This alone is 1% of the entire province’s labour force. Massive scale.
The govt is saying the savings are being reallocated to COVID response. This is false. Money is fungible and the spending on health during the crisis will be unaffected by this decision. What is affected is Alberta govt’s debt levels.
The govt is shifting to the Feds some of the debt from this crisis. The Feds have an expanded EI program and the province is shifting some of the salary burden up one level. But Feds will almost surely raise transfers soon to accomplish the same end of buffering provincial debt.
We should look to boosted transfers as the mechanism to shift debt federally (where it rightly belongs in a shock of this kind). Laying off provincial public servants to shift salary burdens to the Feds doesn’t strike me as the best approach.
And if the argument really was “the money better spent in healthcare”, which is not the case anyway, but even if it were, then I wonder about why we continue to spend $30m in public funds on a terrible marketing campaign through the War Room.
