Well, we do have the wording of the motion.
Now that we've found so much common agreement here, I wouldn't want to spend time hypothetically trying to figure out how we might divide on this at a future point in time.
I think the prudent thing to do would be, if members are so advised, to adopt the motion. In terms of what we do with this information, as a committee, the chair would stand, advised by members from time to time. The clerk is here. He's very capable of getting the information distributed. It's not clear what format it will come in, but the clerk will, I'm sure, find something reasonable.
We're fully able to meet, if members so wish, over the summer. That's not a common thing, but committees do it. Just as the government would be closely managing the rollout of the stimulus package in the economic plan, so would the opposition parties and other parliamentarians on the government side want to monitor it just as closely, from their perspective as representatives of the taxpayer.
Having said that, if there's further debate, I'll recognize members. If there isn't, we'll go to a vote.
I don't see any further debate.
We have to adopt the amendment first.
(Amendment agreed to)
The Chair: Thank you.
Now I'll put the main amendment as amended. All those in favour? It's unanimous.
Thank you, colleagues, and I offer a special thank you from the chair.
I think I saw agreement on the government side.
Mr. Chair and honourable members, I am pleased to have this opportunity to meet with you to discuss issues and concerns that have been raised by your committee. I am here today with Donald Lemaire, senior vice-president of policy; Jean Ste-Marie, acting vice-president of the audit, evaluation and studies branch; and Denis Bilodeau, director general, investigations.
This committee was recently provided with information on key issues with respect to your motion of April 2, which I hope will be a useful reference for you. I will be focusing my remarks on the actions taken by the Public Service Commission that address your key concerns. I will also speak briefly about two special reports that were tabled in Parliament on May 14.
Let me begin with the issue of temporary, casual, and term hiring under the Public Service Employment Act. We've done a great deal of work in this area because we continue to be concerned about permanent recruitment through a temporary workforce. When managers recruit from a temporary workforce, the long-term needs of the organization are not necessarily being taken into account, and the values enshrined in the preamble of the PSEA, including access, transparency, fairness, and representativeness, may not always be respected.
We have updated our data on indeterminate, term, and casual hiring, and this information was shared with this committee. We found that there has been some improvement in the area of indeterminate hires, with more public servants having entered directly into the permanent workforce. For 2008-09, 35% of all indeterminate hires had no prior experience in the federal public service, as compared to 16% in 2000-01. However, we also observed a new trend of concern: the increasing proportion of casual workers who move directly into the public service. This rate has increased from 4% to 15% during the same time period.
We will continue to monitor these trends. We will be providing additional information in our 2008-09 annual report.
[Translation]
This brings me to the concerns expressed by members of the committee with respect to the use of private firms for the hiring of temporary help. We share the committee's concerns and feel that there is a potential risk to the integrity of the staffing system. Our challenge is to develop a robust methodology to assess this situation.
I now turn to the issue of employment equity hiring, EE. Our 2007-2008 annual report did not include statistics on the appointment of visible minorities because we were concerned about the validity of the available data.
We have been working with the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer to have a better understanding of the differences between EE recruitment rates derived from using self-declaration information collected through the Public Service Resourcing System, and those derived from employee self-identification processes.
First, we looked at how EE is gathered through self-identification, and compared approaches and practices across several departments. The findings have been shared with you. There is a clear need to improve the way in which the self-identification process is managed. We have identified areas where improvements can be made, ranging from more systematic tracking and follow-up to more timely and focused communications in promoting EE and self-identification.
We will continue to work with the Chief Human Resources Officer. We will also be addressing the results of the drop-off study and providing assessment of the recruitment rates of all EE groups for the past three fiscal years in our 2008-2009 annual report.
Another issue of concern to the committee is classification. The PSC has updated some of the data used in the report Expenditure Review of Federal Public Service Compensation Policy and Comparability to determine if shifts in classification are continuing to take place, particularly in those organizations governed by the PSEA. We found that the trends identified in Jim Lahey's report continue to apply to these organizations.
We found that the earlier trend towards more knowledge-intensive workers is continuing, with various aspects on the occupational structure. As well, some select occupations groups continue to have shifts to higher occupational levels. We also found that the AS, PM and ES groups are continuing to grow while the CR group continues to shrink. We have also provided this information to the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer, as classification falls within their mandate.
[English]
Committee members also wanted to know more about the process that had been put in place to delegate appointment authority to deputy heads and to hold them accountable for the staffing decisions made through their delegations. We have provided detailed information on this process to your committee. We've also outlined areas where the PSC has not delegated specific authority, for instance, with respect to priority administration.
I now turn to the two special reports tabled in Parliament on May 14. The first report concerned the unauthorized possession and use of the PSC second language evaluation tests. PSC is responsible for developing the tests that are used to determine the level of proficiency of public service employees. We have delegated language testing to more than 1,200 language assessors. During 2007-08, more than 69,000 tests were administered to evaluate reading and writing expression.
We initiated the audit after a public service employee who attended the Nec Plus Ultra Language School noticed that practice tests applied by the school were similar to the government tests. Our audit concluded that the NPU Language School was in possession of and used the PSC's SLE reading and writing tests without the authorization of the PSC. The evidence showed that the language school students had much higher success rates on these two tests than the general population. The evidence also showed that NPU gave its students practice tests that were practically identical to the PSC tests.
We take this matter very seriously and are committed to taking the necessary steps to maintain the integrity of our tests. As a result of the audit, the PSC is replacing the two tests that have been affected. We estimate that it costs about a million dollars to develop a totally new test with four different versions. The 114 NPU students who took the tests while on their training over the period audited will be retested by the PSC within the next two years. We are implementing the recommendations of this audit and have undertaken measures to tighten test security.
The second audit looked at how departments have been using the federal student work experience program. It is the primary vehicle through which federal departments and agencies recruit students for temporary jobs. In 2008-09, 80,000 applications were received from students. We received 13,000 requests for student referrals--this includes re-employment--from federal departments across Canada. From those requests, 10,031 students received temporary jobs through the program. The audit concluded that overall, the program is operating reasonably well as a staffing tool. It identified a small proportion of unsatisfactory appointments, including a 6% rate of pre-matching, a significant improvement over a 2003 PSC study which found a 19% rate of pre-matching.
Under this program, students can be bridged into the public service. The bridging mechanisms allow managers to hire recent post-secondary graduates who participated in the federal student work experience program or other student employment programs. The audit also found that one in three student bridging appointment processes were unsatisfactory. Improvements need to be made in how these appointments are made.
Mr. Chair, I trust that the information provided to the committee responds to the concerns that have been raised. The Public Service Commission has been entrusted with a very special mandate by the Parliament of Canada. I would like to thank you and committee members for taking a strong interest in the work of the PSC.
[Translation]
We are now happy to answer your questions.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
And thank you very much, everybody, for being here with us again. Thank you for providing your reports and for providing this information today.
I have a couple of questions. I have a question about the casual workers and this trend that you note in the material provided today. I also want to ask some questions about the language testing issue.
First, in the material you provided today you've observed a new trend of concern, that being the increasing proportion of casual workers who move directly into the public service. The rate has increased from 4% to 15%. Can you speak a little bit to that?
A casual worker is someone who can work a maximum of 90 days in a year. I'm assuming that can be a day at a time or it could be 90 days all together. Could you speak a little bit to what types of work the casual workers do, why you think this trend has changed, and what your concerns are? I know it's awfully difficult to answer all that in a very short period of time, but can you try do it relatively quickly so that I can get to the language testing question as well?
:
In the audit work we did, we were very careful as to where we placed our concern and what our preoccupation was. Our preoccupation was that the school had copies of our tests and used them inappropriately. They used them when they should not have used them. We are not placing blame on the individual students who attended that school; from all the evidence we have, they went there for language training, and the school had a good reputation for training people.
The preoccupation I have here is that when I look at the results, these people who have gone to this training school have a phenomenal rate of exemptions. An exemption is the certification we give people to say that their level of the second language is so good that they never have to be tested again. If your level is really so good that you're exempted, you should have no problem redoing the test, because that's what exemption is supposed to mean.
You asked a question about procedural fairness. We are implementing our statute, which requires us to be satisfied that people meet the requirements of the job; if the requirement of the job is that you have a certain level of bilingualism, we have to be satisfied that you meet that level, and in this case we are not satisfied that it has been met. What we have done with the individual students, however, is give them two years within which to be retested. If there is some special circumstance that we may not have appreciated during our work, we will examine each case individually to see if there should be some other treatment.
Nobody at this point is jeopardized in their current job by those test results. They have a two-year period within which to redo the test, and then they would revert to the results they had before they went to this language training school and had those test results.
:
I don't have any objection to using temporary workers, so I don't want to give the impression that temporary workers are necessarily bad. When you look over time, governments have tended to function with a permanent workforce of 86% to 88%, depending on the time and circumstances. That's pretty standard for organizations. There's always a group that is not part of the permanent workforce, and that's probably how you have to operate. I don't object to temporary workers.
In the case of the two examples you cite, we have advocated consistently that departments do some human resource planning. Human resource planning is more than saying they think they might need some people. They need to really do an estimate, given what their business needs are, to set in motion the hiring of people.
In the case of Passport, they estimated how many people they needed and had an understanding of what the flow of people through their organization was, and many permanent hires were made. That was the decision on how to go ahead. They worked with the commission, and we worked with them to do it.
In the case of EI, which is going on now, the department is making that assessment. If it is really a short-term requirement, there is no problem with hiring temporary workers. I have a problem with it if this is the way you recruit. Members of this committee and others tell me you really want to give all Canadians a chance to enter the public service. Well, you're not going to do it by hiring through your temporary workforce.
:
Thank you. I'm sorry to interrupt.
Ms. Barrados is now having to deal with this million-dollar concept. I just wanted to say that amortization is a great friend of big spenders and big borrowers. We have to amortize this over 70,000 persons per year, times a multiple of years. It probably comes out to a buck a head if you do it. So I don't think we should be too distracted by that.
I did want to say to members that we're going to go into five-minute rounds. We have a number of issues that have come before us here, and I get the sense that we're kind of nibbling around at the edges. Ms. Barrados and her team bring us these issues in reality, but they tend to discuss them in concept. They avoid mentioning names and persons and individual ministries, because that's how they should do that responsibly. That doesn't mean that members here can't ask the hard questions and get the accountability.
We're the one place in the world that has the authority to get the information and drill down. We'll do it responsibly and get this information on the record. I'm not saying anybody's pussyfooting around here, and I'm not saying the Public Service Commission is, but if we're going to drill down and get some response to this stuff, then I think we want to hit a few nails on the head. I'll get some questions of my own, perhaps.
:
There is an element of internal competition. At times, departments even try to outbid each other. For example, doing a certain kind of work in one organization may put an employee at level Y while, in another organization, it is level X. As a result, knowing that, employees can ask to go to a different level.
In a way, it perhaps reflects the classification structure. The positions, and the nature of the work, have changed. So we have to ask ourselves whether the classification reflects those changes. If not, perhaps that is what partly explains the adjustment. The office of the PSC's Chief Human Resources Officer would be better able to answer that question, but there are all kinds of valid reasons. Sometimes, it is in order to provide a salary increase; sometimes, it is to attract people or to compete with other departments when there is a shortage. By definition, an internal market is closed, so internal shortages can be artificial. If things are opened to people from the outside, the shortage is no longer the same, and may even become a surplus. All these factors come into play. I do not think that we are able to talk in percentages and say that 20% is because an artificial shortage has been created internally and another 20% is because of a disconnect between the nature of the task and the way in which it is accomplished.
I remember very well that, when I came back, there was a computer on my desk. Previously, I would give my documents to an assistant who would type them, and so on. Now I do not have an assistant of that kind because it is no longer necessary. What I expect from an assistant is different now, but the classification has remained the same. So we say that the “secretary“ category, for example, has practically disappeared because we do the work ourselves. Now, we need people who are much more skilled in document formatting and presentation. That requires a knowledge of software, or knowledge of other kinds. But we may not have changed the classification, and we need a different classification to recognize the different expertise. All those factors are involved; it is quite complicated.