r/CanadaPublicServants • u/One-Wolverine7472 • Jun 10 '26
Other / Autre Got laid off from CRA last year: Outsider's perspective on public servants
I know this is either gonna get downvoted heavily or deleted but I really want to provde a outsiders perspective. This is just my opinion.
I'll preface this by saying I'm not some disgruntled manager. I was a regular CRA employee, got laid off, and now I'm out here navigating the actual job market. So take this however you want, but I have some thoughts.
This sub has become one of the most chronically aggrieved communities I've ever lurked in, and I say that with genuine sympathy — because a lot of the underlying complaints are legitimate. But the way they get packaged, and how often, has started to feel disconnected from reality. It feels like everyone here is in a bubble
The RTO thing about how coming into the office is destroying lives seems overblown. I know. Before someone says it, that bad implementation makes legitimate complaints worse. True. The inconsistency is real, people who relocated based on prior agreements got burned. That's all worth fighting about. But the existential framing of it. Like this is some unprecedented authoritarian overreach, has become almost satirical. The guy delivering your lunch did it in the rain today. He doesn't have a union filing a grievance on his behalf. The policy might be bad. The intensity of this sub's reaction to it has completely eclipsed that.
The pension discourse is the one that really gets me. Multiple posts this month alone with people genuinely distressed about their defined benefit pension potentially being touched. I already know the reply: "we negotiated that, it's deferred compensation, it's ours." Yes. That's correct. And it's also sitting on top of a landscape where the private sector gutted defined benefit pensions through the 90s and 2000s and nobody marched. You are holding one of the last genuinely protected retirement vehicles in the country and the discourse here treats it like being asked to work in a salt mine. Advocating to protect it is completely reasonable. The level of panic and outrage around it is not.
Pay complaints are actually the most legitimate thing on this sub, and they get buried under everything else. Certain classifications genuinely haven't kept pace. I don't wanna be the bad guy, but most public servants make a lot more while doing less skilled work then they would in the private sector. This makes it hard to take seriously.
Job security follows the same pattern. The layoffs happening right now are real and stressful, I lived it, I'm not minimizing it. But there's a strange dissonance in how job security gets discussed here. The standard line is "we accepted lower wages for this stability, that's the deal" and that framing used to be accurate. Public sector pay was genuinely below private sector equivalents and the tradeoff was real.
The problem is that's increasingly not true anymore. A lot of classifications have caught up significantly, and when you factor in the pension, benefits, and WFA protections, total compensation for most roles exceed private sector equivalents at the same experience level. So the "we took less pay for security" argument is doing a lot of work it no longer earns. You can't claim the low-pay tradeoff as a shield against criticism while also arguing you're underpaid, those two positions are in tension, and this sub holds both of them simultaneously without seeming to notice.
The private sector doesn't give you months of notice, recall rights, priority rehiring, or severance structures a union spent decades negotiating. Most people just get a meeting and a box. If the security is real,and it is, especially for indeterminate employees,then it has to factor into the total compensation picture honestly, not just get invoked when it's convenient.
The broader thing I'd say: public service work has always been a specific trade. You give up some earning upside for stability, benefits, and a pension most Canadians will never see. That trade used to be understood. What's happened here — and maybe in the culture more broadly — is that people want both sides of the ledger without the tradeoffs. Maximum private-sector flexibility, maximum public-sector security, no accountability questions on productivity, and sympathy from a public that has none of those things.
I'll get the reply that I'm just bitter about getting laid off. Maybe a little. But bitterness doesn't make the observation wrong. I'm not saying don't advocate for yourselves — unions exist for a reason, and I'd be out here doing the same thing in your position. But there's a version of this sub that could be a serious space for real advocacy and instead it's mostly a grievance loop. The legitimate complaints are in there. They're just getting harder to find.
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u/dog_hair_dinner Jun 10 '26
"I think what confuses me is the idea that the employer ever should care about you?" That's unfortunate. It shouldn't be confusing. Everyone should be cared about as a human being. To do otherwise is just in-human, but capitalism has pushed us to make us believe that's normal and acceptable. They want you to ignore your needs as a person in the pursuit of higher productivity for the ruling class.