PSAC warns service delays will hit families, seniors and small businesses as layoffs mount
More than 700 Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) workers received workforce adjustment notices on Thursday, with up to 260 employees at regional offices expected to be laid off, in the latest round of federal public sector job cuts that unions warn will drive longer service wait times and heavier workloads for Canadians across the country.
“The organizational changes the CRA put in place help align programs, services and organizational structures with current and future business needs,” Etienne Biram, spokesperson for CRA, said in a statement. “They support the agency’s transformation and its priorities: service excellence, revenue generation, and operational efficiency.”
CRA said that it would provide guarantees of continued employment to 110 affected employees, CTV News reported.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) confirmed that 534 of its members in the Union of Taxation Employees (UTE) were among the 735 executive and non-executive employees notified that their positions could be eliminated, according to CTV News. The latest wave adds to a pattern of accelerating reductions at one of Canada’s largest federal departments — and arrives as the broader federal workforce continues to contract.
“Workers at CRA are already overworked and understaffed,” said Sharon DeSousa, national president of PSAC, in a statement. “Cutting more jobs at CRA isn’t how you improve service – it’s how you increase delays and frustrations of people across Canada when they’re trying to access services.”
Increasing cuts across the public service
The notices carry immediate consequences for Canadians who depend on the CRA for tax processing, benefit payments, and support calls. PSAC warns that families, seniors, students, and small businesses will face longer wait times, delays accessing vital resources, and frustrating call loops with automated systems as frontline staff numbers decline.
“It’s increasingly clear that our members bear the brunt of cutbacks,” said Adam Jackson, national president of the Union of Taxation Employees (UTE), in the statement. “While CRA advertises external job competitions, 534 of our members face uncertainty about their jobs and their families’ future. We will fight to keep them employed.”
PSAC’s workforce adjustment tracker shows the latest notices bring the cumulative total of its members who have received such notices across the entire federal public service to more than 18,000. Of those, over 1,400 are CRA workers.
The scale of these workforce reductions extends well beyond the revenue agency. As HRD Canada has documented in its coverage of federal job cuts and workforce adjustment notices across departments, the Canada Strong Budget 2025 committed the federal government to cutting 28,000 positions and finding $60 billion in savings by 2028-29. By August 2026, more than 25,000 federal employees and 1,146 executives had received workforce adjustment notices, BNN Bloomberg reported.
CRA’s accelerating workforce reduction
The October round of notices isn’t the first at CRA. In March 2026, the agency issued approximately 479 workforce adjustment notices across four branches, with positions linked to the sunsetting of several federal tax programs — including the Federal Fuel Charge, the Digital Services Tax, the Canada Carbon Rebate, and the Underused Housing Tax, the UTE reported at the time.
The CRA’s own planning documents set out the longer trajectory. The agency’s 2026-27 departmental plan targets $1.2 billion in spending reductions over three years as part of the government’s comprehensive expenditure review, with its workforce projected to fall from 53,585 full-time equivalents in 2024-25 to 48,807 by 2028-29 – a reduction of nearly 4,800 positions, or approximately nine per cent of the agency’s workforce over four years, CTV News reported.
In May 2025, the Canada Revenue Agency did not renew contracts for nearly 1,000 workers, with union officials warning at each stage that capacity losses were accumulating faster than the agency could absorb. The compounding effect of successive rounds – term non-renewals, permanent position eliminations, and now fresh workforce adjustment notices – is reshaping the CRA’s operational capacity.
Service capacity and the cost of cuts
PSAC’s central argument – when you cut the job, you cut the service – raises a structural question that goes beyond employment statistics. The CRA is not simply an administrative body. It collects federal taxes, enforces compliance, and delivers billions of dollars in benefit payments each year. The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) has warned that workforce cuts at CRA will weaken the government’s ability to enforce tax laws and recover billions in lost revenue, according to CTV News.
These latest announcements coincide with similar exercises across the federal public service. HRD Canada’s coverage of the workforce adjustment affecting nearly 3,000 Parks Canada employees illustrates how the federal cost-reduction program is cascading across departments simultaneously – each round compounding pressure on agencies already managing reduced capacity.
