Following a spike in complaints, call centre delays and staffing cuts, the federal finance minister has directed the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to implement a 100-day plan to resolve “unacceptable” levels of service for Canadians, especially at its call centres. Canadians are increasingly frustrated by the long wait times at call centres, unclear and inconsistent information on tax filing and issues with navigating the CRA website, and not everyone is convinced these issues can be resolved within Ottawa’s deadline. Here, Financial Post breaks down why Canadians are upset with the CRA and what improvements might fix the agency’s failures.
Why are Canadians upset with the CRA?
Taxpayers’ ombudsperson François Boileau, whose office is responsible for reviewing service-related complaints about the CRA, said the public’s frustration with the agency has been “long-standing.”
Canadians have been grappling with long wait times, disconnected phone calls or inconsistent and unclear information when they do get connected with an agent, Boileau said. The CRA’s website itself is inundated with too much information that can confuse users or put them through an endless loop, he said.
However, in recent months, Boileau’s office (which is comprised of 32 staff) has seen a surge in complaints and is struggling to manage a backlog from the first week of June. To make matters worse, these complaints, once analyzed by the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson Office, must also be sent to the CRA, which has been late in processing them as well.
“If we’re going to continue this same trend that we’ve seen in the first few months of this fiscal year, we may easily match or even surpass the numbers of complaints that we’ve seen during the highest period of our history, which was during the pandemic years,” Boileau said.
Jamie Golombek
, managing director, tax and estate planning, at
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
, said it is not just the average taxpayer who is frustrated, but financial advisers and accountants trying to reach the CRA on behalf of their clients, too.
“People are spending literally hours on a phone trying to reach a CRA agent to settle a routine matter,” he said. “I think it was getting to a breaking point.”
What is the CRA’s call centre problem?
The Union of Taxation Employees (UTE), which represents more than 35,000 employees of the CRA, said fewer than five per cent of callers are even reaching an agent.
“At the end of the day, we’re jammed,” UTE national president Marc Brière said. “The call volume is just way too high versus the number of call centre agents (that) we have.”
Brière said staffing cuts (many of which have occurred since 2024) have had a “devastating” impact on the CRA’s services to Canadians. He said 3,300 call centre workers have lost their jobs since May 2024 (out of about 6,600 total jobs the CRA has shed on the whole in that time).
“The delays have exploded because of the cuts,” he said. “We used to answer such requests in, let’s say, three (to) four months. Now they can easily (take a) minimum of 52 weeks, and sometimes more than that.”
Brière said many taxpayers reach out to the CRA to request an adjustment to previous tax returns, such as claiming a credit they forgot to include or amending their financial situation. He estimates there are hundreds of thousands of these T1 adjustment files that have yet to be processed.
In other cases, people seek tax filing advice, have questions about certain credits they can claim or may oppose the CRA’s assessment of their tax return and how much money they owe.
Financial Post reached out to the CRA for comment, but the agency did not respond before publication.
What happened to the 850 call centre workers whose contracts were going to end?
Last week, the CRA offered contract extensions to about 850 call centre workers (the contracts were originally set to expire in September), following a campaign launched by the UTE and Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) pushing back against job cuts at CRA contact centres.
Brière said Finance and National Revenue Minister
François-Philippe Champagne
intervened with the CRA commissioner and advised him to retain the agency’s staff after a visit to the CRA’s call centres.
He said that while he is appreciative of the decision to extend the contracts until the end of March 2026, he doesn’t think it’s enough. March lands in the middle of peak tax season and he said the CRA will require even more employees at contact centres next year, especially as the number of calls continues to skyrocket.
“We believe that it’s not acceptable (for) Canadians to wait a year to get any type of file processed, unless it’s extremely complex,” he said.
What improvements does Ottawa want to see and will they be enough?
The CRA has a 100-day timeline to “strengthen services, improve access and reduce delays,” Champagne said in an open letter to Liberal MP Karina Gould, chair of the House of Commons finance committee, which was posted to X on Tuesday.
Champagne said his team visited CRA call centres and met with leadership and workers to gain insights into challenges the agency has been experiencing.
“The agency has been asked to take concrete steps to help Canadians get the assistance they need,” he said. “This will include reallocating and adding personnel, piloting a new call-scheduling system, and expanding digital services, among other measures.”
Golombek said he isn’t sure whether the CRA can fully resolve its issues in 100 days, but the letter from the finance minister certainly “lights a fire” for the CRA to put together a plan of action.
He said the CRA needs to set a goal to reduce call centre wait times to a much more reasonable level. He also suggested a fallback system that invests in technologies such as
artificial intelligence
for taxpayers to communicate securely and coordinate another call to be followed up with a human CRA agent.
In its 2025-26 departmental plan, the CRA said it would be piloting an AI chatbot to provide quick access to relevant and up-to-date information.
Brière said the CRA needs to hire more staff to resolve its call centre problem — not just shuffle personnel around from different departments. He said the agency is currently down to pre-pandemic staffing levels due to the end of COVID-19-era programs, but is still dealing with higher levels of calls than it did prior to 2020.
Currently, he said the CRA receives an average of about 250,000 calls a day, not too far from levels seen in a typical tax season. The agency’s website states that of the 253,000 calls a day it received from April to June 2025, between 36,000 and 38,000 of those were answered.
“We’re asking the CRA and the (finance minister) to invest money in the next budget (and) also to rehire at least 1,000 collection officers that were let go since sometime in November and December of 2024,” he said.
• Email: slouis@postmedia.com
