Google Notifies Canadian Employees Affected by Global Layoff of 12,000 Workers

TORONTO – Canadian Google employees impacted by recently announced job cuts were notified Monday if they have been fired.

Google Canada spokeswoman Lauren Skelly confirmed in an email that notifications have been sent to employees impacted by the cuts announced last month.

Skelly would not say how many Canadians will be laid off and what departments or cities they work in, but said Canada remains an important and priority market for Google.

However, LinkedIn posts featured software engineers and user experience designers in Kitchener, Ontario. were among those who lost their jobs.

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Google and parent company Alphabet, told employees in mid-January that his company would lay off 12,000 employees.

“In the last two years we’ve had periods of dramatic growth,” he said in a blog post revealing the cuts.

“To accommodate and drive that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

The emerging reality prompted him to conduct a “rigorous” review of all product areas and functions to ensure roles align with the company’s top priorities.

“The roles we are eliminating reflect the outcome of this review,” Pichai said. “They go across the alphabet, product areas, functions, tiers and regions.”

Within days of its announcement, Google said it was closing the Edmonton office owned by its artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind.

The UK-headquartered subsidiary plans to consolidate its remaining operations but retain its offices in Montreal and Toronto, located in Google-managed buildings.

Researchers from the Edmonton office have been offered an opportunity to relocate to another DeepMind site, Skelly said.

Other companies that have laid off staff or reorganized operations in recent months as investor and economic sentiment shifted include Shopify, Netflix, Amazon, Wealthsimple, Clearco, and Hootsuite.

Layoffs.fyi layoffs aggregator counts 94,838 employees at 297 global tech companies laid off earlier this year.

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on February 6, 2023.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

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