OTTAWA—Federal civil servants won't get to fill out a workplace survey because the Conservative government has axed it.

It appears the next Public Service Employee Survey has wound up in the Treasury Board's budgetary crosshairs.

A Statistics Canada official broke the news to colleagues last month in an email obtained by The Canadian Press.

“I regret to inform you that plans for the 2010 Public Service Employee Survey are cancelled,” Geoff Bowlby, head of the agency's labour statistics division, wrote on June 2.

“We received notice from Treasury Board secretariat yesterday evening that funding for the project was not approved for this year.

“Please cancel any work that you may have already initiated on this project.”

Neither Treasury Board President Stockwell Day nor his department were immediately able to say how much the survey cost.

The government solicits voluntary feedback from its workers every three years to improve programs and services. The survey gives a snapshot of workers' demographics, skills, career expectations and concerns.

The union that represents civil servants accused the Tories of turning a deaf ear to the bureaucracy.

“In eliminating this survey, I think government is quite clearly saying to their workforce that they're not interested,” said Patty Ducharme, executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

“They're not interested in hearing their ideas, they're not interested in hearing what's actually going on in the workplace.

“Let's face it: the people who deliver the services every day to Canadians from coast to coast to coast are the people who are more likely to have good ideas and suggestions for improving services.”

The irony is that Day symbolically opened his door to department staff after taking over the Treasury Board in January.

“If you see me out and about, please stop and say 'Hi' and let me know what you do,” he wrote in a note to employees.

“I'm also inviting you to email me any time if you want to tune me in on anything. My staff knows that I want to get any notes from you directly and quickly. I will always try to reply to you personally, even if it takes a while.”

Statistics Canada conducts the civil-service survey and compiles the results. The first survey was done in 1999; the most recent was in 2008.

Government workers have filled out the survey online for the last six years. Workers without Internet access get paper copies.

About 258,000 workers received the last survey. About 170,000, or about two-thirds, filled it out.

The last survey turned up thousands of claims of harassment and discrimination.

More than 27,000 workers, or 16 per cent of respondents, claimed they had been harassed once or twice in the last two years. And 20,000 workers, or 12 per cent, claimed they had been harassed more than twice.

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Co-workers and bosses were mostly blamed.

Another 30,000 workers, or 18 per cent of respondents, alleged discrimination, mostly based on gender, age and ethnicity.

Word of this survey being scrapped comes as the Tories are under fire for getting rid of the mandatory, long-form census.

The head of Statistics Canada quit last week after Industry Minister Tony Clement claimed the agency supported replacing the long-form census with a voluntary survey.

It did not.

Clement has since clarified that the decision to scrap the census was made by the federal cabinet alone.

Many groups oppose that decision.They say data will be less accurate if the survey is voluntary instead of mandatory because fewer people will fill it out.

Union executive Ducharme has similar concerns about cutting the public-service survey.

“In the short term, it'll be a little blip in the picture,” she said.

“But in the longer term, for improving the work environment, for ensuring that managers are well trained to manage, that programs have the resources to deliver the programs that they're supposed to and that government plans for that, I think ... it will have a potentially negative impact.”

The Conservatives have clashed with the bureaucracy since coming to power.

Theformer heads of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, the Military Police Complaints Commission and the Nuclear Safety Commission were all turfed after running afoul of the Tories.

A former Public Works adviser won a $1.3 million settlement last week after he was fired over a news report that turned out to be wrong. The Conservatives let him go even though an internal probe exonerated him.