Ottawa·NewThe Public Service Commission of Canada is grappling with how to rapidly expand some agencies at a time when the overall size of the federal public service is declining, its president has told Radio-Canada. Some departments on a hiring spree even as government plans to cut about 40,000 public service jobsCBC News · Posted: Dec 12, 2025 4:00 AM EST | Last Updated: 31 minutes agoListen to this articleEstimated 3 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.Which federal departments are shrinking — and which are still hiringA new federal report outlines the pressures facing public servants. But not all departments are going through the same challenges.The Public Service Commission of Canada (PSCC) is grappling with how to rapidly expand some agencies at a time when the overall size of the federal public service is declining, its president has told Radio-Canada. Even as the federal government is looking to cut about 40,000 public service jobs, some agencies are expected to grow quickly, according to PSCC president Marie-Chantal Girard, who said there is a need to accelerate the public service’s hiring process. “We need to be faster, we need to be more competitive with the private sector, that’s for sure,” she told Radio-Canada in an exclusive interview tied to the release of the independent federal agency’s annual report. National Defence, the Canada Border Services Agency and Public Safety Canada are among agencies that will be “recruiting heavily,” she said.For the first time in a decade, the size of the federal public service has decreased, statistics published Thursday by the PSCC show. After reaching a record level in 2023-2024, the number of federal employees as defined by the Public Service Employment Act dropped by one per cent to 279,707, according to the PSCC’s annual report.The decrease was largely due to a sharp decline in external hiring, the report said. ‘Not very competitive’But the report also shows that the median time it takes to hire a new public servant has increased to 221 days, up from 214 days in the previous report. The PSCC is aiming to reduce that to 167 days. “We’ll see what can be achieved in terms of efficiencies, and we’re very hopeful that we’re going to put a dent in that not very competitive data point that we have at over 200 days,” Girard said.Marie-Chantal Girard, President of the Public Service Commission of Canada, poses for a portrait on Dec. 11, 2025. (Felix Desroches/Radio-Canada)Delays in hiring were partly due to the particular criteria for hiring federal public servants, including bilingual language requirements for many positions, Girard said. Currently, applications are evaluated in “sequential fashion,” Girard said, with various stages of the hiring process — such as reviewing resumés, evaluating candidates and certifying qualifications — taking place one after the other. Girard hopes to accelerate the hiring process by “working more in a parallel fashion” to assess different aspects of an application simultaneously. The report comes a month after the release of the 2025 federal budget, which plans to cut the public service by an estimated 16,000 full-time equivalents over the next three years, or about 4.5 per cent of the current workforce.The report showed that the proportion of the federal public service working outside the National Capital Region has remained stable for five years at 53 per cent.With files from Radio-Canada and Estelle Cote-Sroka
Federal government must accelerate hiring process, Public Service Commission of Canada says
