OTTAWA - Cuts to the federal public service appear to be occurring mostly outside Ottawa — which is the opposite of what the government suggested it would do when it first announced the job reductions.
The vast majority of those federal job cuts, two-thirds of them, appear to be taking place elsewhere across Canada.
The Flaherty budget tabled last March forecast 19,200 jobs eliminated and it promised that a heavy burden would be shouldered by the national capital region.
"A large proportion of full-time-equivalent reductions will occur in the National Capital Region," said the budget document.
"The regional distribution of employment in the federal public service will be largely unaffected by the implementation of the departmental spending reductions."
But the regional distribution has inflicted most of the pain outside Ottawa, based on the notices sent so far to over 18,000 federal public servants that they could lose their jobs.
According to statistics compiled by the federal public-sector union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, just 35 per cent of those notices have gone out in the national capital region. Sixty-five per cent have gone out elsewhere in the country.
Fourteen per cent of the notices have gone to employees in Ontario, 13 per cent were issued in Quebec, 12 per cent went to the Prairies and Atlantic Canada received 10 per cent.
Calls to the office of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty were referred to the Treasury Board, which did not respond to a request for comment from The Canadian Press.
