It took until the dying days of this election, but the battle for the hearts and minds of the region’s 150,000 public service workers is in full swing and will likely determine if the Liberals keep their tight grip on the Ottawa-Gatineau region or if the Conservatives can mount a breakthrough.

The issues, predictably enough, come down to job security and a failed pay system. Truth be known, both issues bear the messy fingerprints of the Liberals and Conservatives, so neither party should be claiming their hands are clean when it comes to acting in the best interests of public servants.

The country’s largest public service union tends to place more blame for the Phoenix mess on the Conservatives as architects of the system than the Liberals, who rolled it out against the advice of experts with predictably disastrous results. Furthermore, the Liberals never made much headway in fixing the system over the past four years, and so any promises to do so now should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the Public Service Alliance of Canada from telling its members that the most important thing this campaign is not electing a Conservative government, no matter what assurances the party gives when it comes to public service job security or replacing the Phoenix pay mess.

We can’t entirely rule out the NDP here, which has always aligned itself with whatever public service unions demand. But an NDP government is unrealistic, so the fortunes of public servants will almost certainly lie in the hands of either a Conservative or Liberal administration.

As for job security, neither party has a great history in that regard. The Liberals are urging public servants not to vote for a return to the Harper years yet conveniently ignore their own record of mass public service layoffs by the Chretien Liberals in the mid ‘90s.

Those 45,000 job cuts were necessitated by a slowing economy and a ballooning deficit, a situation that some skeptics fear the country is headed toward again.

Pierre Poilievre, MP for the riding of Carleton and the Conservatives’ lone sitting member in Ottawa-Gatineau, promises no public service job cuts by a Conservative government. Instead, he says the Conservatives would freeze the overall size of the public service at 2020-2021 levels until the budget is balanced, which it forecasts will take five years.

Note that freezing the size of government is not the same as a hiring freeze, which would block managers from replacing those who retire or leave voluntarily. The Conservatives say their plan would allow for new hires to replace those who leave. But there would be no growth in the overall size of the Public service beyond 2020-2021 levels.

This is an interesting pledge for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the Conservatives are using the 2020-2021 fiscal year as the baseline for setting a limit on the size of the public service. That would suggest the size of government would be set only after a Conservative government introduced its first full budget, which presumably will contain cuts in at least some areas of government spending.

The Conservatives are promising to cut red tape. You don’t cut regulations without eventually cutting the regulators, so Poilievre’s assurances aside, there is at least a small window of opportunity here for Conservatives to reduce the size of the public service before locking down any growth for the next five years or so.

The Conservatives promise that the cost of the public service would continue to grow and that sick leave and pensions would be protected, which simply means a Conservative government would honour collective bargaining agreements.

The Liberals touch all the bases in praising the good work of public servants.

But promises to eliminate the backlog of outstanding pay issues as a result of the Phoenix pay system, is a hollow pledge from a government that made no headway despite earlier promises to do so. Why should public servants believe them now?

So, as public service workers get the kind of attention they crave in elections, the choice they face isn’t an easy one: Better the Devil they know or a fresh start with a new party in power?

Gibbons is a veteran journalist/broadcaster and is former publisher & CEO of the Ottawa Sun

Email: rick.gibbons@outlook.com

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