Canada's federal public service has an image problem — and the receipts are public record.
When 155,000 federal public servants walked off the job in April 2023, they made history. It was the largest federal strike in Canadian history, and the issues at stake — wages, remote work, job security — were real. Workers had legitimate grievances. Collective bargaining is a legal right. Nobody disputes any of that.
What happened on the sidewalks outside Service Canada offices, EI processing centres, and passport bureaus across the country is a separate matter entirely. And it is one the federal government, the union, and frankly most of the press have been content to leave unexamined.
The public has not forgotten.
The Scene on the Picket Lines
The Public Service Alliance of Canada required members to attend a picket location for a minimum of four hours per day to receive their $75 daily strike pay. Across more than 250 locations from coast to coast, federal workers formed lines outside the very buildings where Canadians come to access services they are legally entitled to — Employment Insurance, Old Age Security, Citizenship processing, passport renewals, tax assistance.
Those Canadians still needed to get inside.
What many of them encountered was documented in the government's own strike management guidelines, which acknowledged the reality plainly: catcalls, jeers and profane language directed at people trying to cross a picket line. The Treasury Board of Canada's own guidance — written to protect non-striking employees — specifically addresses "interference or harassment by pickets in entering or leaving their assigned work location, of a sufficiently serious nature to arouse concern over their personal safety."
That language does not describe a hypothetical. It describes something planners anticipated, documented, and built procedures around.
Striking workers had every legal right to picket. They did not have the right to block access, and courts issued injunctions to that effect. But the legal floor and the ethical floor are two different elevations — a distinction the federal public service's own code of conduct makes explicitly.
What the Code of Conduct Actually Says
Every federal public servant signs and operates under the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector, a document that is a condition of employment — not a suggestion. The Code is precise about the standard expected:
Public servants are required to act "at all times with integrity, and in a manner that will bear the closest public scrutiny, an obligation that may not be fully satisfied by simply acting within the law."
Read that again. Acting within the law is explicitly stated as insufficient. The standard is higher.
The Code further requires that public servants conduct themselves in a manner that does not harm the reputation of the Government of Canada, and — critically — that off-duty conduct which leads others to be reluctant to interact with a public servant becomes a work-related matter. The Code states this directly: off-duty activities "may sometimes reflect on both the Office and the Government of Canada, and affect the confidence and respect of the public."
A federal worker on a picket line is not on vacation. They are, under the law, an employee on an authorized work stoppage. They are identifiable. They are often in uniform or wearing government-issued identification. And they are, under their own code, representatives of the institution whose trust they hold.
The Standard Applied to Clients
Here is where the asymmetry becomes impossible to ignore.
Walk into any Service Canada location, any CRA tax centre, any passport office in this country, and you will find posted policies about respectful conduct. Staff are trained to respond to client agitation with de-escalation. If a client raises their voice, the interaction can be paused. If a client uses profanity, service can be refused. If a client is perceived as threatening — regardless of whether an actual threat was made — security can be summoned and the person removed from the building.
These are not unreasonable policies. They exist to protect front-line workers who deal with the public in high-stress circumstances, and that protection is legitimate and warranted.
But the government's own misconduct reporting confirms this standard is enforced. The Canada Revenue Agency's 2024–2025 Annual Report on Misconduct specifically lists as founded cases: "aggressive or disrespectful language towards supervisors or the public via MS Teams or email" and "inappropriate behaviour toward colleagues or the public by phone, MS Teams, email, or physical contact." Penalties ranged from oral reprimands to ten-day suspensions — for being rude through a screen.
A client who does any of those things in person, at a counter, loses their appointment. The worker who directed comparable behaviour at members of the public on a public sidewalk — including people who may have had no idea what the strike was even about, who simply needed to renew a passport or ask about a benefits cheque — faced no professional consequence whatsoever.
The People in the Middle
It is worth pausing to consider who was actually caught between the union's labour action and the government's intransigence at the bargaining table.
It was not Treasury Board negotiators, who did not need to cross a picket line to get to a boardroom. It was not PSAC's national leadership, operating from a position of organizational authority. It was the 70-year-old woman trying to get her Old Age Security question answered. The recent immigrant whose citizenship application was time-sensitive. The parent whose EI had stopped and whose rent was due. The person who drove ninety minutes to the nearest passport office and was met with a line of people blowing air horns.
These are not edge cases. These are the clients the public service exists to serve. The people the code of conduct describes as the entire reason the institution has a mandate.
Their frustration was not misdirected. They were not angry at the right to strike. They were angry at how that right was exercised in their faces.
The Accountability Question
The government of Canada's misconduct and wrongdoing framework is substantial on paper. The Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. The Values and Ethics Code. Departmental codes of conduct. The Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner. Annual misconduct reports published by every major department.
What none of those reports address — what none of those mechanisms were applied to — is conduct on picket lines directed at members of the public. It falls into a gap: legally permitted labour activity that simultaneously violated the spirit, and arguably the letter, of the code those employees agreed to uphold.
The PSAC itself, notably, ran its own harassment policy for picket lines — protecting members from harassment by other members. There was no equivalent protection for the public walking through.
A Damaged Institution
Public trust in Canada's federal public service was already under pressure before 2023. The pandemic years raised questions about service delivery. The Phoenix pay system debacle cost hundreds of millions of dollars and left thousands of employees underpaid or overpaid for years. The slow return to in-person service. The passport processing collapse of 2022 that left hundreds of thousands of Canadians stranded without travel documents.
The 2023 strike did not create a credibility problem. But it made one that already existed visible, and visceral, in a way that spreadsheets and auditor reports never could.
When Canadians who had been waiting weeks for an EI payment — often people who had themselves worked for years and paid into the system — encountered workers blocking their access and yelling at them for trying to get inside, the damage was not merely to the union's public image. It was to the idea that the public service exists to serve the public.
That idea is not a partisan talking point. It is the founding premise of the institution. It is printed in the Values and Ethics Code. It is what justifies the job security, the defined-benefit pension, the protected classification system, and the grievance mechanisms that make federal employment among the most stable in the country.
The anger from Canadians is not irrational. It is the rational response of people who watched an institution forget, in a heated moment, who it works for.
What Would Accountability Look Like?
This article is not an argument against public sector unions. Collective bargaining exists because without it, workers have historically been exploited, and there is no reason to believe that dynamic has been permanently overcome. PSAC's 2023 members won real improvements to wages and working conditions, and that matters.
But accountability runs in both directions. The same institution that will suspend a worker for ten days for a rude email expects the public to accept — on a legal technicality — that yelling at a vulnerable person trying to access their government benefits is a protected labour activity.
Canada's public service has a code of conduct that explicitly demands more than legality. Enforcing it consistently — including when the conduct happens on a picket line, in front of the people public servants are sworn to serve — is not an anti-union position.
It is simply the standard the institution claims to hold itself to.
The gap between that claim and the conduct visible to millions of Canadians in April 2023 is where the image problem lives.
And image problems built on real events do not go away with a communications strategy.
The Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector is publicly available at canada.ca. The Treasury Board of Canada's strike management guidelines, departmental misconduct reports, and PSAC's own strike conduct materials referenced in this article are all public government documents.