Attrition plan working: Friesen

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This article was published 18/04/2018 (2197 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Controlling Manitoba’s finances through an eight per cent reduction in the civil service means going office by office in search of potential cuts, Finance Minister Cameron Friesen says.

Friesen told his department’s estimates hearing this week the Tory government, led by Premier Brian Pallister, is well on its way to achieving its goal of trimming some 1,200 provincial employees — though it is doing so through retirements and departures, not layoffs and firings. (Estimates hearings are meetings to allow the Opposition to ask government ministers detailed questions about their budgets and programs.)

“Every resignation becomes an opportunity for a government who is fixed on that goal to reassess that particular position. And to understand whether an opportunity exists to find a better way of doing that business, to assign a task to someone else who might say, ‘I have that capability and I can do that task,’ to understand if the function already exists somewhere else in the work area within the department or somewhere else,” Friesen told the hearing.

The minister cited the example of the office formerly tasked with handling seniors education tax rebates. (The eligible recipients and amounts were significantly reduced in the 2017 budget.)

Friesen said he redeployed the staff and closed the stand-alone office that operated separately from the rest of the taxation branch, after simply asking the Canada Revenue Agency to assume the duties.

Government officials said the move saved $900,000 and made 10 staff available to work elsewhere.

“It was a bunch of conventional work, heavy lifting, affixing stamps, I imagine, to envelopes and processing applications. And, when we got to government (in 2016), we were looking for efficiencies and we asked the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) whether they couldn’t just administer this program for us. They said, well, absolutely they could,” Friesen told the hearing.

“We were able to collapse a lease. We were able to realize an efficiency where the CRA, of course, had an apparatus in place already to be able to do this important work.”

Similarly, Friesen said, he freed up one staff member for other work and saved provincial resources by paying the CRA $126,000 to administer a program to sign up newcomers to Manitoba to the education property tax credit — some of whom wouldn’t otherwise have known they were eligible.

Meanwhile, the finance department both enhanced and streamlined the primary caregiver tax credit, which freed up another civil servant to work in a different department, he said.

“This was a very labour-intensive tax credit before. Logbooks had to be taken and kept. There was a difficult application process that involved multiple steps. We’ve streamlined all of that to provide a benefit to these people who are giving care to seniors in the province of Manitoba,” Friesen said.

The minister said the previous NDP government had a separate “very large” property housing cabinet’s priorities and planning secretariat. “It was not always clear to us what each of those individuals had been doing.”

The province has since rolled that 6,689-square-foot space (in two buildings) into one building using 3,882 square feet at 386 Broadway, he said. The freed-up space is now occupied by civil servants.

The finance minister challenged NDP critic Matt Wiebe to defend the former government’s spending for technical political staff which, Friesen said, the Tory government is doing well without.

“The member may be able to provide a further explanation on behalf of Manitobans as to what all of those individuals were doing. We were unable to provide a full explanation as to what those individuals in that area were all doing, what activities they were undertaking for the previous NDP government, but I can tell you that we were able to reduce that square footage of space, harvest those savings,” Friesen said.

“Some people call them ‘political officers.’ Those are a significant reduction from the previous government’s complement of technical officers.”

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca