Ontario Treasury Board president Caroline Mulroney ordered an immediate hiring freeze covering all 143 provincial agencies, extending the 2018 Ontario Public Service freeze to agencies, boards, and commissions effective immediately.
Mulroney said the move is “prudent as a next step,” citing internal figures that “staffing in government agencies has risen by more than five times the rate of the OPS since 2023 (4.7% in agencies vs. 0.87% in the OPS),” which she warned “has led to financial pressure that could jeopardize frontline service delivery.”
“The freeze will involve a cap,” Mulroney said, adding that “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.”
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The government framed the approach as “putting more resources into frontline service delivery and back into the pocket of taxpayers.”
The order widens the 2018 OPS hiring freeze to personnel at public agencies that handle regulatory, advisory, adjudicative, and service-delivery mandates. The list includes Ontario Health, Metrolinx, the Ontario Energy Board, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and Legal Aid Ontario.
“We expect in the future for agencies to bring forward HR plans to be approved by ministries,” she said. “I recognize our agencies deliver a big part of our mandate… We just believe that the approach that we’ve used in the Ontario public service can also be followed within these agencies.”
The ministry notes that the Ford government reduced the number of provincial agencies from 191 to 143 over its tenure, alongside the standing OPS freeze since 2018 that “kept growth relatively flat the entire time, while ensuring high quality public services for Ontarians.” Over that period, Ontario’s population increased from 14 million to 16 million.
Mulroney rejected the “austerity” label, countering that this is about “good fiscal management.”
“[We’re] making the investments that we need to make to continue to build our province… We’re doing so in a targeted and responsible way,” she explained.
She further underscored that this is a “cap” focused on managing growth rather than cuts and said she expects public sector unions to understand the rationale.
“I think business owners 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.”
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