Caroline Mulroney announces hiring freeze for Ontario's 143 government agencies

The president of Ontario’s Treasury Board, Caroline Mulroney, is responsible for making sure all of the province’s agencies, boards and commissions are well run. Effective immediately, Mulroney has decreed: All 143 government agencies are subject to a hiring freeze.

In 2018, Premier Doug Ford’s newly elected government mandated a hiring freeze for the public service — a freeze that remains in place to this day. Mulroney’s decision means these measures apply, as well, to provincial agencies, boards and commissions.

“We instituted the hiring freeze across the Ontario public service in 2018,” Mulroney affirms in an interview, “and around the same time, the provincial government began a comprehensive review of our agencies.”

“There was some consolidation that occurred subsequent to that,” Mulroney elaborates. “Some new agencies were created; there was a pandemic; but we’ve continued to review the governance and the structure of the relationship between government and the agencies.” Over the Ford PC’s tenure in government, the number of provincial agencies was reduced from 191 to 143.

Today’s announcement by Mulroney extends the reach of Ontario government’s 2018 hiring freeze beyond bureaucrats within government ministries, to include personnel within public agencies who perform specific regulatory, advisory, adjudicative, or service-delivery functions, sometimes at arms-length from government departments.

In Ontario, that list of agencies, boards, and commissions includes Ontario Health, Metrolinx, the Ontario Energy Board, the province’s Lottery and Gaming commission, the Human Rights Commission, and Legal Aid Ontario.

“Over the last few years,” Mulroney reports, “we’ve been looking more closely at them and realized that the hiring freeze that we imposed on the OPS (Ontario public service) — it would be prudent as a next step to impose it now on our agencies.”

“The freeze will involve a cap,” she explains, “and for business-critical services, agencies will still have the ability to fill those spots. We don’t want to affect any business-critical decisions and business-critical services.” The minister’s press release also reinforces the government’s aim of “putting more resources into frontline service delivery and back into the pocket of taxpayers.”

“We expect in the future for agencies to bring forward HR plans to be approved by ministries,” Mulroney explains. She hastens to add: “I recognize our agencies deliver a big part of our mandate and so they’re delivering critical public services. We just believe that the approach that we’ve used in the Ontario public service can also be followed within these agencies.” “Staffing in government agencies has risen by more than five times the rate of the OPS since 2023 (4.7 percent in agencies vs. 0.87 percent in the OPS),” the minister’s press materials state, “which has led to financial pressure that could jeopardize frontline service delivery.”

The hiring freeze on the public service since 2018 “kept growth relatively flat the entire time, while ensuring high quality public services for Ontarians,” Mulroney asserts. The province’s population in that window of time grew from 14 to 16 million.

This show of discipline by Ontario’s Treasury Board will no doubt be welcomed by many in the province. And I can’t resist asking Mulroney if her government has encouraged the feds to do something similar. Under the leadership of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the federal civil service exploded, reportedly growing at a rate twice as fast as Canada’s population.

Mulroney colours within the lines — she’s circumspect. “Since Mark Carney was elected,” she responds, “I think there has been some talk” of reducing size within the federal public service. “But,” she reiterates, “this is about Ontario and what we’re doing, and how we can manage growth and still provide those services that we were elected to provide in the most cost effective way.”

Then, she adds: “I’ll be happy to talk about it with members of other governments, if they decide to consider this kind of an approach.”

Mulroney expects the public sector unions will understand the reasons for placing a hiring freeze on agencies, boards and commissions. And she takes care to reiterate — “this is a cap” — it’s about managing growth. “I think business owners,” she adds, “will say that this is something that they have to do every single day, so I don’t think that it’s an unreasonable thing to expect from our agencies.”

“Austerity” is a buzzword creeping into the vernacular of ordinary Canadians. But Mulroney isn’t embracing the term: “This isn’t about austerity,” she says evenly. “This is about good fiscal management. And we’re making the investments that we need to make to continue to build our province, and have measures in place to sustain people as we’re going through this difficult time because of the tariffs. But we’re doing so in a targeted and responsible way.”

Mulroney is also scheduled to today release the province’s public accounts for 2024-2025, together with Ontario’s finance minister,  Peter Bethlenfalvy. Of course, she’s not going to pre-empt that announcement, but she assures me “we’ll have some good news that will show that our fiscal management has been viewed as transparent and well run … I think we’ve got good news for taxpayers, and on our debt sustainability measures, I think those measures will also show that they’re trending in the right direction.”

As U.S. President Donald Trump wreaks havoc on the province’s economy — and Ontario’s debt grows weighty — this 51-year-old minister logically and calmly explains the rationale for imposing a hiring freeze on government agencies. Mulroney’s unrelenting focus on good governance and fiscal discipline is a breath of fresh air in a chaotic world. Steady, she goes.

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