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Madam Chair, thank you for the invitation to appear before your Committee on the Public Service Commission's (PSC) mandate. I have with me from the PSC Linda Gobeil, Senior Vice-President, Policy Branch, and Donald Lemaire, Vice-President, Services Branch.
I would like to discuss the responsibilities of the PSC and our studies and reports to Parliament.
Now approaching its 100th anniversary, the PSC is a unique organization with a long history of protecting merit and non-partisanship in the federal public service. We are independent of ministerial direction and report to Parliament. We also hold an authority necessary for the government to function—the staffing of the core public service under the Public Service Employment Act (PSEA). There are about 185,000 employees. All other HR functions, such as compensation and classification, are the responsibility of the executive branch.
Our core responsibility for protecting merit and non-partisanship has not changed over the last century. However, the way in which we carry out that responsibility has evolved considerably. Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss our system with the Civil Service Commissioner and the Public Appointments Commissioner in the UK, where the human resources management system has evolved differently from ours.
[English]
Under the new PSEA, which came into force on December 31, 2005, we have moved to a highly delegated staffing model. We are no longer running key parts of the staffing system. Instead, we have delegated staffing authorities to the deputy heads. We hold them accountable for ensuring that staffing actions respect the values of merit and non-partisanship, as well as those of fairness, access, and transparency.
We are the external auditor for staffing. We have a staff of about 1,000 highly skilled and professional employees, located across Canada. Our organizational units are responsible for staffing and assessment services, policy, audits, and investigations, as well as corporate services.
As a result of our long history, we have built up a large concentration of expertise in staffing and investigations, and we are building up our audit and monitoring capacity. We have provided you with more information on our activities, as well as on our organizational structure, financial, and human resources.
We report annually to Parliament on the health of the staffing system. Our report is tabled in both houses, through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. The new PSEA allows the PSC additional reporting authority, with the power to make special reports to Parliament when we deem the matter urgent or important.
At the time of passage, this amendment was taken to mean that we could transmit these reports directly to the speakers of both houses. However, without specific wording in the act, the reporting mechanism was unclear. The absence of a specific tabling provision has resulted in us tabling our reports through a minister, potentially restricting timely action as envisioned.
I would like to share with you the results of some of our recent work.
Last month we released two statistical studies. The first was on the use of ministerial priorities to staff positions in the public service. Our second study, on time to staff, provides a benchmark that will allow us to assess progress, as we modernize the staffing system under the new PSEA. These statistical studies are the beginning of a series, based on analysis of our data holdings.
We also issued two special audit reports, which we tabled and which stand referred to this committee. Our audit of the Canadian Space Agency found shortcomings in the management of staffing operations. I was particularly concerned about the lack of impartiality in staffing, the quality of the rating tools and assessment methods used, and the fact that human resources advisors and managers had conducted staffing transactions with a poor understanding of the framework governing staffing activities. In addition, the agency did not respect the merit principle and staffing values in 48% of the staffing files we audited. Consequently we imposed conditions on its staffing delegations.
Our audit of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, OPC, determined that significant improvements in staffing systems and practices have been made. The OPC has a staffing strategy in place, supported by plans and policies. It has established communications strategies for management and employees, initiated a self-monitoring process, and is ready to conduct staffing under the new act. Accordingly, we have removed the restrictions previously placed on its staffing authority and established a standard delegation agreement with the deputy head.
[Translation]
We are currently conducting audits of acting appointments to and within the EX group, student programs and readiness for the new PSEA. We are also working on statistical studies in a number of areas such as the extent to which casual employees subsequently become employed under the act. In early October, we will be tabling our Annual Report.
Our recent studies and reports are the result of our new emphasis on oversight as the means for carrying out our responsibility to protect merit and non-partisanship. We would appreciate hearing from your committee on its areas of interest and how we might better serve Parliament in the exercise of our responsibility on its behalf.
We are an independent agency supporting Parliament but because of our staffing authority, must work closely with the executive. However, we look to our relationship with your committee as an important means of maintaining our independence from the executive branch.
I would be happy to answer any questions you may have at this time. Thank you.
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The new legislation, which we were discussing, that came into force December 2005 was called the Public Service Modernization Act. Under that legislation there was a strong suggestion—I guess is the best word, because it wasn't “must”, but “may”—that the Public Service Commission delegate staffing authorities. Given the debate and the approach that was taken with that legislation, we have taken this to mean that we fully delegate.
Before we did that delegation, we went through a process of assessing readiness, because we wanted to make sure there were the basic pieces in place so that we had some of the training, had the policies, had the delegation framework and a receptivity to the framework. That's the first step of readiness.
We did that first assessment to determine that there was a readiness to do the delegations. And at that time, already we conditioned the Space Agency delegation, because we were already concerned with what we were finding in that audit. So there are some that have conditions imposed on them, where it's not a full delegation.
Now what we have to do is continue to ask, as did your earlier question: how ready is the system to take on this new approach to human resource management? That's what we're going to continue to do, because once you get past the policies and the framework, you really do have to get to the behaviours, and you want to see behaviours and practices that have been changed.
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Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Barrados, I wish to thank you and your colleagues for being here. I will be talking about the PSC's revenues during the next round.
Like my colleagues, I think there should be a cost recovery system and that organizations that do not comply with the act should be forced to pay. I, like other parliamentarians, find the non-compliance with staffing principles in 48% of cases to be appalling. Regardless of whether we are talking about 48 cases out of 100, or 480 cases out of 1,000, the figure is absolutely appalling.
Under the Public Service Employment Act, the PSC delegates staffing authority to deputy heads. Under section 15, the commission may revise or rescind an authorization granted under this section.
I would like to come back to the last question. You said that you make sure that an organization is ready and willing to receive a staffing authority. Yet, you said in your report that of the staffing files audited, 48% did not respect the merit principle, and managers do not consider themselves as important actors in human resources management. Either managers are not ready to have staffing authorities because they do not understand their role in human resources management, or else the organization has undergone a complete and total change.
During the 1970s and 1980s, it was believed that human resources management was the responsibility of human resources. A staffing agent simply had to be called to resolve a problem. However, the staffing agent is not responsible for drawing up manpower plans.
Was the agency ready to receive staffing authorities when the commission delegated them? Things happen, and then all of a sudden, there are cracks and everything falls to pieces.
I'm very interested in what preceds the delegation of authority, because 48% is unimaginable.
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Most members of this committee know that I was at the Office of the Auditor General before taking up my position here at the Public Service Commission.
Neither the human resources planning framework nor the financial planning framework is very solid, and we would like to integrate these two frameworks. Some departments and agencies devote nearly three quarters of their budget to human resources. Having a truly integrated planning framework is major challenge.
The question as to whether or not organizations were ready to receive staffing authorities was important when we started making decisions on the delegations. The assessment allowed us to note a preliminary planning process. That is a beginning. Consequently, we will be devoting more efforts to oversight.
We will be carrying out more audits, because our role is to push and encourage people. Managers are responsible for the implementation of this process. That is not our job.
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We're quite concerned about all of those things, and I can address some of the issues without starting to pull out all the specific numbers—but we can get you specific numbers.
Under the previous legislation, there was the requirement that public service jobs first be posted within the public service. There had to be a justification before you went outside the public service to staff a new job, hence giving promotion opportunities to people in the public service.
That particular clause is no longer in the legislation. We now have a different system beginning to take shape, which means that people can advertise outside much more than they had in the past to fill some of the jobs that are there. That's a significant change.
We watch fairly closely representativity numbers, and we continue to be concerned about the gap in work force availability of, the actual people represented in, and the rate at which we're hiring visible minorities in the public service. We are doing better than many other organizations, but there's still a significant gap between what is available and what we find in the public service.
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Now you're getting to the really tricky part. Your question is anticipating my next comment a bit.
In the past—and we're in a transition now—there was a restriction. There was an ability to restrict the geographic area of competition. So any public service manager could decide to allow jobs, if there was one in Ottawa, only from Ottawa-Gatineau, for example, or if it was in Toronto, from only around Toronto. This has raised a lot of concerns, particularly from members of Parliament, who saw a lot of jobs come up that were advertised for outside the public service but restricted geographically. So that meant that their constituents couldn't apply for those jobs.
We had always done that to limit the volume of applicants, because in the public service we have a lot of people interested in the generalist jobs. We have hundreds of applications. For the specialty jobs, it's a different situation. For specialty jobs, we have to compete with everyone else, and we often don't do so well. So specialty jobs are not the same as the generalist jobs.
We have now initiated a process and changed our policy by broadening it. Starting April 1, all jobs for what we're calling the officer level are now open to national competition, so anyone in the country can apply for those jobs. Two things have had to happen with that. One is we are putting in information systems that will allow us to deal with the large volumes of applications. That is now all in place; we're beginning to roll this out.
Your second part of the question is what the costs are. This is a bit unknown, because this is now at the discretion of the managers, as to what they're paying for this. We are providing facilities and support, so that you can do interviews in other ways apart from having people come directly. But there is discretion as to whether you pay moving and relocation costs. That's one part of the cost equation.
The second part of the cost equation is we have to put the information systems in place, so that when people apply their application gets treated and they get treated in as fair a way as everyone else.
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As you're going through this transition process, there are obviously difficulties. You said one of the most difficult things is following up. You start a process, but then to ensure that you're going to get the desired results you have to have some form of assessment of the process all the way through.
We've seen a classic example. This committee has been struggling with recommendations that the Auditor General made back in 2001 for accrual accounting. Yet we've never seen a full implementation, and every time we do a small degree of follow-up, there doesn't appear to be the proper emphasis.
My concern is that we have an adequate means of follow-up to ensure that this is working and effective as we go to the new process within your department.
May I be so bold as to ask you for your opinion on how could Parliament be most effective in giving you the tools necessary to ensure that we are getting a process that works, that's cost-effective, and of course that suits the national identity of what we are as a society?
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Mr. Kramp, this committee is exactly the kind of process I look for. It is very important for me and my organization that we have the dialogue with this committee, because having members of Parliament ask questions on the record focuses the mind, the minds of all the people, and the subjects, which you touch here. You may not be quite aware of the impact this has on the system. People watch what is said at these committees very closely.
It's the system, and it works. In organizations like mine and the Office of the Auditor General, it is important that we continue to have that link with Parliament and maintain our independent point of view. So we will do the follow-up and identify the issues.
Regarding some of the issues I look for, one is strengthening the independence of my office. One of the big issues has been in the process, in the way in which I was nominated. It was through this committee. My nomination was a vote in both houses. The only way I can be removed is through a vote in both houses. This gives me a tremendous independence as to who my boss is. I know who my boss is: it's the people around this table.
I do have concerns about our budgets. I have not had any issues where people have tried to take money from our budgets. One way you control the watchdog, if you like, and the ability for me to organize my organization the way I want is to reduce the money.
Now, the minute I feel that I am in trouble, I can assure you I will come to this committee. But I'm always trying to make sure that we maintain that independent point of view and that ability to function independently.
One bit of good news, based on the study that has just been completed by D-Code, a private sector organization, which has surveyed 27,000 college and university students, is that they have a very strong interest in joining the public service, either provincial, municipal, or federal. From that perspective, there is a strong interest in joining these organizations.
What we're doing now is working with departments to identify where there are specific gaps, because it's not every place that faces the same challenge. If we take just human resources, which is our main concern, there is a big shortage and already a big gap. What we're doing is launching with our partners, the other departments, recruitment at the entry level. We put in place also a two-year development program to make sure they have proper mentoring and training so that they can achieve the level of performance we expect more senior officials to arrive at.
Also, we're working with different departments now with more specialized targeted recruitment among different communities. The first phase is basically to do the diagnostic, because starting from a general premise that everybody will face the same type of shortage is not a very effective way to identify a proper strategy to meet and close the gap. That's basically the process we have engaged.
I think it's very positive that you're reporting that among students today there is a desire to go into public service. I think there was a period of time when there was a lot of disparaging of public sector staff.
I personally have a lot of respect for them. I think it's a valuable contribution. A key to our public sector is that there not be the accusation of partisanship, and I note in the report that there has been a strong emphasis on being non-partisan and protecting merit, which I think we all value.
One particular issue I'd like to raise--this came up in my riding in Toronto--is about the federal student employment program. I was asked to come in and approve not hirings but the authorization to fund positions that were going to be offered for the summer. I asked about the criteria for this program.
I see you shaking your head. Maybe that's not usual, but I was asked to come in, and it seemed to me highly unusual that I would be looking at these, because we don't want them to be partisan.
But I also had questions about how the program works. I was told that the goal is to offer students workplace experience, summer work experience, especially targeting disadvantaged students. When I asked what it was based on, they said it was the census data from 2001, the number of students in the riding and the percentage of those who are unemployed--which seemed to me a very gross yardstick five years down the road. This is what I was told.
When I asked whether there was a requirement that these students be hired from within the riding, I was told there wasn't, and there was no particular outreach to the especially disadvantaged areas in my riding. Maybe I was misinformed, but it just seemed to me a strange way to go about implementing this kind of program.
I don't know whether I was misinformed. Maybe you could explain the goal of this program, because it does involve hiring.
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I'm a little puzzled by the explanation that you were given. Maybe we can follow up with your office and get some of the details, because that's not the way the program is to operate, and my understanding is that's not the way it operates.
Students apply individually, so there's an application to this program. We get large numbers of students applying--9,000 students who apply for these jobs. What we then do is get a request from a department for a particular type of job, whether they're looking for somebody with a background in science or whether they want a statistician, or usually what kind of background they want.
We, the Public Service Commission, will then look at the databases. We will give them a match of five people, and they can choose one of those five people. That's how it's done.
There may be another process in departments in terms of saying how many students we're going to hire, but we're not involved in that part of it. We're involved in the part of having students apply. They apply directly. We're there to be non-partisan and not have any part in a manipulation of that, to give students an equal chance.
Where we had the problem in the past was when you looked at some of the requests and you would have a request--I'm making this up, but it's the kind of thing you'd have--for a BA in something like anthropology, somebody who had done lifesaving as well, and knew some obscure language. By the time you pulled out those out, you'd have a unique individual. That's what we were so against and we identified in the last audit.
We've gone back to make sure that wasn't continuing, because it is supposed to be an equal chance. But we'll follow up with your office for--
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Yes. When the Public Service Modernization Act was going through, there were a couple of decisions made to strengthen the independence of the Public Service Commission. One was the appointment of the head and the dismissal of the members of the commission. The second one was to provide a clause that would give the commission a direct report, allowing the commission to report at any time it felt it was important to report to Parliament. Everyone at that time took that to mean it was a report directly to the Speaker, not by way of a minister. There's quite a procedure set out for how you report through a minister: you have to give notice, and you have to work with the minister's office.
When the act was enacted, I had these two reports that I thought had timeliness and urgency to them. Certainly I thought it was very important to get the space agency report out, the message being you have to get a new head of the space agency in there, and you have to solve a problem. I thought it was important to get the privacy commissioner report out because a previous committee in Parliament had been very preoccupied about the privacy commissioner not getting full delegation back.
When I went to see about how I could do it—because I thought I could just go to the Speaker and table with the Speaker—I was told that the absence in the drafting of tabling to the Speaker meant it had to go through the minister.
An hon. member: Who told you that?
Ms. Maria Barrados: The Clerk of the House of Commons and the law clerk.
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Yes, we have actually a specific charge under the Employment Equity Act to be responsible for removing barriers to employment in the public service. So we have been watching this fairly closely in terms of what kinds of barriers there are and what the numbers are looking like.
On the representivity side, if you take a number that reflects workforce availability, we are seeing overall that women are fairly represented, mainly a little bit over, in total, and the disabled are fairly represented, as are aboriginals, but there's a special issue with the aboriginal people. But visible minorities are under-represented from workforce availability.
If you look at the senior executive ranks, the representivity issues are more severe. I think there is under-representation across the board. So we have under-representation across the board in the senior executive ranks.
On the question of visibility minorities, it is one that bothers me in particular, in large part because of the extent to which our society is changing, and I think it's very important that our public service is reflective of the society it's there to serve.
We have initiated a study that we are terming the drop-off study, because what we have found is that in terms of applications to the public service, visible minorities are over-represented, and in terms of the actual jobs they get they are under-represented. We have undertaken a statistical study that shows what we're calling this drop-off. Now we are moving to doing more analysis on that to try to determine exactly where the barriers are and what it is that is causing this phenomenon of this high interest in the public service and yet when it comes to getting the jobs they're not getting the jobs in the proportions.
Linda is responsible for the work in this area. She might have something to add.
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We have an unusual set of teeth, and that's what makes us unique. Unlike the Auditor General, whose role it is to audit and make reports, we are actually in the business of auditing and taking corrective measures. That's why in our reports to Parliament we have to say what we found, but also what we did.
We have a couple of instruments. One is the actual delegation; we put conditions on delegations and we can intervene in the staffing processes. Some we'll remove; other times, we do a combination. In the case of the Canadian Space Agency, we removed some and then we imposed some very strong conditions whereby there have to be approvals by us for all future staffing actions.
The other thing we have is the power to revoke positions, so that if there has been an incorrect staffing action, we can actually go in and take the position away.
Under the old legislation we had the power to do that for all positions. Under the new legislation there is a new staffing tribunal set up, and they do that for the internal competitions, but we do it where there is fraud, inappropriate political activity, and for any of the external appointments that were incorrectly done we can revoke the position.
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That's a good question.
Part of the $67 million on the recruitment and assessment services is for grouping these things together. That's a block of activities.
A single piece in there is what we call the psychology assessment centre. These are the people who do the language testing, who do all the psychology assessment, do any of the special needs in assessing employees. That is part of it; it's about $10 million.
I talked to you earlier about the systems we needed to put in place for national area of selection. Those systems are something we are doing overall for the whole of government; it's not uniquely for us. It has brought up our expenditures for the last years by about $10 million to $12 million a year. These are overall systems costs.
The costs you have in there are fully loaded. They now include the student programs we run for government, the post-secondary recruitment program we run for government, the specialty recruitment programs we run for government, the jobs.gc.ca website we run for government. All of these we run, to keep them unbiased and fair and with integrity. And there's our regional office structure
What is changing with the new legislation is that some of those components are going to be discretionary, whereas before they were compulsory. If they are not used, the expenditure and usage are going to go down, and you will see the expenditure going down in those areas.
But a number of those things are being done for the whole system, so we're talking about activities for 170,000 people.
As to the other $47 million, you're asking what we are doing with the $47 million, what's in that box. What we have in that box is the individual investigations we do and the appeals invsetigations we are currently running. We're looking at running about 500 to 600 individual investigations that could result in people losing their job. Those have to be done in a quasi-judicial kind of manner; they are administrative tribunals.
We have an audit function and those audits have to run to the standards of the Auditor General's.
We have delegations to 80 departments and organizations, so we have delegation agreements over which we have a monitoring function.
We have to give advice and counsel to try to keep the system running, because we're in this major transformation.
So we have that whole package of activities in addition to running a commission. When you cost each one of all those things out, they end up giving you that kind of cost.
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We would like to do that, not for the annual report that's coming, because that's now being written, but for the one after that.
Some things are obvious. There is a lack of understanding of how to fill in the applications. It's a technical process in government; government people say they require the following and they expect somebody to respond against each one of them. If you don't respond against one of them you're not going to be screened in.
A lot of the screening is done automatically. We're going to the system, so it's not a person intervening; the screening is an automatic process. So that's obviously one area we have to look at.
I want to see where the drop-off is taking place, because that explains.... I think there are different explanations. If you have people not filling in the application forms, one of the looks we had showed a number of people were not Canadian citizens, and we give preference to Canadian citizens. This takes out the numbers. So we really have to do the work on this.
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I would like to come back to that question, Ms. Barrados.
In my opinion, when filling a position under the terms of the human resources plan, essential requirements must be determined.
If managers decide that bilingualism is a core requirement, that means that the person hired must be able to operate just as well in French as in English. We cannot wait for them to go through one year's training, no matter who it is. It doesn't matter if the person is anglophone, francophone, or allophone, they must be bilingual and fluent in both languages.
It therefore becomes a matter of principle: one must have both languages. We cannot simply overlook the principle and say that a certain biologist, researcher, or a statistician is excellent, even if he or she is not bilingual. The person must be bilingual.
When a department is staffing positions—and I know that you are not responsible for the armed forces, but only civilian members of the armed forces—and systematically does not respect this basis principle, something has to be done, does it not?
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Of course. I agree with you, Ms. Barrados.
In the document we received this morning, it says that your budget will be decreasing. For 2006-2007, your budget is $112 million, that is $106 million plus $6 million in revenues. I may have the opportunity to ask you a question about the $6 million. For 2008-2009, your budget will be $91 million, but the number of your full-time equivalents will increase.
There must be a very good reason for that, Ms. Barrados, and I would like to know what it is. It is very rare for a budget to decrease when the number of full-time equivalents increases. Usually, employee salaries are very costly.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for being here today.
One of my concerns is that we seem to be continually adding layers of monitoring and auditing functions. I know that's a function of our society, unfortunately. It's certainly one my concerns, in terms of how many watchdogs do we need to watch the watchdogs.
Having said that, I can see with the example you gave us this morning of the Canadian Space Agency, with 48% non-compliance, and then the Public Works and Government Services Canada example. On page 21 and 22 of your 2005 report, you mentioned a group where out of 25 appointments, 100% of them were non-compliant. So that's obviously a major concern.
Then I noted as well that with the commission for public complaints against the RCMP, there are significant complaints. It would seem to me that a group with that name, “commission for public complaints”, would do all in their power not to have any complaints against them.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Harold Albrecht: Having said that, I have two questions. First of all, what triggers an audit? Is it one complaint, a hundred complaints? Is it a random thing? Is it done everyx number of years?
Secondly, if my math is right, I notice you currently have one for every 185 people, because you say you're responsible for 185,000 staff, and there are roughly 1,000 staff. I realize those are not all management staff; that's the total. But could you give me an idea of what would be an ideal ratio, or a number of staff required to do this job adequately in our current culture?
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It's part of the delegation agreement we have. We're saying these are the responsibilities to staff, this is how we expect you to run it, and these are the kinds of measures we expect you to monitor.
We're looking at how many competitive processes you're running; we're looking at how you're advertising these things. Are you advertising them? Are you doing a lot of staffings and not advertising? We're looking for the kinds of complaints you're having. We're looking at employee satisfaction. We're looking at representativeness. A lot of these things can be reasonably non-intrusive, if we get the systems working right so that we have systems that give us these numbers as the first warning signs.
In the case of one small organization that has ten staff and where we can see there is a big problem, I will sit down with that person and ask: what are you doing to fix it? We expect it to be fixed. We have people coming in to tell them how to do it, and then we'll go back to make sure they've fixed it. So it's a risk-based system that we want in place.
You cited examples: the military police complaints commission was one; PWGSC was another, where we were actually asked to come in. At PWGSC, the deputy had a problem. They were working with unions, the unions were not satisfied with what was done, and everyone agreed to have us come in. In the case of the military police complaints commission, it was a lot of staff complaints and some union complaints. We go in and we do the audit.
On your question about what is the ideal size, I'm not sure I have a really good answer.
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Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to continue my line of questioning from when I ran out of time earlier. First, I want to go on the record as saying I don't necessarily believe arbitrary quotas are the right way to go about ensuring that the public service represents the makeup of society, but I do believe we have a responsibility, and the public service has a responsibility, to perhaps work harder to ensure that we do a better job of reaching out to visible minorities or underrepresented people and ensuring that they have an equal footing or a level playing field when it comes to applying for jobs.
You've said everything we say here is important, so I wanted to go on the record to say that.
The question I have for you is this. Do you automatically table the upcoming reports you're expectnig this year and perhaps next with this committee, or do we need to request that you do so?
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Yes, I expect a package of reports to come that would be our annual report, which gives the concerns of the commission. Some of our concerns are obvious and already reflected in this committee—the state of readiness and the types of changes we have to make, concerns about non-partisanship. We raise those and put our findings together. We also give an overview of what is happening in the public service in terms of hiring and the size of the public service. Then we expect these three audits on EX staffing, on readiness, and on the student program.
We are not tabling the statistical studies to Parliament. We will be releasing them on a routine basis. I'm happy to talk about them, but this is going to be a routine thing that we release.
That will be the package we have coming in October.
As to the process by which we release the annual reports, we do a little more than we did in these two special reports. When we send those, they get tabled, we release them, and there's some information around them. But usually for the annual report and that package, we do the press conference. We offer to brief this committee before, if they would like, or have a meeting on the day. I'd be talking to your chair to see what the possibilities are for that.
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What we're finding is that in those two cases we didn't find political influence. That's an important consideration here, which we didn't find. That's not to say it doesn't exist, but we didn't find it. What we found was a lot of hand-picking people and saying, “We're going to use the system and get you into that job.” That's where we get very worried. There was a using of the system to manipulate the system to get pre-chosen people into the jobs.
So we're very concerned about that. That's not what we expect, because we have the system that says fairness, access, and transparency.
There are a couple of other things that go on in the public service. One is that we do have a priority system, and we expect it to be respected. If you get laid off or you're on leave without pay as a public servant, you have a priority for a position. The expectation is that you go to those people first, so you expect that to function.
One of the areas I have been concerned about, and continue to be concerned about, is the movement from casual employment in the public service into full-time, and the movement we see from part-time to full-time. What we see going on is people moving in and learning the job. So you come in as a casual, you have the opportunity to learn the job, then you have a competition and--surprise--this person knows all about the job. That's not really very fair, because not everyone's in a position where they want to take casual employment to learn the job to get into a permanent job. So some of those moves are really not very good. You can have small numbers of them, but you don't want large numbers of them.
That's why I've been concerned about the speed it takes to do things, how efficient we are, and how flexible we are, because what you want is a truly competitive process in which you're not relying on entry through the casual and part-time route. This is how you hear the comment that somebody got a job because they knew somebody. It wasn't that they were all of a sudden put into a permanent job; it was because they were given the opportunity to work as a casual to learn the job and then they would compete.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I do not want to be defending managers, but earlier I said that there's obviously a lack of financial planning. I believe that it is because of this lack of financial planning that some people were hired temporarily or casually, at least this was the case in the past. There's uncertainty surrounding how long funds will last. Given the fact that programs and initiatives had to be set up, people were hired on a part-time basis in the hope that later they could be hired permanently through a competition. I'm not defending managers, but I believe that there must be, first and foremost, some sensible financial planning and integration.
You carried out a statistical study on the length of the staffing process within the public service, which was reported to us in May 2006. According to a survey conducted on the appointment process, between January 2000 and December 2003, the average length of a competition for a permanent position was 22.8 weeks and the median duration was 17.3 weeks. It seems to me that the average time it took to staff a permanent position was rather long.
Ms. Barrados, has progress been made since then? Where are we now in terms of execution time?
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
As I'm listening to your report, I'm remembering how difficult it was for me to hire my staff as a new member of Parliament, so the thought of hiring tens of thousands of staff seems pretty daunting.
There are two areas I'd like to ask you about in my remaining five minutes. The first one is on the issue of employment equity. This is the 20th anniversary of employment equity legislation in our country. It is a goal we hold to make sure that our hiring is fair and democratic and that we're getting the best talent possible. We discussed earlier that there is a generational change taking place starting now, I guess, and over the next few years in the public service. You talked about a report that's going to come later this year.
What I'd like to know is how you will proceed to develop a strategy to take full advantage of the full range of talent we have and make sure we are diverse and fully representative in the public service, and that where barriers are identified there is a strategy to deal with them as quickly as possible.
:
Among things we have done to date in the kind of strategy we've followed, one is that there obviously has to be a lot of information, so we did a lot of work initially to provide information on availability of people and on how to apply, and in working with groups to encourage them to apply. I think we see some of the results of that in the volume of applications: we have the people applying, which may not have been the case in the past. But we did a lot of work on it.
On the executive side, under the old legislation, where we were making the appointments, we looked at the representativeness in each department and challenged departments on why they were not considering targeting some of these positions specifically to members of visible minorities to try to get the numbers up. The decision was finally always in the hands of the managers about that kind of targeting.
As Linda was saying, we developed a pre-qualified pool of EX-1s for entry into the public service, who we tested. We advertised, we tested, and they're executive-ready. We are encouraging departments to make use of this pre-qualified pool, because certainly you can reduce your time to staff when you have a pool of people to draw from. So we're doing that.
Your question about going forward is about what it is we do because the world now has changed. I'm going to be looking a lot to that study to pinpoint for us where the problems are, because I think our strategy has to be developed in this area. We will continue to be very active on that file. We take every opportunity we can to discuss it. We report regularly on where the numbers are. We make it one of the things we always talk about that people have to take into account.
But in terms of specific things, I need to be a little more informed about what the problem is, because I think we have them now coming in. We just have to worry about what level it has reached, and what it is about the process that is taking them out, and what it is you can and should do to try to keep more of them in the process.
Having said that, we still expect appointments to be merit-based and non-partisan.
:
That's a very interesting question and a rather complicated one, because under the previous Public Service Employment Act there was a prohibition. Public servants were not allowed to be involved in political activity, until a case went to the Supreme Court in the early nineties. It said this was too severe a prohibition, and that public servants still had rights, and rights to be politically active, but that it had to be appropriate to their job, and it discussed what the risks were for the public service.
That meant those sections of the old PSEA were struck down. Under the new PSEA we have a new section that gives direction on non-partisanship in the public service and that has left it to the judgment of the Public Service Commission. What that means for us is that we have a role in providing guidance. We have little self-administered tests public servants can do.
It's a function of the nature of their job, the profile of their job, and how closely they may be working with the political level. As I tell people all the time, it's actually a very easy test. If you're working with one party that is the government and you have a change in party in government, does it give you a problem? That's the simple test.
So we provide a lot of guidance and a lot of direction. We have a system now that is directional and informative, and we've been doing a lot of training with people. We give advice, but then we also hear complaints. And if there is a complaint of non-partisanship, we can investigate through this administrative review process, and we can revoke and punish.