What On Earth24:10What Ottawa’s job cuts may mean for oil spills and forecasts
Scientists who monitor Canada’s environmental health and protect Canadians from extreme weather events and industrial disasters could soon find themselves on the federal government’s chopping block.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government is in the process of reducing the size of its public service. Thousands of jobs are on the line, including 840 positions at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).
As public servants wait to learn their fate, scientists and labour leaders are warning these cuts could significantly impact the health and safety of Canadians as well as Canada’s wildlife and environment.
“It is the kind of research that I believe that Canadians need and want at this time,” retired ECCC scientist Christine Bishop told Laura Lynch, host of What On Earth. “They have to look for other ways to trim the fat in the government.”
‘Canadians should be very concerned’
Carney’s first budget, delivered in November, announced plans to shrink the federal bureaucracy by 16,000 full-time equivalent positions — which is not necessarily the same as 16,000 individuals — over three years.
ECCC will reduce its workforce by roughly 10 per cent, or the equivalent of 840 full-time roles, department spokesperson Samantha Bayard wrote in an email.
Despite the cuts, she wrote the department remains “committed to its mandate and advancing Canada’s leadership in environmental protection, nature stewardship, science and weather services, clean technology, and building a greener, more sustainable future.
Sean O’Reilly, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), isn’t convinced the department can cut hundreds of jobs and stay true to its mandate.
PIPSC represents thousands of public servants who are bracing for job cuts, including those at ECCC.
While he’s worried about his union’s members, O’Reilly says he’s also concerned about the safety and well-being of Canadians.
“These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. This is real science being cut,” he said. “You can’t cut public science or staff without increasing public risk.”
On Jan. 27, an email went out to ECCC’s Science and Technology Branch (STB) staff from assistant deputy minister Marc D’Iorio, warning that 120 full-time roles would be cut over the next year, starting in April.
“Essential scientific programs that support policy, operations, and services to Canadians will be maintained or strengthened,” read the memo, which several ECCC employees shared with CBC.
“The focus will be on efficiency, integration, and impact, rather than eliminating critical functions. Some reductions were targeted in areas where extensive expertise exists outside the Department or the public service.”
ECCC did not respond to CBC’s questions about D’lorio’s email or which teams, specifically, would face cuts.
While PIPSC doesn’t yet know which areas of research will be affected, O’Reilly says the people at ECCC do essential work.
“They work with avalanches, hurricanes, and severe weather events. What’s going to happen to those alerts in Canada if those folks aren’t there to do that work?” he said.
“[They are] the ones that prevent oil spills from becoming catastrophes, you know, who are ensuring dangerous goods don’t explode on our railways.”
Throughout Canada’s history, he says, a failure to adequately invest in the public service had real, and sometimes deadly, consequences.
He pointed to the 2013 fatal rail disaster in Lac Megantic, Que., which researchers from Toronto’s York University blamed on “ a decades-long process of deregulation and reduced resources ” at Transport Canada, or Canada’s struggle to respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which some doctors blamed on chronic underresourcing at Canada’s Public Health Agency.
“These cuts today potentially could mean a crisis tomorrow,” he said.
ECCC did not respond to questions about whether the cuts would impact weather forecasting and alert systems.
Canadian public servants are speaking out over the federal government’s plans for deep job cuts, after thousands more were notified they could be affected. Some say the situation is creating a Hunger Games-style atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.
Pesticides, microplastics and forever chemicals
Bishop, who spent decades working as a federal ecotoxicologist before retiring three years ago, says the team was already a “skeleton crew, and any staff reductions will likely have devastating effects on essential research.
She and her colleagues worked alongside Indigenous communities to monitor the impacts of environmental contaminants on wildlife and the environment — things like pesticides, microplastics, forever chemicals or diluted bitumen from the oilsands.
It’s the kind of work that she believes matters to everyday Canadians.
“People are definitely interested in knowing what’s going on in the environment and how it might relate to, you know, their own health,” she said.
“Anytime I spoke to people in the public about the work that we did … people are saying, ‘Yes, I’m interested in that and we need more of that.’”
Private, academic research not enough
Both Bishop and O’Reilly say private and academic research can’t fill the gap left in the wake of public service cuts.
ECCC scientists, says Bishop, are “specifically required to do applied research to ask questions of immediate interest to Canadians.”
That’s not the case at academic institutions or private companies, O’Reilly adds, where research is driven by funding availability, profitability, or, at best, curiosity.
“Public science is the science that isn’t as glamorous, it isn’t profitable, potentially, [as what] businesses are doing. And so that public science is the science that needs to be done,” he said.
“It takes years and years to build up good public science, but it only takes a moment to cut it.”
