Employment: 1) Canada’s tech job market has gone from boom to bust in last five years: Indeed; 2)Border, spy agencies among worst federal workplaces: survey

1) Canada’s tech job market has gone from boom to bust in last five years: Indeed

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Tara Deschamps, Aug. 26, 2025

Canada’s tech job market has gone from boom to bust in a matter of years, a new study says.

The research released Tuesday by job postings site Indeed says August openings in the sector posted on its platform were down 19 per cent from their early 2020 levels.

“The Canadian tech world remains stuck in a hiring freeze,” said Brendon Bernard, Indeed’s senior economist.

“While both the tech job market and the overall job market have definitely cooled off from their 2022 peaks, the cool off has been much sharper in tech.”

He thinks the fall was likely caused by the market adjusting after a pandemic boom in hiring along with recent artificial intelligence advances that have reduced tech firms’ interest in expanding their workforces.

The company said it is hard to tease out which of the factors was more to blame because tech job postings edged down when chatbot ChatGPT was released in late 2022 and triggered a surge of interest in AI. 

Indeed’s findings come after the tech sector, as well as the broader labour market, has coped with several changes over the last five years. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many saw e-commerce and other digital parts of their business boom, causing some to staff up as their revenue soared. 

But as the health crisis dissipated and inflation rose, demand for online services took on growth pattern reminiscent of pre-pandemic times, forcing tech businesses as prominent as Shopify Inc. to lay off staff.

“We went from this really hot job market with job postings through the roof to one where job postings really crashed, falling well below their pre-pandemic levels,” Bernard said.

However, he sees AI’s recent boom as a “watershed moment.” 

Many tech firms are rethinking their workforces again as some have found the technology can perform a lot of rudimentary tasks they’d give entry level workers, allowing them to reduce new hiring. 

While much of the decline in tech job postings has been in software engineer roles, Indeed found hiring for AI-related jobs was still up compared to early 2020. In fact, machine learning engineers and roles that support AI infrastructure, such as data engineers and data centre technicians, were among the job titles with postings still above early-2020 levels.

At the same time, Indeed saw postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs drop sharply from their 2022 peak, but as of early 2025, they were still up five per cent from their pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, basic and junior tech titles were down 25 per cent.

When it compared Canada’s overall decline in tech job postings, Indeed found the country’s decrease from pre-pandemic levels was somewhat milder than the retrenchment it has observed in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.

The U.S. fall amounted to 34 per cent, while in the U.K. it was 41 per cent. France saw a 38 per cent drop and Germany experienced a 29 per cent decrease.

“All this just highlights is that this tech hiring freeze is a global tech hiring freeze,” Bernard said.

Indeed said the few advanced economies where tech postings remain above early 2020 levels — Australia, Spain, and Singapore — are countries where overall job postings remain elevated.

2)Border, spy agencies among worst federal workplaces: survey

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Catherine Morrison, Aug. 25, 2025

Employees at the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service are the least likely to recommend their office as a great place to work, a survey of federal public servants suggests.

The 2024 Public Service Employee Survey asked federal government employees a range of questions about their satisfaction with their workplace, including about their leadership, well-being and compensation.

One question asked public servants if they would recommend their department or agency as a “great place to work.”

Overall, 67 per cent of public servants gave positive answers to that question.

CBSA and Indian Oil and Gas Canada tied for worst place, with 46 per cent of respondents from those organizations indicating that they were great places to work.

Forty-eight per cent of people at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and 49 per cent of people at the Office of the Auditor General of Canada said they’d recommend their workplace as a great place to work.

Jacqueline Roby, a spokesperson for the CBSA said there are many factors that impact an employee’s work experience. She said the agency works to create a safe workplace, cares about employees’ well-being and affirms their “right to work in an environment that is free from all forms of harassment.”

The survey suggests that CBSA employees feel worse than the overall public service in several areas, including work-life balance, getting a sense of satisfaction from their work and receiving recognition for their efforts.

Mark Weber, national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, said in an interview with The Canadian Press that he’s “not shocked” by the results and that the agency is usually “dead last” or among the bottom three.

Weber said his union communicates with the CBSA regularly about morale in the workplace and what needs to improve, but that sadly “things don’t really seem to change.”

Weber said the CBSA is well known in the federal public services as being very heavy handed when it comes to discipline and suspension, and will spend thousands to fight a grievance it would have cost them less to just settle.

“Our members tell us how disappointed they are with that regularly, and again it doesn’t really seem to change,” he said.

Weber said there’s also frustration from some members about the return-to-office mandate and, for front-line workers, the increased use of automation at borders. He added that the CBSA is short-staffed on officers and that management is getting “bloated.”

While CSIS employees scored quite low when it came to ranking their workplace, they scored slightly better than average on a question about being “proud” of the work they do, with 84 per cent giving positive answers.

They were also on par with the overall public service in answering whether they like their job overall, with 77 per cent giving positive answers.

The Union of Safety and Justice Employees said in a statement that it’s not surprised by the results of the survey and that the morale of members who work at CSIS tends to be quite low.

The union said there’s a strong perception that some union members haven’t been treated the same as non-union employees and noted a “considerable” delay in the implementation of the collective agreement negotiated in 2022.

Eric Balsam, a spokesperson for CSIS, said in an email that the department takes employees’ input seriously. He said CSIS continues to make improvements to ensure employees feel supported and valued and that it’s examining the results to find areas of strength and concern.

Two organizations — the RCMP External Review Committee and the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada — could not have fared better in the survey with 100 per cent of their staff who responded saying the departments were a great place to work.

Invest in Canada and the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada both had over 90 per cent of their staff say the same thing.

The 2024 survey ran from Oct. 28, 2024, to Dec. 31, 2024, and surveyed more than 186,000 employees in 93 federal departments and agencies, for a response rate of 50.5 per cent.

It was administered by Statistics Canada in partnership with the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.