OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand reassured Canadians that recent budget cuts at Global Affairs Canada will not hinder their access to consular services while abroad. "I’m confident that these reductions will have no impact on the services on which Canadians rely while abroad," Anand stated during her testimony to the House foreign affairs committee on Thursday.

The recent budget announced a $561 million reduction in the department's funding for the upcoming year, which is expected to escalate to a $1.1 billion cut in two years. The budget plan includes a strategy for Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to "revamp emergency preparedness and modernize consular services" to achieve these savings.

Earlier this year, officials warned Anand that increasing global instability and a rise in international travel have significantly expanded the workload necessary to protect Canadians overseas. They cited expensive evacuations from regions such as the Middle East, Sudan, and Haiti as examples of the growing demands on consular services. A report prepared for Anand upon her appointment in May indicated that the number of evacuations conducted by GAC has surged 3.4 times over the past five years.

The report also suggested that the department may need to "calibrate and manage expectations of service delivery" for various consular cases, which can range from severe medical emergencies to child abductions and lost passports.

During the committee meeting, GAC's chief financial officer, Shirley Carruthers, confirmed that the budget cuts would indeed impact consular services. "We did have to make some reductions to our consular program," Carruthers said. She noted that some services would transition to an online platform, although she did not provide a specific timeline for this change. "For those more complex cases that we have, they’ll continue to receive in-person support," she added. Carruthers emphasized that the reductions are part of a broader effort to modernize service delivery.

Anand also addressed concerns regarding the cuts' impact on Canada's economic initiatives. She stated that the reductions "will not impact the government’s ability to diversify its trading partners and bring more investment" to Canada. This suggests that the cuts may disproportionately affect non-economic branches of the department. Anand mentioned that the diplomatic missions abroad have been instructed to allocate resources effectively to promote trade diversification and economic diplomacy.

The budget allocates $1.7 billion for initiatives aimed at enhancing Canada’s competitiveness in trade, including funding for trade missions. Carruthers explained that the department had to evaluate all its operations to identify areas for reduction and efficiency. She indicated that job cuts would be necessary, affecting some of the approximately 92 percent of the department's staff classified as "indeterminate employees."

The budget also outlines plans to consolidate Canada’s foreign service presence, which may involve merging trade offices, consulates, and ambassadorial residences into single facilities. This could include co-locating offices with allied nations or purchasing properties currently leased by Canada abroad. Anand noted that reviewing Canada’s diplomatic footprint is a routine process, stating, "With every new government, with every set of new foreign policy priorities, there is also a necessity to readjust the places of focus, especially in terms of missions."