Hundreds of federal employees remain in limbo

Postmedia News September 5, 2010 3:01 PM

OTTAWA — Hundreds of federal compensation advisers in Ottawa are braced to see if the government will abolish their jobs and recruit new employees after consolidating their work at a new $300-million pay centre in Miramichi, N.B. It’s been several weeks since Prime Minister Stephen Harper stunned 2,100 compensation advisers working in 110 departments across the country by announcing that their jobs would be moving to Miramichi, and they still don’t know their fate. The government offered few details on how it plans to manage the move to a state-of-the-art, centralized, self-serve pay system for public servants and that is fanning fears that workers will lose their jobs in the political trade-off the Conservative government made in order to shut down the long gun registry based in Miramichi. “What do they expect — the government makes an announcement without details which involves people’s livelihoods and panic and fear are created,” said John Gordon, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Harper made no bones that the new centre fulfilled his earlier pledge to replace any jobs lost if the gun registry is shut down. The registry employs about 250 people. The government’s $17-billion payroll is the largest in Canada. Compensation advisers handle the pay and pensions of 310,000 federal employees and churn out 6.4 million transactions every year.