The federal government is projecting that the public service will lose 40,000 jobs from its peak in 2023-24.

The reduction, revealed in the federal budget released Tuesday, would be around 10 per cent of the public service’s headcount. Economists equated the size of these cuts to those of the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper between 2011 and 2014.

“So these are cuts, I think, Harper could support,” said David Macdonald, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a left-leaning think tank.

Macdonald projected this could mean a reduction of 15,300 public service jobs in the National Captial Region.

The federal public service ballooned under prime minister Justin Trudeau and during the COVID-19 pandemic, culminating in a peak of 368,000 workers

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