:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to speak to the members of your committee.
You invited me, along with my colleagues, to speak to you today about the demographic challenges facing Canada's public service.
My presentation—and I promise not to speak for the full 10 minutes—will deal with these challenges, and also with other factors that are radically changing the environment of the public service at this time.
First, with your permission, I would like to explain briefly our responsibilities as an agency, because it has a relatively new role with regard to human resources in the public service.
[English]
The agency was created in 2003, when the legislative reforms to the management of human resources in the public service were introduced. Our fundamental raison-d'être is to modernize and foster excellence in people management within the public service.
I arrived as head of the agency last September, which means that I am still relatively new to the wonderful world of human resources. As president of the agency, I am the government's chief human resources officer. Now, government being government, it's never quite as simple as that, and I have to admit we all find that the HR machinery in the government is a bit complex. So while the agency assumes overall leadership on human resource matters in the public service, there are a number of other players with HR responsibilities out there.
First, there's the Treasury Board Secretariat, which has the authority for labour relations and compensation at all levels except the executive, which is a responsibility of the agency. The Public Service Commission has the authority, as you know, for staffing policy and audit, as well as external recruitment. The Canada School of Public Service delivers all the training according to policy that is set by the Treasury Board on advice from this agency. As a consequence, we at the agency have to play a leadership role to bring coherence and direction to all HR matters in the public service, regardless of whether or not the agency itself holds all the actual levers to make things happen in the system.
Given these responsibilities, I was therefore delighted to respond to your invitation to discuss some of the issues we're facing right now, and more importantly, what we're doing about them.
The federal public service, like all other private and public institutions, is facing demographic challenges as the makeup and diversity of the Canadian workforce changes. We need to attract, recruit, develop, and retain our fair share of talent in the face of increasing domestic and global competition for this vital resource. Fortunately, we have a strong base to build upon. The Public Service of Canada is a valued national institution, and interest in working for the public service is very high. The vast majority of our employees are highly dedicated, skilled, and committed to their work. In fact, our most recent survey shows that 96% of employees were strongly committed to making their organization successful. A lot of people in the private sector would be extremely happy with these numbers But the public service is in a state of change. We're facing internal and external challenges that we cannot ignore. I would like to touch on three in particular. They are the changing nature of our work and the labour market, a changing and more diverse population mix, and an aging population.
Starting with the first one, the changing nature of our work and the labour market, we know that the Canadian economy is facing important challenges. Innovation, productivity, and growing competitive pressures are changing the Canadian workforce and the public service. Demand for highly qualified and highly educated workers is growing. Educational levels are rising. The online workplace is a reality for many Canadians.
This evolution has shifted the level and types of skills required in the public service. Based on the definition we use, roughly 58% of our employees are now knowledge workers, whereas ten years ago this number was about 40%. Globalization has in many ways changed the way we do business, and the business we do, and technological advancements have transformed how we provide services to Canadians. ln addition, the talent pool from which we are drawing is becoming more scarce with such a competitive labour market.
[Translation]
Canada's labour force has changed just as the very nature of its work has changed. Recent trends in immigration, the greater participation of women in the labour market, a growing aboriginal population and new language profiles have brought greater diversity to the labour force. According to forecasts from Statistics Canada, visible minorities could make up 21% of the Canadian population within 10 years. Obviously, the labour market will become even more diversified.
Currently, the public service is doing well in dealing with the representation of women, aboriginal people and handicapped persons. We hire members from all of these designated groups beyond their availability on the Canadian job market.
However, we must do much better with regard to visible minorities. This is a designated group that needs more sustained efforts on our part.
Clearly, we have made some progress. The representation of visible minorities went up from 5.5% in 2000 to 8.1% in 2005 and 8.6% in 2006. However, this is obviously not enough.
Of course, we must continue ensuring the geographic representation of all of Canada's regions within the public service.
[English]
The last trend I'd like to address is our aging public service. It's true that Canada's public service is aging. The demographics of the country as a whole show a similar trend.
The current average age of a public servant is 45. This is five years older than in 1990, when the average age was 40. The current average age of a public service executive is 50. The age of a brand-new executive is 46. More than half of all public servants are now over 45.
Departure rates for the public service are traditionally low as compared with the private sector. In the private sector they're at about 8%, and we're at just a little over half that. We expect retirements to peak at around 2013 and then slowly come back down.
The ranks of our youngest employees are strong. Generations X and Y account for 31% of the public service. So we do have a solid foundation to build upon.
We also know that interest in public service jobs is still very high, as Madame Barrados highlighted in her presentation to this committee last month.
If you ask me, therefore, “Is there a crisis looming?”, I will answer, well, maybe, if we were complacent--but we're not. Are we taking these pressures seriously? Absolutely.
One of the first things the Clerk of the Privy Council put on his agenda as head of the public service, when he assumed the responsibility a year ago, was the need to renew the public service. The moment he arrived, Kevin Lynch turned his attention to these challenges and the need for renewal. He launched a process of renewal of the public service based on a practical, results-oriented management approach to achieving and sustaining excellence in the public service. He is doing this with the full support of the Prime Minister and Minister Toews, President of the Treasury Board.
Kevin Lynch created a senior forum of deputy ministers to drive this process of renewal. This deputy minister committee, which is supported by my agency, has been working hard, and has brought forward, after careful analysis of the issues, some specific priorities for action.
[Translation]
We have defined four priority sectors that require our attention.
First, there is integrated planning. We need to understand clearly our current and future activities in the departments and make sure that we have the people and the resources that we need to carry them out. Essentially, we must plan for our needs in personnel at the same time as we make our business plans, so that we can balance our resources.
Secondly, we must deal with recruiting. We must renew and maintain our capacity at all levels. Currently, 86% of our hiring meets our short-term needs, and this is why we need integrated strategic planning. We must also give the public service a better profile as a dynamic and stimulating career choice.
Third, there is training. We must invest in people at all levels, not only to improve their skills, but also to encourage the leadership that we need in the long term.
Fourth, we need a basic infrastructure with systems, procedures and tools that can support planning, recruiting and training. When Parliament adopted the Public Service Modernization Act, it provided us with means for improving our human resource management.
However, we still need to modernize the entire administrative structure that the new legislation involves. This obligation has a great deal of impact, not only on the efficiency and the cost of human resource services, but also on the perception that the younger generation has of the public service, because we want to keep the new recruits with us.
[English]
This concrete and practical action plan, based on these priorities, is fully described in the clerk's most recent annual report, which actually was tabled yesterday in Parliament, and I believe that every member of Parliament has received a copy already. Thank you, Chair.
The report is our road map for public service renewal, and it's our response to the challenges we face as an institution. We will certainly be glad to provide this committee with updates as our work progresses.
In closing, Madame Chair, I hope you will agree with me that yes, there are real challenges before us, but the public service is well positioned to effectively manage future pressures. And while we recognize that there is still a lot of work to do, we are confident in our approach. I would certainly welcome your questions and your comments.
Merci beaucoup.
:
With pleasure. I thought this question would come up. I was trying not to take the time of the committee in my presentation, which was long and detailed, but I'll capture a few highlights.
For example, “integrated planning”: we've noticed it's really important to enhance the capacity of departments to do their business planning at the same time as their HR planning, so we are going to require that departments actually do that. They're supposed to be doing it, and now we're actually going to ensure that departments are in fact doing that.
One of our responsibilities at the agency is making sure they have the tools to do this. When you have a huge department, it can be very daunting to integrate all your HR needs and your financial needs. It's quite an exercise, but it's absolutely essential, and it's the first thing we need to do.
Second, on recruitment, one of the specific things the clerk has asked is that deputy ministers and senior leaders get personally and directly involved in recruitment, to make sure they're in charge of the recruitment campaigns and that there's attention from the top.
We also need to think about senior-level recruitment and bringing in people at senior levels from outside of the public service. That's not necessarily an easy task. The public service is an established culture and it's not necessarily easy to come in at senior levels. We're working on what we need to do to facilitate this. We're also targeting specific areas in the private sector and other levels of government where we might attract some very interesting candidates at those levels.
We're also doing some recruitment pilots for specific needs we have with respect to financial officers, compensation officers. We find that we have a big need for them. We also have a need for personnel officers, and we're recruiting people at that level. There are a number of other initiatives I could talk about, but that gives you a sense of them.
With respect to development, the Prime Minister announced the “Fellows” program. It is a development program aimed at senior levels, to build bridges between the private sector and the public service. It's an exchange program, if you want, of limited duration, to give both sides a sense of what the other universe is.
Every employee in the public service will have a learning plan. That's something that will be appreciated by all. Of course if you have a learning plan you have to explain why you're not following up on the learning or why you're not being given the time to follow up on the learning. That's another very specific example of something we're doing.
I'm sorry to go on. We are doing these initiatives right now, to make sure we give life to these four priorities.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I appreciate your coming in this afternoon. We certainly appreciate your perspective. We've had a number of different perspectives as we've gone through this--I guess I wouldn't call it necessarily an inquiry--looking for information. We certainly don't want to see what's happened out west happen in the federal government.
I'm from a riding in Alberta, and unfortunately even the federal government is now experiencing some difficulty in attracting employees. I know of one specific situation. I know that Canada Post is a crown corporation, at arm's length. I'm sure that you don't have much to do with them, but they've actually had to close a post office permanently, because they were unable to find people who would work for the wages that were offered. Without question, nobody expected this five years ago even, never mind ten years ago, and we don't want to see the federal government come into this type of situation.
I know that Mr. Poilievre is the one who initiated this discussion. We look down the road and certainly don't want to see our generation and our children's generation having to face this major crisis if it isn't looked at. We do appreciate your attention to it.
I know that Madam Barrados had expressed that she was certain that there wasn't a problem--certainly not in the immediate term, but maybe not in the longer term--based on the number of applications that were coming in. I would just implore you to reconsider that methodology, because you know as well as I do that those applications wouldn't come in if all those people got a job. Next week that draw may dry up. For sure, there has to be some other type of mechanism in terms of identifying the possibility of a crisis out there.
The chair has even talked about this, with regard to some of the possible inefficiencies within the federal government. Often many of us, especially MPs, hear from constituents and experience ourselves the problem with red tape, or whatever you call it--bureaucracy--and possibly inefficiencies between different groups.
Just looking at the different arms of our human resources department within the federal government, of course, we have PSHRMAC, which you represent, and then we have the Public Service Commission of Canada, and then we have the Treasury Board Secretariat, and we have the Canada School of Public Service. I know that they each have their own identified mandates and their responsibilities. Then beyond that, we also have the temp agencies that provide the federal government with public servants as well, at least on a term basis.
I'm concerned—and I'd like your comments on this—that we're losing valuable information. I guess I should say, in addition to all of these, we also have all the HR departments within the crown corporations and the different departments. With all of this and all these different groups, are we experiencing the same types of inefficiencies and red tape and bureaucracy in our HR experience as we are in some of the other departments? If so, what information might we be losing? Where one group might be experiencing a crisis, and if the right hand is experiencing a crisis and the left hand doesn't know what's going on, I can just see that this might explode, and we might be in a real situation by having these inefficiencies.
Would you concur that there are possibly some inefficiencies because there are so many different people doing similar activities?
I apologize for coming into this process late, so some of the questions may have already been asked. I'll know, when my colleagues are rolling their eyes, that's the case, so just do cut me off at that point.
On the upcoming retirements, yes, there's a downside in terms of the loss of knowledge, the inability to transfer that knowledge, but to me it seems it also represents a huge upside in an economy where we're losing tons of decent-paying jobs. There is an opportunity within the public service to provide those jobs and to give some hope to young people. I find that side of things really exciting. But of course that kind of change needs to be managed and monitored. So I just have a couple of questions that come out of that.
To my mind, delaying retirements isn't the answer to the problem. It may be a stopgap, but I don't even think it's a desirable stopgap. So I wonder, first of all, whether you might comment on whether that is part of the strategic thinking.
Secondly, I don't believe that EE targets are part of the criteria that are looked at with respect to temporary, casual, or student employees, and yet in many ways those categories, it seems to me, make the natural feeder pool, if you will, into permanent positions. I know that my colleague Mr. Albrecht talked about visible minorities, but employment equity really should go far beyond that.
I'm not sure whether you have statistics, for example, on the disabled community, on native Canadians. The outreach for each of those groups is a little bit different because really the process starts with recruitment, not just with the hiring. If you don't get the right people to apply we'll never change the numbers. So I wonder if you could comment on that a little bit.
Then the last question--because I know that I'm limited in time--is temporary, casual, and student employees are one part of filling job vacancies, but I know there's also been, at least in recent history, a trend towards contracting out, and not contracting out just specific jobs but rather entire projects and the staffing associated with those projects. I wonder if you can comment a little bit about, first, the numbers of potential employees that would affect who otherwise might be in the public service full-time, because they too will take experiences away with them that we then can't benefit from within the public service.
I'm sure that will generate a bunch of more questions, but I'll stop there for now. Thanks.
:
I'll be brief in my answers so I can give you opportunities to have more questions.
On delaying the retirements, it is not an objective of what we're doing to delay retirements. I think, first of all, people who are ready to retire and want to retire should be allowed to retire, and that shouldn't be the issue.
I think the issue arises when you're thinking about knowledge transfer, and there it's a little different. What we need to do is manage those retirements. We may be able to find some better tools than what we have now. We have some, but they're limited in terms of what we have to allow this knowledge transfer.
I'm with you. I think everyone is with you on that one. The objective would not be to delay retirement.
With respect to EE targets, it's not that for casuals we don't have any EE targets--well, that is true--but the issue is more that we don't actually count them. We were saying a little earlier that if we could count them and if we could know, we probably would have a little bit of a different picture from the one we have now.
On the visible minorities in particular, I think we might have a different picture, but we don't count so we don't know. For all the other groups, all the other employment equity groups, we are actually over. If you want to be in the numbers game, we are over the total workforce availability. It's just the visible minorities where we're a little bit under, and we find that's still not acceptable.
Did you want to add something, Karen?