The province’s 30,000-strong public service, which has endured nearly a year of layoffs, hiring freezes and cutbacks, now faces being jostled into new ministries as part a wide-ranging reorganization with an unknown pricetag.
About 2,400 civil servants will be directly affected by the changes, but there will be little to no change for the large majority, Allan Seckel, head of the B.C. public service, said Tuesday.
Premier Gordon Campbell shuffled 17 of his 23 ministers Monday in a far-reaching reorganization that included splitting up responsibilities for welfare and homelessness, adding a new minister of state for building code renewal, streamlining natural resource operations into a single ministry and combining tourism, trade and investment under one roof.
At the B.C. legislature Tuesday, government workers caught off-guard by the sudden shuffle were posting makeshift signs on doors, scrambling to change websites and updating phone greetings.
An email sent out late Monday by Doug Konkin, deputy minister of Natural Resource Operations, on behalf of all deputy ministers under that umbrella, said changes “will seem like business as usual.”
Brian Gardiner, spokesman for the B.C. Government and Services Employees’ Union, estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars will be spent on moving staff around, outfitting new offices, printing new stationery and rejigging payroll.
“Given the scale of this change, a considerable amount of money will be spent on this shuffle,” Gardiner said. “It’s a bit of a hallmark of this government when they get into a bind to shuffle the cabinet and make program changes.”
But Seckel expects the cost and the impact on the public service to be minimal.
“A lot of people will stay in the same offices but [the changes] will enable them to do multiple functions,” Seckel said. New stationery and business cards will likely be printed off within the ministries themselves and payroll is already centralized, he added.
The changes are expected to be completed by the start of the new fiscal year in April, Seckel said.
The union fears its members may be laid off or relocated to other regions in the province.
But Seckel said: “This is not a workforce adjustment in disguise. This is really about taking the resources we have and trying to use them better. This is more about change than loss and displacement.” However, there will be “opportunities” for some members of the civil service to relocate.
“I would imagine there will be opportunities and things that come up in different places, and someone will probably end moving to take up one of those opportunities – but it’s not wholesale,” Seckel said.
Dana Hayden, deputy minister for the ministry of forests, mines and lands, wrote to staff following the announcement Monday.
“As long as natural resource ministry budgets remain as they currently are, no further workforce adjustment is planned,” Hayden wrote in an email.
Konkin’s email heralded the changes as “an exciting time” for the natural resource sector.
“Today’s announcement solidifies the integrated approach to resource management that we have been moving toward over past few years, by reorganizing the sector into the Ministries of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation; Agriculture; Energy; Environment; Forests, Mines and Lands; and Natural Resource Operations,” Konkin’s email said.
Seckel said the changes in the Natural Resource Operations ministry allows staff to work in “a much more integrated fashion” in the field and in the office.
The only negative impact from the shuffle may be the loss of “place and pride” as the ministries are streamlined or the managerial reorganizations that will come with that, Seckel said.
“But if we didn’t’ think it was mostly better we wouldn’t have done it,” he said.
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