The Canada Revenue Agency has reduced its work force by more than 10 per cent since May, 2024, shedding more than 8,000 jobs.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The union representing Canada Revenue Agency employees is warning that Ottawa’s push for cost savings will disproportionately affect the employment of call centre workers, resulting in poorer service for Canadian taxpayers.
Since May, 2024, the CRA has reduced its work force by more than 10 per cent, shedding more than 8,000 jobs, many of which were contract workers at call centres across the country.
At the same time, federal data show that CRA service standards are getting worse – an indication that the agency is struggling to respond to inquiries related to annual tax assessments.
“CRA call centres have been under pressure for a long time, but we have seen service standards deteriorate even more over the past one year,” said Marc Brière, national president for the Union of Taxation Employees. “Additional cuts that the Carney government wants will absolutely decimate our call centres.”
Federal ministries have been asked by Prime Minister Mark Carney to find “ambitious” internal savings by August this year, ahead of the 2025 budget presented in the fall. Departments have to find ways to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal year beginning April 1, 2026, followed by 10 per cent in savings in 2027, and 15 per cent in the 2028-29 fiscal year.
In an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, the CRA confirmed that it is in the early stages of determining how to cut down on spending within the department. Spokesperson Etienne Biram said that “no final decisions” have been made on cuts, and that the agency will focus on “minimizing the impact on Canadians and employees.”
CRA’s new live chat service supported by fewer than 100 agents
The agency also acknowledged that demand for phone support can exceed its capacity and as a result, some callers are being “redirected to automated self-service options.”
Mr. Brière is concerned that CRA call centre workers will be targeted in any further work-force reduction plans because many of them are contract workers and do not have full-time, permanent staff jobs with the government.
“It’s the easiest place to cut,” he said. “And for the average Canadian taxpayer, it is the worst place for cuts to come from because it will become more and more difficult for the CRA to respond to your inquiries quickly on the phone.”
Last week, the union wrote to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, requesting that he visit a CRA call centre to witness the working conditions of employees. The union described those conditions as “strained,” with employees feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by the volume of calls they have to handle on a daily basis.
CRA call centres, known within the agency as “contact centres,” have been plagued with staffing problems and inefficiencies for years. In 2017, the Office of the Auditor-General of Canada issued a scathing report of the agency, finding that CRA call centre agents could not handle the volume of incoming calls. The report stated that call centres blocked more than half the calls they received in order to maintain a wait time of 30 minutes or less.
Service levels improved dramatically after the Auditor-General’s report, coinciding with the agency embarking on a hiring spree to boost staffing at its nine call centres across the country. When the pandemic hit in spring of 2020, the CRA further increased staffing.
One measure of CRA efficiency levels is the timeliness with which the agency responds to low-complexity tax objections from the public.
The CRA’s mandate is to respond to these queries within 180 days. In the 2018-19 fiscal year, CRA agents met this service standard 94 per cent of the time. The following year, it was 97 per cent. During the pandemic years, that percentage dropped to between 76 per cent and 81 per cent, partly owing to government pandemic relief programs that complicated tax filings.
But from 2023 onward, the CRA’s overall efficiency fell dramatically. In 2023-24, the agency only met its service standard for low-complexity tax objections 61 per cent of the time.
The union attributes poorer service at contact centres to lower staffing levels. “When agents have too many calls to deal with, the quality of answers are bad. The number of wrong answers increases,” Mr. Brière said.
Opinion: For the love of God, can someone please help CRA fix its website?
Contract employees play a large role in the roughly 8,000 CRA positions that were lost over the past year. Agency figures show there were 15,323 contract workers in March, 2024, falling to 11,014 a year later.
Recent data obtained by The Globe from the CRA show that employee numbers in call centres have fallen significantly between the 2021-22 fiscal year and spring 2025. At the height of the pandemic, there were 6,704 employees at call centres nationally; that’s down to 4,133 as of last month.
The CRA has been reducing staffing at call centres over three years, opting to not renew thousands of contracts.
In a statement to The Globe, CRA spokesperson Nina Ioussoupova said that it has a fluctuating work force because of the annual seasonal hiring for tax season. Call centre roles are temporary by design, according to the agency, and when demand for the CRA’s phone services increases, it makes “every effort to rehire previously trained contact centre agents.”
Mr. Briére is particularly critical of this approach, which he calls a “short-term, Band-Aid solution” that does not fundamentally improve the long-term efficiency of the organization.
Two employees at one of the CRA’s contact centres in Calgary said they do not respond to “many” incoming calls because they do not have the time in an eight-hour shift to handle them. The Globe is not identifying the individuals because they are not authorized to speak publicly about their employer.
On any given day, agents deal with between 20 and 30 calls, they said. When there were more employees at the centre, more calls were answered.
The employees said that over the past two years, the staffing level at the Calgary call centre has declined by about 40 per cent. One of the employees said that the CRA’s directive to agents is to minimize time on calls to handle more volume. But because many calls are complex in nature, and the public has often spent more than an hour waiting to speak to an agent, it is difficult to resolve calls quickly.
The CRA has attempted to innovate the way it responds to phone queries from the public by introducing an online chat service that uses artificial intelligence to respond to questions from taxpayers. But a recent Globe and Mail investigation found that the CRA had so far trained fewer than 100 of its staff to support the pilot service, turning it into a source of complaints for Canadians struggling to get their tax questions answered.
With a report from Erica Alini