Canada Budget 2012: Federal Government Job Cuts and Grads

With the Harper government promising to slash 19,200 federal public service jobs, there is one group of people who stand to lose the most — the students and graduates working to become the next generation of civil servants.

It’s a reality Sean O’Brady is acutely aware of as federal layoff notices go out this week, with some public service employees expected to learn their fate Wednesday.

Just months away from completing his Master of Arts in Public Administration (MAPA) at Carleton University, a program that generally launches more than 80 per cent of its graduates into federal government jobs, O’Brady says the employment prospects are grim.

“It used to be that almost everybody would get a job within three months, now you don’t even know if you’ll get a job at all,” said O’Brady, who is the president of the school’s student society. “It’s really tough.”

In the past, upon graduation it wasn’t uncommon for students to get “competing offers” from the government departments where they had done co-op placements, O’Brady says. But he isn’t expecting the stint he did at Environment Canada or his current placement at Public Health to turn into something more solid…

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