Federal Government: 1)CRA aiming to hire 1,700 call centre staff ahead of busy tax season; 2)PM says back-to-office plan for bureaucrats coming soon as MPs call for flexibility; 3)Ottawa’s budget bill proposes to end free postage for people who are blind; 4) (Updated) Canada Post commits to free postage for people who are blind as legislation changes

1)CRA aiming to hire 1,700 call centre staff ahead of busy tax season

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Catherine Morrison

The Canada Revenue Agency is looking to hire or rehire about 1,700 call centre workers over the next few months to manage an influx of calls during the upcoming tax season.

Melanie Serjak, an assistant commissioner at the CRA, told reporters Wednesday the agency is aiming to reach a total of about 4,500 agents to handle a “very high forecast” in demand.

Serjak said it’s normal for the CRA to increase its staffing levels during the high peak season, when the agency can receive more than 300,000 phone calls per day.

At the height of last year’s tax filing season, she said the agency had about 3,300 call centre staff. She said hiring is underway in hopes of increasing that number by more than 1,000 people this year.

“We always rehire or extend term contracts during our high peak season to give us that flexibility that we need to operate throughout the course of the year,” Serjak said, noting there are currently around 2,700 employees working at CRA call centres.

The agency is seeking to grow its staffing levels as several departments and agencies are warning their employees of looming job cuts.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada said last week 219 of its members at Natural Resources Canada received notices this week saying their jobs might be cut.

In addition to those, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada said Friday about 200 of its own members at Natural Resources Canada received notices.

Another 109 people at the Public Service Commission of Canada, 92 people at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and 74 staffers at the Department of Finance received similar notices, the union said.

Ottawa is looking to cut program spending and administration costs by about $60 billion over the next five years though its Comprehensive Expenditure Review.

The latest federal budget said the exercise will involve “restructuring operations and consolidating internal services.” It said it will also involve workforce adjustments and attrition to return the size of the public service to “a more sustainable level.”

Asked about potential cuts at the CRA Wednesday, assistant commissioner Maxime Guénette said decisions “are still being made at the agency level.”

While the planned hiring at the CRA’s call centres will involve temporary workers, Guénette said an analysis is still ongoing when it comes to the agency’s permanent workforce.

“What we’ve been able to tell employees at the agency is that there are no cuts, no workforce adjustment announcements that are planned between now and the end of the calendar year,” he said.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne set a 100-day timeline for the CRA to address call centre delays on Sept. 2, putting in place a deadline of Dec. 11.

During that time, the CRA says the number of unique calls answered has more than doubled — from 35 per cent to its target of 70 per cent, with peaks of 92 per cent.

Serjak said the agency is aiming to maintain that 70 per cent target goal, throughout the course of the next few months and into tax filing season.

“We will never be in a position to answer 100 per cent of the phone calls that we receive at the agency,” Serjak said. “Even with that number of agents on the phone this filing season, there will be times where we may not meet that 70 per cent service level.”

The CRA has worked to reduce the number of calls it receives by expanding digital self-service options, like increasing the types of questions its GenAI chatbot beta can answer.

After placing 167 calls to the CRA’s contact centres over four months this year, the office of Auditor General Karen Hogan reported in October that CRA call centre staff answered just 17 per cent of its individual tax questions accurately.

The report found agent responses to business tax or general benefits questions were accurate just over 54 per cent of the time.

However, the CRA says in a news release that it reviewed more than 100,000 call recordings this year and found agents provided accurate information 92 per cent of the time.

Wayne Long, secretary of state for the Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions, told the House of Commons public accounts committee last week that the government is working on a three-to-five-year plan for the agency as its 100-day plan to improve its services reaches its end point.

2) PM says back-to-office plan for bureaucrats coming soon as MPs call for flexibility

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By David Baxter and Catherine Morrison, December 8, 2025

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Monday his government’s plan to get public servants to spend more time in the office will come into “sharper view” over the next several weeks.

The issue came up when Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe asked Carney about the prospect of public sector job cuts during the mayor’s monthly breakfast event with the Ottawa Board of Trade and the Ottawa Business Journal.

Carney said his government will be “engaging with the public sector unions on the modalities” of the back-to-office policy, with detailabout the plan to be made public “over the course of the next several weeks.”

Carney provided few clues about his thinking on the issue. He did say the amount of time public servants will be expected to spend in the office will be set at different levels, depending on individual roles and seniority.

A Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat document shared with The Canadian Press suggests the government was at one point looking at sending all executive staff back to the office five days a week by January 2026.

The document also suggests the government was considering sending all non-executive employees back to the office four days a week by July 2026, with all employees to be back on-site full time by January 2027.

Treasury Board has not responded to repeated questions about whether discussions on a return-to-office policy are taking place, or when the policy might take effect.

Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali last week denied having any knowledge of discussions about ordering public servants back to the office full-time in 2027.

“I’m hearing from news outlets, so I’m not aware of that,” Ali said, adding he was looking into the matter but “nothing has changed.”

Remote work rules have been an ongoing issue in the public service since COVID-19 forced most federal workers to work remotely in 2020. After public health restrictions began to ease, the federal government moved in 2023 to have workers return to the office two to three days a week.

The current rule, in place since September 2024, requires public servants to work a minimum of three days a week in-office, with executives in office four days per week.

Liberal MP Bruce Fanjoy represents the Carleton riding, which is home to more than 10,000 public servants. He told The Canadian Press last week he hopes there will be “flexibility” as employees return to the office.

“Some jobs depend on location more than others,” he said. “I for one am advocating for flexibility where possible.”

Fanjoy said flexibility on remote work would allow the government to keep and attract “high quality” employees. He also said it would help the government manage its office space and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“I would like to think that a young person starting out a career who just happens to live in a rural part of my riding or elsewhere in the country could have a career in the public service without needing to leave the community that they’re connected to,” Fanjoy said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all.”

Fanjoy argued that, as an MP, he doesn’t go to Parliament Hill every day.

“Sometimes I’m in the riding, sometimes I’m taking a Zoom call from my office at home,” he said. “There are times when it’s important to bring people together, but that doesn’t have to be all the time.

“I don’t see a lot of benefit in forcing someone to be stuck in traffic for forty-five minutes in order to jump on a Zoom call downtown.”

Liberal MP for Hull — Aylmer Greg Fergus told reporters last week he also hopes managers will be flexible if public servants are told to attend the office five days a week.

“I think it’s important to have civil servants come back to the office, but I would hope that managers will be flexible,” he said. “As long as the work is getting done, and we know that the work can get done because we created those opportunities through remote work.

“It’s important to have people come in where it’s necessary and, where it isn’t necessary, I hope they’ll exercise even greater flexibility.”

Sutcliffe said Monday he thinks adding another “day or two” in the office for civil servants is feasible.

The mayor said the city is working on expanding transit options and opening the next phase of the light rail system.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how (return-to-office) plans roll out. I’ve seen some of the reports. We want to see our downtown thriving and prosperous. It’s been a challenging time over the last few years since COVID,” Sutcliffe said.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada said in a media statement Monday that decisions about the return to office should be grounded in “evidence, service outcomes, and operational reality.”

“When the government makes policies about optics instead of outcomes, it risks slowing service delivery, draining talent, and making it harder to recruit the next generation of professionals,” said PIPSC president Sean O’Reilly.

O’Reilly said the government has repeatedly told unions that a return-to-office policy was not being considered, while the recent federal budget made no reference to it.

“We can all agree that no one wants a repeat of past RTO directives, which were announced without consultation and caused widespread disruption, confusion, and unnecessary strain on labour-management relations,” he said.

Addressing the prospect of public service job cuts, Carney said Monday the government’s workforce grew to an unsustainable size over the last decade.

He said much of the reduction in the size of the public service will come through conventional retirement, early retirement and “other adjustments.”

Unions representing public sector workers said last week hundreds of their members have received notice their jobs may be cut.

Departments facing cuts include Natural Resources Canada, the Public Service Commission of Canada, Crown-Indigenous Relations, Northern Affairs Canada and the finance department.

Carney said another priority for the civil service is to expand its use of artificial intelligence for “the less interesting components” of public sector work.

3)Ottawa’s budget bill proposes to end free postage for people who are blind

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Craig Lord, December 8, 2025

The federal Liberals’ budget bill currently making its way through Parliament contains a small amendment to Canada Post’s legislation that could spell the end of a critical service providing accessible reading material for people who are blind.

Deep in the Liberals’ Bill C-15, the budget implementation act, are clauses mentioning the repeal of a few sections of the Canada Post Corporation Act without further explanation of what’s covered by those parts of the legislation.

Those sections of the act are what allow Canadians and organizations to send and receive — without paying any postage — books, letters and other materials used by people who are blind.

These few lines of legislation are what let Laurie Davidson do a crucial part of her work.

She’s the executive director of the Centre for Equitable Library Access, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material such as physical books in braille and audiobooks to people who are blind, low-vision or have other disabilities that make reading difficult.

“It’s alarming to me that the government has decided to put this in — I might even say intentionally obscure it — so that nobody will notice it in the hopes of pushing it through,” Davidson said.

Davidson said her organization — just one of a handful in Canada that offer similar services — ships around 6,500 accessible books and 500 audiobook players to clients across the country each year.

That includes physical books embossed with braille over text, an accessible option that allows parents and children who are blind to read together.

Paying for postage on all of those shipments would cost the Centre for Equitable Library Access between $500,000 to $1 million a year, Davidson estimates.

“The cost would be prohibitive,” she said. “We would have to stop that service.”

The CNIB estimates 1.5 million people in Canada live with some form of vision loss.

Davidson said the free postage on accessible materials can be a lifeline for clients who live in remote areas and do not have ready access to a local library or digital alternatives.

“For all of these people, this would be a loss of format choice that would significantly impact their ability to equitably participate in Canadian society,” she said.

The CNIB said in a statement that it was still reviewing the proposed changes for possible impacts on Canadians who are blind or have low vision and was not yet in a position to comment.

The Canadian Press reached out to the offices of Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Joël Lightbound, the minister responsible for Canada Post, but has not received comment on the proposed changes.

Canada Post spokeswoman Lisa Liu said in an email to The Canadian Press that the Crown corporation is “aware of the proposed changes in Bill C-15 and will not be providing further comment.”

Facing mounting financial losses in recent years, Canada Post is readying for major overhauls to keep its operations viable. That includes a turnaround plan submitted to Lightbound last month, but details of the proposal have not been made public while his office is reviewing it.

While the cost of paying for postage can be exorbitant for a non-profit, Davidson said the scale of the program for Canada Post itself would be a “drop in the bucket.”

“Cutting this program or not is not going to make Canada Post solvent,” she said.

Providing free postage for people who are blind has been a part of the Canada Post Corporation Act since its inception in 1981, Davidson said, but she believes the practice itself may predate the legislation.

It’s also a tenet of the Universal Postal Convention, a United Nations-led pact that Canada has signed.

Davidson said it’s “mind-boggling” that Canada would seemingly step away from a commitment like this through a couple of lines buried in the budget implementation act.

“Canada has signed on to a convention which says that this should be part of their law, and they have it in their law,” she said.

“The idea that they now have a clause in here that says that it will be repealed, I think is unconscionable for Canada, for a country that supports human rights and equitable access.”

Bill C-15 is in its first reading in the House of Commons, meaning it has a number of hurdles to pass in the current minority parliament until it is enacted in law.

The Centre for Equitable Library Access is convening other organizations with stakes in the changing legislation this week in hopes of pushing members of Parliament to make amendments to C-15 that will stop the change from passing into law with the broader budget legislation.

4) (Updated) Canada Post commits to free postage for people who are blind as legislation changes

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Craig Lord, Dec. 8, 2025

Canada Post is vowing to maintain free-postage service for people who are blind even as Ottawa’s budget bill looks to repeal those parts of the postal service’s legislation.

Bill C-15, the federal budget implementation act, contains a proposal to allow Canada Post to set its own postage rates. Right now, the Crown corporation has to seek Ottawa’s approval to change the price of a stamp.

But alongside those changes is the repeal of certain sections of the Canada Post Corporation Act. Specifically, the bill removes clauses that allow Canadians and organizations to send and receive — without paying any postage — books, letters and other materials used by people who are blind.

Laurie Davidson, executive director of the Centre for Equitable Library Access, said she was alarmed by the idea that those crucial parts of Canada Post’s legislation could be repealed.

The Centre for Equitable Library Access is a non-profit that provides accessible reading material, such as physical books in braille and audiobooks, to people who are blind, low-vision or have other disabilities that make reading difficult.

Davidson said adding postage to the thousands of shipments the Centre for Equitable Library Access sends out every year would be a “prohibitive” expense and would mean many Canadians who are blind or low vision would no longer receive materials from her organization and others like it.

The CNIB estimates 1.5 million people in Canada live with some form of vision loss.

Davidson said the free postage on accessible materials can be a lifeline for clients who live in remote areas and do not have ready access to a local library or digital alternatives.

“For all of these people, this would be a loss of format choice that would significantly impact their ability to equitably participate in Canadian society,” she said.

Providing free postage for people with impaired vision has been a part of the Canada Post Corporation Act since its inception in 1981, Davidson said, adding the practice may predate the legislation.

It’s also a tenet of the Universal Postal Convention, a United Nations-led pact that Canada has signed.

Officials from the office of Joël Lightbound, the federal minister responsible for Canada Post, said the government does not intend to walk away from its commitments under the postal convention.

They said the government has to repeal those parts of the legislation to give the postal service the power to change its own postage rates.

A Department of Public Services and Procurement Canada spokesman confirmed Monday the federal government will continue to compensate Canada Post for providing free postage to people who are blind.

“The transmission of materials for the blind will continue to be delivered free of postage and library materials will continue to be delivered at a reduced rate of postage,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Canada Post initially said on Friday that the corporation was “aware of the proposed changes in Bill C-15” and would not comment further.

But after this story was published Monday, the Crown corporation issued a followup statement reconfirming its commitments under the Universal Postal Union, a specialized United Nations agency that governs the international convention.

“We are proud of our long-standing commitment to provide free postage for the blind and have no plans to change this service,” said spokeswoman Lisa Liu.

“As for Bill C-15, we’re not in a position to comment. We remain committed to our mandate of serving all Canadians, including those with disabilities.”

Davidson said she appreciates the postal service’s commitment but the Crown corporation should have consulted members of the community in advance of any changes.

Even with the verbal commitment from Canada Post, Davidson said Canada could violate its responsibilities under the Universal Postal Convention by repealing relevant sections of the law.

She said she and other stakeholders will continue to push parliamentarians to amend Bill C-15 to protect clauses guaranteeing free postage on accessible materials.

Canada Post CEO Doug Ettinger is set to appear in front of the House of Commons’ standing committee on government operations and estimates to discuss the challenges facing the Crown corporation on Thursday afternoon.

Facing mounting financial losses in recent years, Canada Post is readying for major overhauls to keep its operations viable. That includes a turnaround plan submitted to Lightbound last month; details of the proposal have not been made public while his office is reviewing it.