Thank you very much.
I want to first of all, through you, commend the work that's been done. I think it's vitally important. These are changes that are badly needed.
Stepping back for a moment, it's going to take me a minute to get to a question, if that's okay. I would outline—as I have in conversations that we've had offline outside of this place—what I think the ideal circumstance is, what I'd like to see us move towards, and perhaps you could articulate how far this gets us to that.
My second job, after building fences, was as a summer student for a member of Parliament, so I've had some experience with this over the years.
I think for any organization.... For example, when I was executive director of Heart and Stroke, we would have a centralized job bank. People could look at what employment opportunities were available. We would hold on to resumes, so that if somebody didn't work out for one position, we would hold on to it for maybe another. We would ensure that all positions had job descriptions. If we were creating a new position, the first thing we would do is create a job description, understand its reporting relationships and its requirements, and put it out. You would then have a screening process that HR was involved in, to basically look at whether or not the candidate who was applying for the job—and through an interview and initial screening process—had the qualifications for that job.
These are things that are not available and that I think would be essential as a resource for members to utilize.
We don't have a performance management system. The reality is that at the beginning of the year, there's no goal-setting process. Because you don't have a goal-setting process, then you have no process of evaluation, which means that any of your compensation is not rooted in any sort of evaluation of performance. That is not present.
There is HR support, in the sense that if somebody has a problem, they can call your office. However, there isn't anything that someone in a workforce beyond this place would recognize. You would have an HR adviser you establish trust with, that you have communication with. When you have issues, you would then discover that through conversation.
One of the things we found when we talked to our own employees—there's Women on the Hill and others who've done this work—is that they don't know where to go. They're very reticent to go up to the chief human resource officer or to the whip, or to the chief of staff of the whip. It seems like a very nuclear option to them. Therefore, they're not reporting. As a result, very minor issues become larger and larger before they become something much more significant.
One of the things that concerns me in this—I know I've already relayed it in conversations prior to this meeting—is that if we have eight HR consultants against 2,000 political employees, that makes it pretty hard to do proactive work or trust building. Those eight people might be able to have one half-hour conversation with that entire group of 2,000, but they certainly aren't going to be having the kind of in-depth conversations to build trust, so that on a month-to-month basis, maybe even week-to-week basis, as they're encountering challenges inside of an office, they could have a conversation.
I see that as being two-dimensional. In other words, there is both the need on the part of the member to be able to get support in how to manage their staff or get associated training, but there is, separate and apart from that, the need for staff to be able to have somewhere to go to ask how they manage a situation, either with another staff person or in fact with their employer, if it is indeed the member.
I would see where we could encounter problems. They need to be able to have environmental assessments or to take a 360° view of what is happening within the office environment. They would then be able to come back to us, as a whip, to say that there needs to be training, or there clearly was a lack of understanding of how to deal with this particular management issue. There's the need to be able to understand the source and root of the problems when we have issues that come forward to us.
Obviously, I'm speaking in fast-forward and generalized terms. Really what I'm talking about is professionalizing our HR services so that they would mirror and be reflective of what we see elsewhere in the world. I recognize that this place is special and it is different, but I think that having these kinds of services is essential. I think that in the wake of Bill C-65 and of expectations that people have in terms of what happens here, these things are quite essential.
There's where we are. There's what is in front of us today, and I've articulated—at least from my perspective—the ideal paradigm. How far does this get to that?
Maybe specifically speak to this concern I have that eight people against 2,000 are not.... I mean, basically, they would have to be sitting by the phone waiting in a reactionary way for people to call them. There would be no element of proactivity in that. What would it take to be able to proactively have an opportunity to be reaching out, building that trust and establishing those relationships?