The Public Service Alliance of Canada welcomes the new government’s move away from austerity and its commitment to invest to improve the lives of Canadians, at least in the immediate future.

“Federal public service workers want to deliver on commitments made in the federal budget. That requires departments having the resources they need to serve Canadians,” said Robyn Benson, PSAC National President.

For the federal budget to work as a whole, there needs to be an explicit commitment to fill the hole created by the previous government’s years of departmental freezes, job and program cuts.

In 1966, the United Nations proclaimed March 21st as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

While there has been some progress with respect to racial justice, racism persists in Canadian society, there has also been some erosion of human rights over the past decade. 

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives today released its 2016 Alternative Federal Budget (AFB). 

The AFB projects a federal deficit of $29.2 billion for 2016-17 when Liberal platform measures are taken into account. It also delivers a blueprint showing how the government could take on a $37.9 billion deficit and still maintain Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio.

The AFB proposes to reverse cuts made to the public service and introduce a program review process to make the public service more transparent and adaptive to the needs of everyone, to be ramped up to $2 billion per year.