:
Mr. Chair and honourable members, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to discuss our main estimates as well as our report on plans and priorities, or RPP, for the upcoming year. They set out our plans and budgets, and some of the challenges we face.
I am here today with Donald Lemaire, senior vice president of policy, and Richard Charlebois, vice president, corporate management Branch.
This year, we are providing a shorter and more focused report as part of the broad initiative led by Treasury Board to provide more streamlined reporting to Parliament. Should members wish to have more details, supplementary information is readily available on our website through a link to our RPP.
[English]
In our RPP, the PSC's net planned spending for 2009-10 is about $95 million, with a staff complement of 989. In addition, the PSC has vote-netting authority of $14 million for cost-recovery of counselling and assessment products and services provided to federal organizations. Our total planned spending is $109 million.
I would like to point out that our planned spending for 2009-10 is lower than the forecast spending for 2008-09 by about $10.3 million. This is due primarily to the carry-forward from 2007-08 to 2008-09 of $4.8 million, salary adjustments of $2.8 million, the human resources horizontal review reduction of $3.1 million, and other minor offsetting adjustments.
With regard to the horizontal review reductions, we were one of six organizations that participated in the review. As a result, the PSC's annual budget has been reduced, as I mentioned, by $3.1 million in 2009-10. It will be reduced by a further $1.5 million in 2011-12, for a total permanent reduction of $4.6 million.
We feel this 5% cut is manageable through increased efficiencies in our operations. In addition, we have greater authority for cost-recovery. These changes will not affect our capacity to implement our strategic priorities.
Also in 2009-10, a total of $1.5 million has been permanently removed from the PSC's budget because we are no longer doing appeals.
For the longer term, we are showing further reductions in 2011-12. At that time, our planned spending decreases by $8.4 million, which is primarily due to the end of sunset funding for our electronic recruitment and screening system, the public service resourcing system.
[Translation]
Our strategic outcome has remained constant—to provide Canadians with a highly competent, non-partisan and representative public service, able to provide service in both official languages, in which appointments are based on the values of fairness, access, transparency and representativeness.
In support of our strategic outcome, in 2009-2010, we are focusing our attention and resources on five priorities: to put in place a well-functioning, delegated staffing model; to provide independent oversight and assurance to Parliament on the integrity of the staffing system and the non-partisanship of the federal public service; to enable organizations to manage their delegated responsibilities; to provide integrated and modernized staffing and assessment services; and to build on the model organization.
[English]
Our strategic outcome and priorities are supported by four program activities.
Our planned spending under the appointment integrity and political neutrality activity is $10.7 million. This activity includes establishing policies and standards and providing advice, interpretation, and guidance. It also includes administering delegated authorities for 82 departments and agencies, as well as administering non-delegated authorities such as the priority system and political activities regime.
Our second program activity is oversight of integrity of staffing and political neutrality. We have allocated $21.7 million to this area. It includes monitoring compliance with legislative requirements, as well as conducting audits, studies, and evaluations. It also includes carrying out investigations into allegations of fraud in external staffing and allegations of improper political activities.
Our third activity is staffing services and assessment, which accounts for $30.7 million of our spending. Here we also have authority to spend funds generated through cost-recovery. Through this activity we provide assessment-related products and services in the form of research and development, as well as assessment and counselling for use in recruitment, selection, and development throughout the federal public service. We manage systems such as the jobs.gc.ca website that link Canadians and public servants seeking employment opportunities in the federal public service with hiring departments and agencies. We have a growing volume of applications in the recruitment programs we operate, including post-secondary recruitment, PSR, and the federal student work experience program, FSWEP. More than 55,000 applications were received in the PSR's fall 2008 campaign. Last year applications under FSWEP numbered approximately 73,000. The PSC also operates a network of regional offices.
Our fourth and final program activity is internal services, with planned spending of $32 million. This activity provides all central services and systems in support of PSC programs, including finance, human resources, and information technology. Unlike other departments and agencies, our internal services include the offices of the president and commissioners, the library, and internal audit. In order to be more efficient, we have also centralized within this program activity our corporate support services, such as communications and parliamentary affairs, legal services, and acquisition of IT equipment and furniture.
I'd like to turn to some of the challenges in the public service that have implications for public service staffing. They include the increasing rate of departures due to retirements, the growth of the public service, and the high level of mobility that I spoke to this committee about last month. The federal government is Canada's largest employer. We have high interest in public service jobs. We had 22 million visits to our website and we received one million applications to 11,000 job openings in 2007-2008. This level of interest is expected to increase, given the current economic situation.
[Translation]
The modernization of the federal public service staffing system and the ongoing implementation of the Public Service Employment Act, or PSEA, are our responsibilities. We are moving forward with our planning for the five-year review required by the PSEA by December 2010.
In 2008-2009, we initiated a review of the PSC's oversight function by an independent committee, led by Larry Murray. The review confirmed the appropriateness and level of effort of the PSC's current approach to oversight. It concluded there is a need for increased capacity and resources for our monitoring activities. We have accepted the committee's 18 recommendations and three conclusions, and are finalizing an action plan to address them.
[English]
Operating on a cost-recovery basis for more and more of our counselling and assessment services is not without risks. We have grown our cost-recovery operations significantly over the past two years, from $6 million to about $11 million. We are currently in discussions with Treasury Board Secretariat to obtain the financial flexibilities we require to operate more effectively within a cost-recovery environment, such as additional carry-forward authority and front-end financing for investments in developing services and products.
We have created electronic recruitment and assessment tools for external hiring into the public service in support of staffing modernization and the implementation of the national area of selection. From pilot testing in 2002, the PSC has developed and implemented the public service resourcing system. It is now fully operational and accessible by all departments for hiring into the public service. The system costs $7.2 million a year to operate for the government, with a total project expenditure to date of $52 million. Our project has been on time, on budget, and has met all Treasury Board and contracting requirements.
Treasury Board funding for the current project will run out in two years. The current system has limitations, and investment is required to support continued staffing modernization. The system should be expanded to handle all internal staffing transactions. There were more than 67,000 of those last year. Without improvement, we face the brown-out and rust-out of our current tools, and limited advancement in improved reporting. An enhanced system would also be more user-friendly for job seekers, provide better screening and assessment tools, and provide greater flexibility. We believe these investments make good business sense and offer a significant return on investment. We estimate that significant annual savings, of approximately $38 million per year, will accrue to federal departments and agencies through greater operational efficiencies.
The PSC is preparing a submission to Treasury Board to obtain funding for the investment required for a long-term solution and the ongoing operation of this system beyond 2011.
[Translation]
Mr. Chair and honourable members, the PSC is committed to excellence in its work on behalf of Parliament and Canadians. We have received clean audit opinions from the Auditor General the last three years. We have effective internal audit and we received strong ratings by Treasury Board on our management accountability framework. l am encouraged by the progress that has been made in implementing the PSEA, but more work needs to be done. We have presented our plans and priorities for this reporting period, and we have also identified some of our challenges. We are confident we can meet them. Public service renewal, together with the modernization of human resources management, is critical in building a highly competent, professional and non-partisan public service.
Thank you. We are happy to take your questions at this time.
:
Thank you for the question.
We went to the Senate human rights committee and we had the discussion about the problem that I had raised before, that we had difficulty with estimating the actual numbers. We went before the committee and we gave our results in our estimates, which were that we felt, based on our system that I talked about in the opening statement, our inflow of visible minorities in the public service is significantly higher than we had been estimating before. And it is due to how the numbers are collected.
We ended up reporting for 2007-08 that the inflow, or the proportion coming into the public service of all the jobs that are advertised.... So there's a serious limit on this, as it's all the jobs that are advertised. For 2007-08, 17% of the hires through the advertised jobs were members of visible minority groups. The old way of estimating that would have been 9.5%. We have concluded, on that basis, that there has been a serious underestimation of the inflow.
There are a number of issues that become associated with that. The obvious question is, how many people do you have in the public service today? I can tell you about inflow, the number coming in in the last two years, but I can't tell you about the flow for the last ten years to give you an estimate of what there is today. We have to continue to work at that number to try to get a better number.
I can't give you a number for the ones that have come in through unadvertised processes, but 28% of the new hires are through unadvertised processes. So I have a partial number. That partial number gives me good news.
The controversy that you've seen in the media is that there is discomfort with this number. I feel very confident the number is a good number for the limits I have just put around it.
Now, the question is, how do you measure visible minorities? There's a lot of debate around this one. We have settled on how people declare themselves. There are two processes in government that give us these two different numbers, and I talked about this the last time. The number that I am using is what people fill in on an application form. We now have an automated system. Anybody who applies to one of these posted jobs goes through the screens to fill in on this system. One of the things that we call a “forced field”, in that you must answer it to go on and submit your application, is this question: Are you a member of a visible minority group? You say yes or no. You can say no and you go onto the next one. If you say yes, it takes you to what kind of group you're a member of.
Those are the numbers we have used. The other number that is being used is a questionnaire that people are given in government, and it is much more voluntary. It gives me a lower number. We are starting some work to determine exactly how rigorous this process is. I am assuming that if somebody identifies in their application, they would identify when they're at work. But again, that's a question.
One of the things we have seen when we've done our analysis is that for some departments the numbers are very close. So what is on the application form and what people do on that survey that's done in government are very close. The Department of Justice is one that's very close; the two numbers are close to one another. For my own organization, they're not. I could start in our own organization and figure out why there's such a difference.
Madam Barrados, I have every confidence that things are going well with the Public Service Commission in terms of the estimates and the spending. I'm sympathetic that you're coping with a reduction in your budget, but from the briefing you've given us today, you have that under control and you're coping with that, etc.
I'm more concerned about a larger problem that we have in terms of managing the public service, and an article in today's Ottawa Citizen spells it out: that fully 42% of Canada's core public service was on the move last year. Your own report to us suggests there were 67,000 moves within the public service. This journalist calls this “the federal nomads”. At that rate, you'd have a complete turnover of the whole public service every two and a half years. I think this is a symptom of a much deeper and more serious problem of morale and possibly even malaise within the public service caused by a number of fairly predictable causes.
The low morale I think can be traced back to the period when we had seven years of wage freezes in a row, plus slashing, cutting, and hacking of the public service by 30%. Then to add insult to injury, Marcel Masse's last move as the President of the Treasury Board was to scoop the $30-billion surplus out of the pension plan and put it into the government's general revenue fund. The public service pension plan got robbed. Somebody should have called the cops.
With all of these things combined, the public service had to watch one-third of their workforce disappear, and then the government hired back the same people to do the same work at $1,500 a day as highly paid consultants. Their own work was devalued and even vilified by the government of the day, which was scapegoating the public service for the budgetary deficits that they were running. I mean, trying to put all that back together into a well-functioning, satisfied workforce is a super challenge.
With that sort of opening comment, there is a practical problem too. One of the core functions of the Public Service Commission when it was struck almost a century ago was to get rid of nepotism in the hiring process. Seeing as a lot of the staffing issues you're dealing with are actually within the public service, how do you avoid the type of nepotism that gives an unfair competitive advantage? There will be an advantage to the internal applicant, but is it not a fear of nepotism at a different level, or maybe expanding the meaning of that kind of insider advantage? Obviously, through the collective agreements there are opportunities afforded for the internal applicants, but are you not faced with the whole idea of advantage or even missed opportunities in terms of people moving to that extensive degree?
There is one last thing I'll ask you. We were on the road to dealing with classification issues. Treasury Board was in the midst of bargaining when the Harper regime came down and essentially put on a wage freeze and controls, and froze collective bargaining for three years. Do you anticipate any kind of impact on morale associated with what we believe to be a very heavy-handed approach?
:
Perhaps I could just offer a few comments.
The 67,000 moves that I referred to in the opening statement were the transactions that you see inside the public service. A mixture of things would be in that. I share preoccupations about the mobility and movement in the public service. I talked about that at some length the last time I was here.
The whole idea behind having a Public Service Commission was to avoid nepotism, to have a merit-based public service, and to have a non-partisan public service. Hence we have this structure of a Public Service Commission that doesn't take direction from a minister.
We continue in that mode with that same kind of mission and mandate. I continue always to be concerned that we have a merit-based public service, that we're fair, that we're transparent, and that we provide fair access to all Canadians, particularly as we go through an economically difficult time. At the commission we try to support a system whereby we let managers manage while making sure they're on that path. Is the system perfect? I don't think so. Do we still need a strong commission? I absolutely believe we do. I think we function as a deterrent as well as somebody who is policing the system, in some respects.
One of the elements the clerk raises in his report, an element that I feel is absolutely the right direction to go, is this whole area of being concerned about employee engagement. As managers in the public service, we have to be concerned about engagement of the employees so that they feel part of a very important mission. It is a special calling to be a public servant; you have to have a commitment and an interest in working for the public interest and the public good, and we must engage these people to the best of our ability. A series of surveys are going on now to try to measure that. I think that would be a good way to assess how the whole current environment has an impact on employees.
Thank you, witnesses, for coming this morning. We appreciate your testimony and your comments.
I'm going to pass by the estimates for a few minutes. Maybe, if I have some time towards the end, I'll quiz you on a couple of things there.
I don't think it will come as a surprise to you, Madame Barrados, but what I'd like to talk to you about this morning is this whole issue of classification creep. You and I have had discussions both here at the committee and elsewhere on this issue.
As I've done a little bit more reading and have become, I believe, a little more educated on this whole issue—but certainly not an expert yet—I have a couple of questions. We know that there are a number of reasons for the changes in classification. Maybe one would be the organized promotion of certain employees after they accomplish certain levels of education or training, and that type of thing; there are those organized methodologies for moving people through classifications. There is also the understanding around this committee that there is a change in the work that's expected from the civil service. We have a lot of people moving into computer tech positions that are increasingly being created as the decades pass, and obviously as a result there are other jobs that are eliminated as these other jobs expand.
The one that concerns me, though, is this change of classification for retention purposes. That is the one that really concerns me.
First of all, can you identify for us how much of the increase of salary across the civil service last year was as a result of a change in classification? Do you know what the number is, or do you have any idea? Has there ever been a number established regarding that particular change, and would you know what it was in the last year? Would you venture a guess?
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At the prompting of this committee, I actually went back and looked at some previous work I had been involved in on this issue of classification. There was a report by the Auditor General in May 2003 that gives, in my humble opinion, a fairly good description of what the problems with classification had been in the Government of Canada.
It describes the whole story of the universal classification system, which was an effort to modernize and reform classification and ended up failing and costing a lot of money. At the end of the piece, the Auditor General is recommending that there be some clear direction given on how the reforms are going to go forward and how the system is modernized. For it to work well, you must have a system that reflects the work that's in the government, and some of the classification standards are indeed very old.
The Treasury Board then took it upon itself, in part in response to this, I think, to do a big study on pay and classification, which was authored by Jim Lahey. He concluded in his study that this was an area that was really under-managed and that there was a need to manage this system. In his study, he does a fairly lengthy analysis. There was a need to manage this system and also to have clearer oversight of the system. He talks specifically about the requirement to do audits of the classifications.
The best person to speak to this is the chief human resources officer, because this is now squarely her responsibility, and not the responsibility of the commission. To date, we have had movement on trying to update the standard, but it's piecemeal. As far as I know, there is no real oversight and no real audit of the classification system. There is only a requirement that all reclassifications be posted.
The only real control on classifications is for EX-4 and EX-5 positions--these are assistant deputy ministers--where the Treasury Board controls the numbers of these positions. To get a new position created, you need to have a Treasury Board submission.
Ms. Barrados, you are responsible for protecting the integrity of the staffing process. From time to time, I think, and depending on the mandate you receive from our committee, you can conduct audits and investigations to confirm the effectiveness of the staffing system. At this time, more and more private firms that are left to manage the various sectors, whether dealing with purchasing or staff recruitment, as is the case here. As I said earlier, some articles report that there about 140 private companies whose work consists of recruiting staff. That constitutes an enormous cost and it is constantly increasing. I have before me the characteristics of the public service workforce. There are contracts for temporary help and contracts for casual employment. In both cases, section 30 of the PSEA, which stipulates that appointments must be made on the basis of merit, does not apply, which means that there is no guarantee that these people are entitled to work in the position they do: there are not necessarily any official language requirements; a security clearance is not necessarily conducted; and these people do not have to swear an oath, as all public service employees must do. Thus, these four elements do not apply in terms of the integrity of the staffing process, if I am not mistaken. That is very serious.
Also, I think that people who work in temporary service contracts or as casual employees can get caught in a trap in the sense that, not only do they not have job security, but as my colleague said, a certain employment sector might have an unhealthy work environment. It is also possible that hiring a temporary employee could provoke an unhealthy work environment. A few years ago, I introduced a bill to address psychological harassment in the workplace. In several departments, these kinds of situations arise because, when an employee arrives through the back door and works in a position that he or she is not qualified for, people do not know how to remove that person and this could result in potentially unacceptable actions.
Lastly, Ms. Barrados, 80% of indeterminate jobs are apparently filled by employees who previously worked in term positions. Once again, that does not correspond in any way to your mission, vision and mandate. You also said you are very concerned. You find the situation worrisome, since you have “quantified a pattern of recruitment through the temporary workforce.” You said you are “preoccupied with the heavy reliance on building a permanent workforce through hiring temporary workers”.
Mr. Chair, considering all those factors, I would like to move a motion that the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates may ask Ms. Barrados to conduct a study, to take a closer look at the consequences of all the factors I mentioned. Accordingly, we could: first, help her with the excellent work she is already doing; second, have a clear picture of what is going on within the federal public service; and third, examine the costs. It is costing the Canadian government $55 million more.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
:
On this issue of visible minority hiring, we've had occasion to look at two separate reports—three, if we include the Public Service Commission report. One is the report of the Canada Public Service Agency tabled recently by the Treasury Board president. For reasons that weren't really explained, two years were squeezed into one report. In other words, the report from the prior year was delayed, so there are two years. The report on employment equity in the public service in Canada was 2006-2007 and 2007-2008.
There is a second report, which has been referred to here, from the Clerk of the Privy Council, Kevin Lynch. We're all familiar with that one. Both these reports are required by statute, as is your annual report. So now we have three reports coming in. The odd thing is that, on the visible minority statistics, the data did not coincide. And I'm absolutely not alleging any bad faith here at all. You have two different organizations, maybe three, generating data different ways.
But the most important statistic I can find here, Madam Barrados, on this issue comes in the report of Kevin Lynch, where, on the matter of visible minority presence, the numbers fall quite short of market availability. Now, if you are correct, the number of visible minorities in the public service is understated, and that may address part of the problem. There is another piece of data, on page 24 of the English version of the same report, that shows a rather heightened level of visible minority hiring, quite significant. This is the 17.3% figure versus 12.4% market availability. That's significant.
So I don't quite understand. We've got data coming left, right, and sideways. Who should the committee be looking to for a resolution of the data problem, and who's got to carry the can on the missed targets?
Just so all members will relate to this, my particular constituency is about 80% visible minority. They actually really do care about this.