Auditor general to study hiring, promotion of public servants with disabilities

OTTAWA — The federal auditor general is planning to study the recruitment, retention and promotion of people with disabilities in the federal public service.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through Access to Information indicate that the audit is expected to be tabled in the spring.

Claire Baudry, a spokesperson for the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, said in an email that while auditor general Karen Hogan expects to table the report in Parliament in 2026, the audit is in the planning phase and any comment on its scope or timelines now would be “premature.”

Hogan’s office sent a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Board Bill Matthews on March 7 notifying him of the upcoming study.

The most recent employment equity report for the public service says that since March 2020, the number of people with disabilities has increased steadily in the core public service — the federal government departments and agencies that fall under Treasury Board.

But that number remains below the rate of “workforce availability” — the metric used by the government to measure the share of the national workforce that is eligible for federal public service work.

As of 2024, 21,089 people with disabilities were working in the federal public service, up from 17,410 in 2023, 14,573 in 2022 and 12,893 in 2021.

The report also found that representation of people with disabilities among government executives was above the rate of workforce availability. As of March 2024, 9.7 per cent of federal executives were people with disabilities, up from 4.6 per cent in March 2019.

The employment equity report also looked at promotions in the core public service. It found that 2,517 federal public servants with disabilities were promoted in 2024.

The report also tracked 1,642 promotions of Indigenous public servants, 1,788 promotions of Black employees, 8,115 promotions of members of visible minorities and 19,578 promotions of women in the core public service.

Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, said he hopes the report will take into account the impact of the government’s return-to-office mandate on people with disabilities.

The government has gradually increased the number of days public servants must be in the office since the end of the pandemic. As of last fall, most public servants are expected to work in-office at least three days per week, while executives are required to be there at least four days per week.

“We hope to see from the report a snapshot before and after the forced return to office took place to see how many workers with disabilities are leaving the federal public sector and taking their expertise with them, while other workers struggle with increasing workload and now cuts — all when we had an easy and workable solution in front of us this whole time,” Prier said.

“During the pandemic we saw on a large scale how telework worked well for so many workers with disabilities, and we’ve been disappointed to see that, since the forced and mismanaged return to office, those same people have not been getting accommodations or have been made to jump through hoops in a long, drawn-out process,” he said.

Rola Salem, a spokesperson for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, said in an email that the Government of Canada has committed to building an accessible and inclusive public service and, in 2024, exceeded its goal of hiring 5,000 people with disabilities.

Salem said the secretariat welcomes the opportunity to work with the Office of the Auditor General on the planned audit.

The Employment Equity Act defines “persons with disabilities” as people who have a long-term or recurring physical, mental, sensory, psychiatric or learning impairment and who consider themselves to be disadvantaged in employment or believe that an employer is likely to consider them disadvantaged.

The definition also includes people whose limitations have been accommodated in the workplace.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 26, 2025.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press