The province is trimming $215 million a year from its payroll as 2,400 civil servants take buyouts, says the cabinet minister who managed the government’s purse strings.

Treasury Board President Peter Bethlenfalvy said Thursday the savings will take effect in 2021 as Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government works to a goal of eliminating annual budget deficits within five years.

“We are making progress in managing compensation,” added Bethlenfalvy, who last week proposed legislation to cap public service and teacher wage hikes at 1 per cent when existing contracts end. The Conservatives have not released an estimate of how much that would save.

The buyouts come with an upfront cost to taxpayers of $190 million. About two-thirds of 3,300 applications from unionized civil servants were approved as the government.

“All these moves are voluntary,” said Bethlenfalvy, maintaining that front-line services are being protected while another 2,500 civil servants who left their jobs or retired since last June have not been replaced.

“We are re-evaluating all sorts of jobs” as the government tries to streamline and modernize its functions and provide more services online, he told reporters.

New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns raised concerns the departures will make it harder for Ontarians to get government services, from front-line services on health cards and driver’s licences at Service Ontario to lower profile roles such as psychiatric assessments and research scientists.

“We haven’t seen a list of the positions that are going to be emptied out. We are already in a situation where I get complaints from my constituents that they can’t get services from Ontario in a timely way,” Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth) told reporters.

“There’s going to be a reduction in services and people will notice,” he said.

Bethlenfalvy would not rule out expanding the buyout program to the broader public sector, beyond the more than 60,000 civil servants who work directly for the provincial government, saying the government is looking to apply lessons learned. There is a total of 1.2 million workers in public-sector organizations, including schools, universities and hospitals.

Civil servants began submitting applications for the buyouts under the “transition exit initiative” last December as the government looked to cut costs given that public-sector compensation amounts to $72 billion, about half of all expenses.

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