada, says Champagne’s spokesperson, Audrey Milette. She told The National Post that the government does not plan to cut transfers to the provinces, or social programs such as dental care, pharmacare and childcare.Article contentThe Public Service Alliance of Canada, understandably, still has concerns.Article content“Canada’s public service workers power this country, and we need a strong, stable public service to make that vision a reality,” union president Sharon DeSousa said in a written statement to The National Post.Article contentWe also, clearly, need a few more people on the phones.Article contentWhen I did get through to CRA (by calling at 7 p.m. on a Thursday as suggested by the Reddit user’s analyzer), I still had to redial for 40 minutes and wait on hold for another 40 before an agent listened to my query. Unfortunately, her advice filled me with dread. “For this, you have to call Service Canada.”Article contentArticle contentArticle contentJocelyne Lloyd is managing editor of The Guardian. She lives in Charlottetown.Article content
JOCELYNE LLOYD: Don’t DOGE the Canadian public service
