Bureaucrats Receive $6 Billion in ‘Severance’

Ottawa bureaucratic payout | BCBusiness
Ottawa is sending a flood of “severance” cheques to federal workers who aren’t losing their jobs.

Civil servants will soon receive fat taxpayer cheques in their mailboxes as Ottawa pays lump sums without any job losses.

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are laughing all the way to the bank as Ottawa pays out “severance” cheques to workers who aren’t losing their jobs.
 
The Harper government is in the process of writing lump sum cheques to civil servants on top of their regular salaries and benefits. Currently, the average payout for a single federal employee is around $20,000, but upper-rung bureaucrats will receive cheques for as much as $150,000.
 
The move is actually a method of cutting the federal budget — or so Ottawa says. Federal employees currently receive severance benefits even when they quit or retire. The Harper administration slashed the benefit in the recent round of budget cuts, which will save the government a reported $500 million a year.
 
Unfortunately, the payouts are costing taxpayers a pretty penny and will top $6 billion. In return for scrapping the benefit, the government agreed to pay civil servants for all the severance they’d accumulated and give them a 0.75 per cent raise over the next three years. The salary increase smacks of a golden parachute and doesn’t exactly fall in line with Ottawa’s budget cut talking point.
 
The announcement also rubs salt in the wounds of the 19,000 federal workers who did actually lose their jobs recently.