SREN Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Subcommittee on Public Service Renewal of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Monday, February 3, 2003

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1740

The Chair (Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.))

»

1745

Mr. John Fryer (Adjunct Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria)

The Chair

Mr. Ercel Baker (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Baker Group International Inc., As Individual)

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1750

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1755

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

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1800

¼

1805

The Chair

Mr. David R. Zussman (President, Public Policy Forum)

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1810

¼

1815

¼

1820

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury (Professor, School of Business, Carleton University, Director of Research, Centre for Research and Education on Women and Work, As Individual)

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

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1825

¼

1830

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

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1835

The Chair

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance)

Mr. John Fryer

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. John Fryer

¼

1850

The Chair

¼

1855

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

Mr. Paul Forseth

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth

½

1900

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ)

½

1905

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Linda Duxbury

Mr. Ercel Baker

½

1910

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Mr. Ercel Baker

Ms. Linda Duxbury

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. Ercel Baker

½

1915

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

Ms. Judy Sgro (York West, Lib.)

½

1920

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

Ms. Linda Duxbury

½

1925

The Chair

Ms. Judy Sgro

Mr. David R. Zussman

Ms. Judy Sgro

½

1930

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

½

1935

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. David R. Zussman

The Chair

Ms. Linda Duxbury

½

1940

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. John Fryer

The Chair

Mr. Ercel Baker

½

1945

The Chair

Mr. Ercel Baker

The Chair

Mr. Ercel Baker

Ms. Linda Duxbury

The Chair

Mr. Ercel Baker

The Chair

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CANADA

Subcommittee on Public Service Renewal of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

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NUMBER 002

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Monday, February 3, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

»  (1740)  

[English]

    The Chair (Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.)): Can we call the meeting to order, please? Bienvenue à tous.

    This is the first meeting of the Subcommittee on Public Service Renewal of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. We have with us Mr. David Zussman, president, Public Policy Forum; Mr. John Fryer from the University of Victoria, and chairman of the advisory committee on labour and management relations in the federal public service; Mr. Ercel Baker, chairman and chief executive officer, Baker Group International Inc.; and we understand that Ms. Linda Duxbury from Carleton University wiill be joining us shortly. Thank you all for coming.

    Before we start I thought it might be useful, considering this is our first meeting, maybe just to give a little bit of an introduction into what it is we're up against or up to. This is a subcommittee of the government operations and estimates committee, and we've captioned our work “A Modern and Accountable Public Service”. Coming out of this, we're hoping we can conclude either that we have a totally modern and totally accountable public service--although I suspect, in the world of continuous improvement, we can always do better, no matter what the state of play.... We want to basically focus to some extent on some of the public service renewal initiatives launched in 1997 and beyond, and to gauge what kind of traction they've had and whether some of those initiatives are effective or not.

    Then also there's a great interest in a number of issues we'd like to look at. We do know we have a somewhat rules-based public service. Given the world we live in, is that the world we have to work in, or can we develop models that are more results-based in the public service?

    As for concepts around accountability, we've had a number of incidents in the last few years that have had a lot of profile in the media--HRDC, the gun registry, the sponsorship issue in Quebec. These things have reopened the debate about ministerial accountability versus public service accountability.

    We've also been talking a lot at the main committee about the need for better horizontal management. This committee would like to look at that from the context of the public service and any sorts of organizational or structural issues that would impede good horizontal management or that would enhance good horizontal management.

    There are a number of other horizontal issues, like succession planning. Is it feasible in the public service? To what extent does it go on? The notion of performance pay, training and development--are these targeted in the right way, etc. It's fairly broad.

    With that, I'd like to start. Have you tossed a coin and decided who will present first?

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    Mr. John Fryer (Adjunct Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria): We thought we would go alphabetically--Mr. Baker, myself, and then David Zussman.

    The Chair: That's fine.

    Mr. Baker, perhaps you would like to begin. Take ten minutes or so, if you need it. Then we'll go to Mr. Fryer, Mr. Zussman, and then we'll have some questions and comments.

    Please, Mr. Baker.

    Mr. Ercel Baker (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Baker Group International Inc., As Individual): Thank you very much. I'll begin by thanking you for the invitation to appear before you.

    In my ten minutes I would like to basically do three things: provide a very brief introduction of myself in the context of my background in public service; talk about one of the major myths, in my view, which relates to the public service and the private sector being the same thing; and then give you a very personal view of what I would consider to be some of the main characteristics of a modern public service.

    In relation to myself, before I left government in 1995 I had served for almost 37 years in the federal public service. Roughly half of that was in what we would describe as human resource functions, the other half in line management functions. I mention that so that you understand that the context of my remarks is from the perspectives of both a human resource practitioner and a line manager. I was also a member of the Fryer committee, and since 1988 I've been an adviser to the Chinese government on the modernization of their civil service.

    The myth that I mentioned, the commonly held view that the public service and the private sector are very similar in nature, is something I have fairly strong views on. I believe there are fundamental differences between the two sectors.

    In the public service, we don't have any immediate indicators of success. The impact of decisions is many years down the road. The working environment of the public service is much more diffuse than the working environment in the private sector.

    Managers in the public service have many more lines of accountability than you would tend to have in the private sector. You have accountability to ministers, accountability to central agencies, and accountability, of course, to the public. I believe that accountability for the management of resources requires a higher level of probity than one might expect in the private sector, simply because these resources are our resources; it is the public who paid us.

    These differences require quite a different approach to recruitment. Public servants must be highly competent--that's common with the private sector--but I believe they have to have a level of dedication higher than what you might expect in a private sector environment. Many of these public servants approach their jobs as a calling, as opposed to a simple job. I think that is something that is absolutely essential to a modern public service. To provide them with that sort of environment they have to be made to feel that their work is valued, that they have a purpose, and that there is a long-term goal. It think it's important that we not think that practices in the private sector are automatically good for the public sector. Some are; many aren't, in my experience.

    As a way of assisting you, because this is the first meeting, I tried to think about what I could say that might be useful to you in your ongoing deliberations. That's why I thought I'd provide a very personal view from what is now 43 years of working experience, 36 and a half in the public service, of some of the characteristics of a modern public service.

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    To me, the first characteristic is and should be obvious--a highly competent, non-partisan service to the public. We mustn't ever forget the real raison d'être of why we are here.

    It would be a public service in which deputy ministers have both clear responsibility and the tools for managing human resources. In that context, it seems to me that deputy ministers must become involved in the management of people rather than delegating that responsibility to the head of human resources. This is one of the major differences between my observation of the private and the public sector.

    In the private sector, the chief executive officer accepts as part of his or her role the need to leverage the rest of the workforce. As a result, the CEO plays a very active part in recruitment, in the setting of goals, and in the development of a stimulating environment for the workforce. In a really modern public service, there needs to be a culture change at the DM level in that respect.

    A modern public service, I believe, should be one that provides for at least the possibility of a career. There is a view that young people are no longer interested in a career but rather only in short-term jobs, and I personally have not observed this. I don't find it to be true. To my mind, it's another of our myths.

    I firmly believe that there are still many highly competent individuals in Canada who can be attracted to a public service that offers, in certain occupational groups, a chance for a career that will allow one to see the results of decisions. Far too often, senior management levels of public services are never there long enough to see the results. I think that's extremely important.

    I'm going to identify three characteristics around what people tend to refer to as staffing. For a number of years I was with the Public Service Commission and I was responsible in general for the staffing system in government. I find it works best for me if one thinks of the staffing system in three pieces: recruitment, lateral movement, and promotion. These are three separate activities, and there are three different reasons attached to why you'd take care with them.

    First, I think a modern public service is one where recruitment is dedicated to finding the best available person, as opposed to simply finding someone who can do the job. I understand that this argues probably for centralized rather than decentralized recruitment of certain occupational groups, perhaps at the management level, certainly at the executive level.

    I believe a modern public service would be one in which lateral movement is truly a management tool for training and development. If this is to happen it requires extensive databases, not just within departments but service-wide. I believe it is one in which promotion processes are protected from both bureaucratic and political interference. I attach equal importance to the two. I believe it is one in which training and development play a significant role in maintaining the competence of the workforce at all levels.

    Finally, if I am to leave you with one message, it would relate to the importance of people in all of this.

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    I would suggest that public sector reform is much simpler than past efforts have indicated. In today's federal public service there are four institutional players that are active in human resource management: the Privy Council Office, the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Public Service Commission, the Canadian Centre for Management Development.

    I would suggest that within the Privy Council Office there is a need for a DM-level position that has responsibility for the care and feeding of the DM community. The DM community are the leaders of the organization, and it seems to me that there should be at least one individual who is not focussing on anything else.

    In a similar way, I believe that in the Treasury Board Secretariat, the employer, there should be a clearly defined chief human resource officer for the service-wide function.

    You would then have four positions: the president of the Public Service Commission; the president of the Centre for Management Development; the chief human resource officer; and the individual in the Privy Council Office. They together would be responsible for making any changes that are necessary.

    I firmly believe that if you have the right individuals in those four positions and those individuals have, first of all, a mandate to make the changes necessary, but perhaps even more importantly a clear expectation from government that it is going to have to happen, then I think you can eliminate the need for the ongoing series of special reform initiatives that characterizes efforts over the last several years.

    Thank you. I look forward to our discussion.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Baker.

    Mr. Fryer.

    Mr. John Fryer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Good evening to members of the committee.

    Let me begin by thanking you most sincerely for the invitation to share some thoughts with you.

    My 40 years of experience has been as an elected public sector union leader, as a professor of labour relations, and as a senior bureaucrat at the provincial level. Those three different careers have given me the opportunity to view the public service from several vantage points. It's gratifying to be given the opportunity to share with you some of the lessons I think I've learned.

    The topic for discussion this evening is Canada's need for a modern and accountable public service. On March 28, 2002, the Prime Minister responded to the annual report of the Public Service of Canada, presented to him by the then Clerk of the Privy Council, Mel Cappe, as follows, and I quote the Prime Minister:

In my view, a competent, non-partisan Public Service, equipped with a modern legislative framework for human resources management, is critical to the Government's ability to serve the needs of Canadians today and in the years to come.

    I completely agreed with that view, so it was with enthusiasm that back in the summer of 1999 I accepted an offer from the then secretary of the Treasury Board, Peter Harder, to come to Ottawa for two years to chair an advisory committee on labour management relations in the federal public service. Such a review was timely, if not overdue, since the current human resources regime in the federal public service was put in place, in large measure, back in 1967, with the passage of the Public Service Staff Relations Act.

    Nine additional members were recruited to assist me with the project. The committee was tripartite in structure, with three members representing the viewpoint of the federal government as an employer, of which Mr. Baker was one of those members; with three representing the interests of the employees and the seventeen different bargaining agents they belonged to; and finally, with three academic members who had studied and written about public service issues for many years, of whom Dr. Linda Duxbury was one.

    I think we once added up that the group, as a whole, had close to 400 years' experience in labour management relations and human resources management.

    With the assistance of a very small but extremely competent staff we produced two reports. The first report was entitled Identifying the Issues, and it was published in June 2000. The second was entitled Working Together in the Public Interest, and it was published in June 2001.

    In the course of our investigation we interviewed a great many people with a wide variety of points of view and we received submissions from most of the bargaining agents. We held round-table discussions, conducted surveys, and used a whole bunch of other techniques to get input.

    I would like to quote from the general conclusion from our first report, found at page 36. As I said, the report was called Identifying the Issues. We quote, as follows, in our conclusion:

The findings from our various sources suggest that in the first 10 to 15 years of public service collective bargaining, participants were generally positive about it. However, with the passage of time and an increase in the extent of unilateral government interventions such as pay freezes and the suspension of bargaining and arbitration, the parties have become more pessimistic about the bargaining system's ability to resolve their problems. The lack of trust associated with long periods of unilateral government action was probably the single most serious concern of both union and management representatives alike.

The complexity of the current collective bargaining system was of particular concern to management representatives, while union representatives were disturbed by what they perceived as management's lack of respect for them.

For unions, other issues such as the narrow scope of bargaining, the continuing high level of designations, the use of back-to-work legislation and the exclusion of many from the right to join unions remain major concerns. Management remains concerned with the length and complexity of the bargaining process and the structure of the PSAC. Both sides complained about the lack of an independent Pay Research Bureau and about the Treasury Board's inability to meet the needs of individual departments and occupational groups because of its “one size fits all” approach to collective bargaining.

    So, having identified the key jointly agreed issues of concern to the parties, my committee began work trying to find solutions. This was an intense as well as a time-consuming process, and my goal was to achieve unanimity from the committee members, since it was felt that the relevance of our work would be seriously diluted if the final report was replete with a bunch of minority dissenting viewpoints. So while trade-offs occurred in committee, unanimity was achieved.

¼  (1800)  

    The second report of the committee, entitled Working Together in the Public Interest, contains 33 unanimous recommendations designed to improve and modernize the labour and management relationship in the federal public service.

    We endeavoured to summarize the key findings of the second report in the executive summary as follows:

This second and final report recommends changes to the labour management relationship that we believe will make it sustainable into the twenty-first century.

To achieve this goal, we propose a new framework based on a collaborative approach to solving workplace problems. Our framework is based on the fundamental principle that joint efforts by employees, their unions and management will improve the quality of services delivered [to the Canadian people].

Consultation, co-development and collective bargaining are all appropriate mechanisms for the creation of “win-win” solutions to workplace concerns.

To help bring about this basic change from an adversarial to a more joint problem solving approach requires rebuilding of trust and willingness on both sides to explore different approaches--in short, what is often referred to as a culture change.

We believe that such change, while difficult, is nevertheless possible. We further believe that the change can be encouraged by revising and modernizing the Public Service Staff Relations Act, by providing for a single redress system for individual workplace complaints throughout government and by establishing a new agency to assist the parties in finding mutually acceptable solutions...[when collective bargaining breaks down].

A good, stable and productive labour management regime should be the foundation to good human resources management in a unionized environment. The employees in Canada's public service and broader public sector are almost completely represented by certified bargaining agents, a situation that we do not expect to change. Finding a way to build effective working relationships between unions and management thus becomes a key public policy issue. In this report our committee believes that it has developed a new framework that, if implemented, will assist in building a solid labour management relationship in the federal public service.

We make these recommendations because it is our considered conclusion that the industrial model of adversarial labour management relations has proven over nearly four decades to be ill-suited, indeed inappropriate, for the federal public service.

Given our diverse backgrounds and strongly held opinions, we truly believe that if we can agree upon these recommendations for change then they are worthy of serious consideration.

We would ask that they be [viewed] as a “package” since they seek to achieve a balanced renewal of the labour management relationship in the federal public service.

We therefore recommend these changes unanimously to all parties concerned.

    A few months after the release of our second report, on October 25, 2001, we were invited to discuss its contents with the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

    On December 7, 2001, Mr. John Williams, MP, the chair of the committee, tabled the committee's 13th report in the House of Commons. The report contained a single recommendation as follows:

RECOMMENDATION: That the report and recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Labour-Management Relations in the Federal Public Service be seriously considered and expeditiously acted upon.

    I have brought copies of that report in both official languages, if members of the committee would be interested.

    To conclude, Canada needs a modern and accountable public service, a public service that recruits bright young people from across the country who are representative of the nation's changing population base; a public service that strives to be a good employer by encouraging productive initiatives by helping employees deal with issues of work-life balance and that provides pay and benefits based upon practices of good employers in both the private and the public sector; and finally, a public service that is governed by an up-to-date human resources and labour-management legislative framework.

    My committee worked very hard for the two years to give the Secretary of the Treasury Board the best advice we could for updating and modernizing the relationship between government, as the country's biggest employer, and its employees, together with their bargaining agents. We sincerely hope that our recommendations will be of assistance to you as your committee studies the critically important task of public service renewal.

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    Those are my opening few words. Of course I also look forward to any questions or comments from members of the committee, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Fryer. We would be interested in receiving copies of the report. I have a copy, which I got off the website. Perhaps you could give those to the clerk.

    Mr. Zussman, would you please address the committee.

    Mr. David R. Zussman (President, Public Policy Forum): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to this committee this evening.

    By way of background, I should tell you that the Public Policy Forum was founded in 1987 with a mandate to promote excellence in government. We are an independent, not-for-profit organization with a membership base from all sectors of Canadian society: business, government, labour, academia, and the voluntary sector.

    Our more than 175 members believe that good government is crucial, in fact pivotal, to achieving a high quality of life in Canada. In our view, a government is only as good as its people who work in it, so good human resources management is crucial to the success of the public sector.

    We've undertaken much research and dialogue aimed at strengthening human resources within the federal public service. Here are a few examples of our work over the past three or four years.

    We have surveyed university students on behalf of the Public Service Commission to help design more effective recruiting programs for young people.

    We have benchmarked and compared modern human resources management practices in seven public, private, and alternative service delivery organizations in order to identify best practices for the federal government.

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[Translation]

    We have gathered leaders of the public and private sectors from all parts of this country in order to compare the effectiveness of work related practices.

    We have put together two round tables in order to test the ideas from the Fryer Study Group on modernization of labour-management relations in the federal public service.

[English]

    We've developed training programs for newly appointed provincial and territorial deputy ministers.

    We've reported on ten of the most challenging leadership positions in the federal public service.

    We were the only external advisers on the design of the recent public service employee survey, and we are now advising on the survey analysis and follow-up.

    We've conducted a number of projects related to e-government. We are currently acting as a secretariat for the external advisory group that advises the Clerk of the Privy Council on modernizing human resources management in the federal government.

[Translation]

    These are but a few of the recent projects. Our aim is to ensure a professional and qualified public service, without any political bias that provides high quality services to the elected representatives and efficient and cost-effective services to the public.

[English]

In fact, that's almost identical to the words that Ercel said a few minutes ago.

    Human resources reform in the federal public sector has been the subject of an astonishing number of studies. By our reckoning, there have been 30 different major reports proposing improvements since the current HR management framework was instituted 35 years ago. Some would say too much talk, too little action.

    In my view, the changes that have occurred have been largely incremental and have not kept up with the rapid evolution of management in the last decade. However, the foundations and guiding principles of the federal public service remain unchanged: one, we need a neutral professional public service that provides advice to elected officials, enforces laws and regulations, and delivers services to its citizens; two, we need an accountability regime with many checks and balances in the system to ensure continuous respect for the public good and the public interest.

    As you know, a number of external pressures are reshaping the role of government: globalization--a rising number of supranational agreements and organizations that affect Canada as a political entity and Canadians as a whole are emerging; decentralization and in some cases off-loading of responsibilities and service delivery to other jurisdictions and sectors; and citizen demands for better service, such as longer hours of service and online service delivery.

    The growing complexity of policy questions requires greater cooperation among different jurisdictions, issues that you, Mr. Cullen, raised in your introduction.

[Translation]

Other concerns are an aging workforce, including a great number of workers who will soon be eligible for retirement; a new generation of workers that have different work related expectations; the increasing diversity of the population, which demands that we pay more attention to diversity within the public service; the expectations that the public service be more keen on innovation and risk taking, while still protecting health and security.

[English]

    The traditional hierarchical structure of the public service makes it difficult to meet these challenges, and the existing legislative framework for human resource management and labour relations has become an impediment to significant change, as the two previous speakers have spoken to.

    As I mentioned earlier, people are at the heart of any human resource regime, and changes must be designed with a view to enabling people to do their work more effectively and efficiently and to achieve greater levels of job satisfaction, which we know is linked to higher levels of productivity.

    At present, HR management in government is facing some critical issues. A very immediate concern, of course, is demographics. We know that a large number of public sector employees will be eligible to retire in the next five years. The recent public service survey indicated that approximately 33% of the total workforce intends to leave the public service within the next five years.

    Current public service executives experience a high degree of stress and health problems compared to the population as a whole, demonstrated by an APEX survey in 2002, almost double the rate of stress and five times the rate of depression.

    The 2002 public service survey revealed disturbing levels of harassment and discrimination within all levels of the public service and a high level of concern regarding work-life balance.

¼  (1815)  

[Translation]

    New employees will have to be hired and the qualifications of those that remain will have to be enhanced. Today's labour market is quite competitive. Professional and highly qualified university graduates are very much sought after.

[English]

    So what measures do we need to be taken? I'll race through these as quickly as I can.

    First, we have “values-based institution”. The preamble of the new legislation should set a positive tone by outlining the set of values and ethics that should underpin public service. I refer you to the United Kingdom example, cited in John Tait's 1996 report, A Strong Foundation. These values and ethics will shape the corporate culture that will guide day-to-day practices and provide public servants with a work environment that responds to the changing world.

    The public service requires more flexible human resource management practices to attract and retain skilled people. Our survey of university students told us that their criteria when seeking a job included interesting work in their chosen field, a minimum term of two years, and a timely offer of employment. Unfortunately, today it takes approximately six months to a year to fill a position in the federal public service. Our study also confirmed that the public service has a relatively poor image among these students. So government must improve their recruiting methods to attract them to government.

    Another factor that was important to potential new recruits and that was raised in the last two surveys of the public service is work-life balance. Flexible working arrangements are needed to meet these concerns.

    I'd also like to next talk about skills shortages, in two areas in particular: the need for greater policy and greater management capacity. While there are some very fine policy analysts and managers in the public service, there simply aren't enough of them. The retirement wave that is taking some of the most experienced and knowledgeable public servants will further exacerbate the shortage of policy capacity. Training courses and mentoring programs are required to meet this need.

    In addition, there is a serious shortage of professionals in the science-related departments. Potential recruits and current employees with PhDs in fields such as biosciences receive job offers from private sector firms with broad scope and attractive financial rewards. As a result, it's difficult for governments to compete.

    If government can't attract the best and the brightest, the quality of the public policies that shape economic success and quality of life will fail. To attract and retain the best, government has to be able to offer interesting work, stability, adequate monetary and performance rewards, all in a timely fashion.

    Next I'd like to talk about leadership and accountability. We tend to think of leaders as being on top, but I believe leadership should be the foundation on which everything else is built. If the public service wants to create a new work culture, public service leaders must embrace and communicate the new culture. They must be held accountable for their responsibilities in human resources management.

    Some steps have already been taken, and Ercel has outlined a couple of possibilities. But I would refer you to the Privy Council Office website, which provides an overview of the performance management guidelines for deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers. I think they are extremely illustrative and offer some interesting possibilities.

    While we're touching on the theme of accountability, there is still a need to find the right balance between paper burden and appropriate tracking. The recent problems at HRDC revealed a few weak accounting practices. However, undue paperwork can stifle worthy initiatives. Attention must be paid to find the right balance between achieving clear accountability for all federal dollars spent and reverting to the famous red-tape approach to bureaucracy, where little gets done or where the cost of the paperwork is greater than the value of the program.

    My next point actually is very similar to the one Ercel raised a few minutes ago. Today, a number of bodies have responsibilities for human resources management: the Privy Council Office, the Treasury Board, the Public Service Commission, CCMD—and a fifth I'd add, Ercel, is the Prime Minister's Office, at times. But many people are unclear about the respective roles of these individuals. I hope in the new work that's going to be brought forward in the coming weeks there will be some clarification, through communication, as to where the responsibilities and the functions of each of these bodies begin and end.

    The last point I'd like to add, just in the interest of time, is that there also is, I think, an increasing need for parliamentarians to have a better understanding of the role of the public service. We have had a number of round tables in recent years and have discovered what we have considered to be a growing misunderstanding in the minds of elected individuals about the roles and responsibilities of public servants.

¼  (1820)  

    As a last comment, Mr. Chairman, the mandate of your committee makes it particularly important for each of you to understand the role of the public service and the people who work there. I recognize that public service human resources reform won't be a big issue in your home ridings, but it is extremely important. Sound human resource management is the underpinning of success in all areas of public administration and policy development, which ultimately contributes to the quality of life for all Canadians. As a result, I hope the members of this committee and your colleagues in the House of Commons will use the debates about the upcoming legislation as an opportunity to become better informed about the Public Service of Canada, the challenges it faces, and the people who work there.

    The legislation should be tested against one proposition, and that is, will the proposed changes enable public servants to meet current and future challenges?

    Thank you for the opportunity to address you this afternoon.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Zussman.

    Ms. Duxbury, thank you for coming over from Carleton, where you just gave a lecture.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury (Professor, School of Business, Carleton University, Director of Research, Centre for Research and Education on Women and Work, As Individual): Thank you. I just finished teaching.

    The Chair: And you raced over here. I appreciate it very much. Are you ready to begin?

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: Sure. I don't know the rules. I missed that part.

    The Chair: I can go over that briefly. You have roughly ten minutes to make a presentation and then we'll get into questions and comments. After your presentation we might break for five or ten minutes because we have a bit of food. If people want to bring some food back, we'll carry on from there.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: That sounds good.

    As a poor academic, I would like to start out by saying that I have a lot of information I can supply, but I'm not going to make twenty copies for you because I'm being frugal with my research money. I would be glad to give it to you electronically, and you can make as many copies as you want.

    That being said, let me just tell you about a few of my credentials and why I feel I have something to say to you. And then of course, if you don't agree with my credentials, you can ignore me and wait until you go for dinner.

    My colleagues and I did a large study in 1991 on work-life balance in Canada, with 37,000 people from the public and private sectors, geographically representative. In 2001 we did a follow-up study funded by Health Canada on supportive work environments and work-life balance and stress. Again, it included 33,000 people, was geographically representative, and covered the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.

    That means that within the federal public service we have 7,000 respondents to our new study. We also have provincial governments, nine city governments, hospitals, school boards, and 37 private sector organizations.

    What this allows me to do that the public service survey does not allow the public service to do is compare, by job type, federal public servants to people who work in other sectors. What it also allows me to do, using exactly the same measurements, is compare how they are today to how they were ten years ago. These are academic measures that are rooted in the literature and have a high degree of validity, etc.

    I have also done a large study on career development in the federal public service and a mirror study on career development in the private sector. So again, I have comparison groups. I don't just focus on the public sector; I focus on all sectors of employment.

    What do we know from the 2001 study compared to the 1991 study? Using the exact same measures, we know that in the federal public service, high commitment, which is loyalty to the organization, willingness to go the extra mile--used in academia and in many private sector organizations as the bellwether measure, like the canary dying--is at 45%. That is a drop of 22 percentage points over the decade. That means that you can't downsize, restructure, re-engineer, shoot your public servants in the press, and expect them to be loyal in return.

    Over the same time period, job stress increased by 15 percentage points, and job satisfaction declined so that fewer than 50% are now satisfied with their jobs. We now have a decline of 20% there.

    Overall stress levels have increased by 22 percentage points; depressed mood has increased by 20 percentage points; absenteeism has increased; benefits costs have increased. I could go on, but with only ten minutes, I won't.

    What is perhaps the most surprising for me is that in the private sector, we have a pyramid. Managers are most committed, most loyal, most satisfied, less likely to be thinking of leaving. Professionals are the second most satisfied, etc., with clerical-administrative support staff being the most stressed, most unhappy, most likely to be thinking of leaving.

    In the federal public service, the situation is completely reversed, which to me is a sign of real problems. The managers are the most likely to be saying they're thinking of leaving. This is the biggest decline in commitment and the biggest differential between managers in the private and public sectors--a differential of 18 percentage points.

    You know, you talk about recruitment and retention, but it's very hard to recruit into an organization when the people currently working there say “Why would you want to work here? What's the problem? Don't you have something else?” So commitment is a very distinct measure.

    We see, too, that the professionals within the federal public service are also much less satisfied than the professionals within any other sector, and the group that's the most satisfied in the federal public service is clerical-administrative support-technical. So we have a complete flipping in the federal public service compared to the private sector and the others.

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    What do I see as the major challenges from my work in a lot of departments? The first is a complete disconnect within the federal public service between the type of worker you now have and the types of structures in place. You have a heavy bureaucratic structure that is top-down, with little consultation. You want the people who work for you to be motivated and energized knowledge workers, who contribute their value-added from what they know. So on the one hand we say to take risks; on the other hand we punish the people who take risks and are wrong. We know that knowledge workers want to be consulted and want to know what happens with their work, and we see a disconnect in that sense.

    In terms of recruitment and retention, the number one reason that managers say they're thinking of leaving is frustration; the second is workload; and the third, which I think is important, especially given what David has said, is because they see a huge disconnect between their values and the values of the organization.

    In the federal public service, one in four people say they think of leaving because of a disconnect in values. Comparatively, 3% of private sector people say they're going to leave their organization because of that disconnect. Why is that? I believe it's very much because the public service talks about values a lot, but the ability to deliver on values is spotty. It depends very much on who you work for, as to what values are actually implemented in the workplace.

    The structure of the workplace right now is going to make it more difficult for you to attract the younger cohort. I have two PhD students who are doing generational differences in work values. We know that those under 30 want balance. They want challenging work you can deliver, but they hate hierarchy, unionization, and all of these frustrations and different steps.

    Another challenge is there's quite a disconnect in the public service between policy and practice. The federal public service has among the best policies of employment in Canada. From our data, the practice depends on who you report to, not which department you work for, what branch you're in, or any other thing. So I think that's very important.

    I tell most of the departments I work with to stop with the policy and start practising. You won't get to practise without measurement and accountability. You can't talk about values and practice and then reward something entirely different. That's again a disconnect between the structure of the organization and the reality of your workforce.

    I forgot to tell you I teach fourth-year change management, I'm designing the masters change course, and I teach the PhD course. You'll have a challenge in implementing any form of change within the federal public service because you have a change-weary workforce. You have a workforce that has been through PS 2000, La Relève, horizontal management, TQM, and last but not least, because it's fresh in everybody's minds, UCS. They see that all these changes have been talked about, but they don't....

    What is UCS? Don't even go there. Trust me. It's the universal classification system.

    The public service has talked about change. In fact, I had a student--I'm happy to give you any of these documents--who did his master's thesis on change within the federal public service. He documented all of the initiatives over the last 35 years and what happened to them. It's very interesting reading.

    From the federal public service perspective, in the studies I've done, they have learned to hang in there--new minister, new clerk, new deputy, new ADM, new initiative. So the federal public service attitude toward changes is: “You've talked change but you haven't delivered. My life is not better. In fact my life is worse.” So unless you put measurement and accountability around anything new you put in, it will not succeed or you will have a lot of challenges.

    I haven't done this sort of thing before. I might be a little blunt for this group, but hey.... Am I doing okay? You asked me what I thought, and I'm telling you.

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You need to really re-examine the fundamentals of the federal public service. You need to examine how it's structured. It's a giant bureaucracy, and in fact you have knowledge workers. It used to be fine when most of the work was routine. The work is not routine. It used to be fine when you weren't focused on customer satisfaction. You're hugely focused on service delivery, and guess who delivers it? It's the public servants.

    We also note that, guess what, if employees aren't happy, they're not really good at customer satisfaction, all right? We know from our private sector research that there's a very strong correlation between the two.

    You have to really look at the reward structure. Right now we reward the policy piece but we don't reward the people management piece. We don't train for the people management piece. And who do we put into people management but the really good operational people? You can see the disconnect. So we need to look at that.

    We need to look at the promotion scheme. We need to look at measurement and accountability, all of these kinds of things, because if we don't make serious and visible changes there, we're not going to get anything different on any of these things.

    In terms of values, I appreciate what David said, but quite frankly, I would be very leery about doing any value-based attempt to change. People are very cynical. The values are talked about, but many people feel that they are not actually being delivered. If I could be so bold, they see that at the ministerial level; they see that at the deputy level; they see that at the ADM level.

    Quite frankly, until the House sees this as an issue, and actually talks about it being an issue and takes ownership of it, if I were you, I just wouldn't even proceed, because people say, “You're asking us what we think, but you don't really care about us; you care about being elected.” There's a big disconnect. You have to make the link between politicians being elected and everybody doing a good job to in fact getting and retaining and motivating a good public service.

    Let me see.... Do you still want more?

    The Chair: Your time is actually up, if you want to wrap up.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: Let me see....

    You're anorexic at the management level. You need mandatory people training for managers, because they don't know about it.

    I recommend very strongly that you start defending your public service in the press, because there is a big issue in terms of recognition and reward. In many cases, public servants feel they're being left to hang out to dry. It's easy. Hindsight is 20:20.

    I guess that's about it.

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    The Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you for your candour.

    We will now break for about 10 or 15 minutes. There's food back there. Anyone in the room, please feel free. If we have to bring food back to the table as we continue, that will be fine as well. So we'll break for about 10 or 15 minutes.

    Thank you.

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---

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    The Chair: I wonder if we could continue, if people are capable of talking and eating at the same time.

    Mr. Fryer, are you ready?

    Mr. John Fryer: Yes, sure, I'm here.

    The Chair: Okay, perhaps we can then start with a ten-minute round starting with Mr. Forseth, please.

    Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

    Welcome to this subcommittee.

    Mr. Fryer, it's been a long and winding road since you stood on the steps of the B.C. legislature and yelled into a microphone, “On behalf of B.C. public servants...”, and you talked to them and said that perhaps they were public-snivelling servants and that you had to defend their rights and that the provincial government was treating them somewhat like a minority in Alabama who were told to go to the back of the bus.

    Mr. John Fryer: It was in 1981.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: You remember that, because I was there and I was part of the group of public servants standing on the lawn as a member in good standing of the BCGEU at the time.

    I see in your comments here that it is your considered conclusion that the industrial model of adversarial labour management relations has proven over nearly four decades to be ill-suited, indeed inappropriate, for the federal public service.

    Wow! What a statement from a gentleman so highly qualified to make such a statement!

    I would like to know whether or not you have gone through a change yourself. If that is the statement, that it's inappropriate, then what is appropriate, especially in our federal context? Where do we need to go in that relationship?

    Mr. John Fryer: In my judgment, what has happened through time is that the public service has become.... In those days, I believe we were fighting for some fairly basic rights for public service workers. In fact, I think at the rally in question the issue at hand was the attempt by the then government to take away cost-of-living indexing from people's pension plans. But now most of those basic economic issues I think have been addressed.

    It appears to me that confrontation is very damaging to the public at large. I think it puts in jeopardy some of the most important things we have in this country, such as our medical system, such as our public education system, because either the students or the patients--or in the case of the public service proper, the citizens--become the meat in the sandwich.

    So my views have changed over those two decades, to the point that I believe in a collaborative, problem-solving approach, one that says we're in this together, that the recipient of our services is the Canadian public, and we should be able to work things out as mature individuals without disrupting those services.

    I want to emphasize that I had ten members on this committee, and Linda was one of them, and our 33 recommendations are unanimous. What we found was that a continuation of the adversarial system is not going to fit. It's only going to cause more political intervention, in our judgment, where governments have to say we can't allow these services to be disrupted. That in turn means that they bring in fairly draconian measures. That in turn generates the kinds of things that were happening in 1981, and people will be on the lawns of legislatures raising hell. It just seems to all of us, and me personally, that this is not the way for the future.

    Attitudes have changed, people have changed. The role of the public sector and the public service has changed. So as we worked this through over a two-year period, we moved in the direction of changing the way in which government and its employees do business. We said the way to go is to have a more collaborative, more problem-solving approach, a more involved role for the employees.

    Other colleagues here tonight have talked to us about bringing in young people. I'm in conflict with former union colleagues, for example, over the fact that I think we're going to have to address the issue of performance pay at all levels in the public service. Because today's young people--and I'm the father of six children myself--do not accept that two people having the same job classification, one working hard and one not working hard, take home the same pay cheque at the end of the month. They just will not accept that, and they won't come into an employment relationship where that's the case.

    So those and other factors over the years have led me to.... I hope it's not just age, you know, that I'm moderating with age. As I said in my introduction, I've been there with the best when it comes to the joined-up shouting and raising hell. Then I had a piece of a career where I taught the subject, and you get to study it from different angles. Then when I got this opportunity to work on this committee and look specifically at the federal public service....

    I had watched the public service from a distance over the years, since the passage of the Public Service Staff Relations Act. When the federal government, in 1967, passed the Public Service Staff Relations Act, it gave collective bargaining to its employees. At the time that was leading edge, because other governments across the country--W.A.C. Bennett, for instance--hadn't and wouldn't.

    Gradually the federal pattern of collective bargaining was followed, in one form or the other, by all the provinces. However, that adversarial system has been seen, in my judgment and the judgment of members of my committee, to be wanting.

    So where do we lead next? Where does the next stage come? That's why we couch our report in terms of we're now into the 21 century and we need a different approach in the 21st century.

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    We hope that the federal government in 2003 will give the same kind of leadership, which subsequently was followed at the provincial and other levels, as they did in 1967. I repeat: I am as worried, if not more worried, about the health sector and about the education sector as I am about the public services proper, because I think confrontation in all of those is damaging and is going to jeopardize those programs, jeopardize the service to Canadians. I happen to feel that if we can get that sea change from the unions and management it will be a better scene.

    For example, one of the things in our report--I'll just give this example and then I'll shut up--is we've said yes, people should have the right to strike, but it doesn't make much sense if all they do when they exercise that right to strike is bring pain to a third party, who are really innocent bystanders. So we have suggested that the government institute a thing we call a public interest dispute commission. We happen to feel that if the parties are assisted to find solutions by people who know the subject area, maybe we can get settlements in the future instead of disruptive work stoppages.

    So, yes, I've changed.

    The Chair: All right then, that was leading into my follow-up question, because we know we're going to get a bill in a few days and it will be largely based, perhaps, on some of your recommendations. Would that then be one of the markers you would look for, that, yes indeed, the work of your group had some success, when you see reflected in legislation something like this public interest dispute resolution commission?

    I will then ask you, Linda, you alluded to this reverse pyramid and really a problem in general morale and the whole issue that I would put under the banner of trust. When you see the bill, when you finally get to see it, what would be the major markers you'd be looking for that you feel would be essential and will get right to the heart of this malaise, this trust issue?

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    Ms. Linda Duxbury: It would be concrete accountability, framework and measurement around the people piece of the job, and that you start tracking the costs of mismanagement. I think there are a lot of costs of mismanagement in the system now that are written off. I see the drug costs, I see the EAP costs, I see the fact that some people actually have retired on the job. All of those things need to be factored in.

    So I would like to see the deputies, and then anybody who has direct reports, have some form of their compensation depend on their ability to manage people. Because when you're dealing with knowledge workers you cannot command or coerce somebody to have a good idea, to be enthusiastic, to give their best, to take risks. You have to provide a work environment that actually allows for that, and supports it, and encourages it. So we have to change the work environment around.

    The other thing I would like to see is mandatory training for the people piece of the job. I was shocked to find out that there's no fundamental management training in things like negotiation, decision-making, conflict resolution, how to give feedback, constructive feedback, positive feedback. For many of those kinds of things they just put managers in the job and expect them to be able to know how to do it. So I think we need to recognize the importance of the management job within public service.

    Also, our data would suggest that you're anorexic at that level, but it's not something the bill will address. I think we need to make it more possible for people to do a good job at the people job and then reward them for doing that, or take them out of the role if they can't.

    The Chair: Were you alluding to the idea that you really can't manage what you're not measuring?

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: That's one of my favourite articles. There's a very famous article also,“On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B”, and that goes hand in hand with the idea that if we want in fact a good public service and we recognize the importance, the difficulties, and the challenges of managing knowledge workers as opposed to the other workforce--which did routine work and transactional stuff and now we have a different workforce--we have to examine measurement and examine accountability and rewards.

    The Chair: Certainly in the world of academia, where there again is a somewhat arm's-length relationship of tenure and so on, often measurements are done, you publish or perish, there are ratings on--

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: There are ratings on everything.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: --student satisfaction and so on. There are ways at getting at those--accretion measures or whatever. Your observation is that there really isn't enough of that incidental measurement.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: There are some concrete ways that have been very successful in other organizations. The 360 is something that I think is essential. Are you aware of this? It says that a well-run business keeps track of four sets of indicators. Money is definitely one. That is the budget piece. There is measurement in accountability around money. There is measurement in accountability around customer satisfaction. Government does both of those very well.

    The other two sets are measurement in accountability around the strategic management piece--where are we now, what are our priorities, what is our planning? The fourth piece is the employee satisfaction piece. That's called a balanced score card.

    The 360 says that any employee should be measured and evaluated by his or her manager, subordinates, clients, and colleagues. All of those evaluations result in the employee's compensation. Most of the best-practice private sector organizations have moved to a 360 and a balanced scorecard approach to measurement, because they say with the knowledge worker it's not just the boss who knows how good a job someone is doing; the client has a direct bearing, as do subordinates. I would like to see something like that, but I'm not sure you're ready for that yet. You're ready, but it's like dreaming.

    The Chair: Okay, your time's up, Mr. Forseth.

    With the indulgence of the committee--I know you have to go off--do you have a quick final question?

    Mr. Paul Forseth: You mentioned these north, south, east, west vectors. On the one of customer or consumer satisfaction, the voter who pays all the bills and in whose name all the public service is supposed to be done, I was just talking in the public accounts committee about public service renewal and trying it from the top. The example was given of Lee Iacocca coming in and saving the basket case of Chrysler, or the new chief executive officer at IBM coming in to save old blue--driving from the top, a new vision, a new leader and all that. But at the same time, where do we put into the equation the customer-driven, from-the-bottom-up approach?

    Being a grassroots reform type of person, I'm always looking at the grassroots, and as a politician, I'm looking at where the community is at. Seeing that we're in public service, we don't have market forces. You can't go to a different store window and say if you're not getting service from the immigration department, you will go to someone else. We look at customer satisfaction. If an average Canadian citizen goes abroad and marries somebody, it takes three years to get landed immigrant status for a no-problem file. The performance standard is absolutely ridiculous.

    We're all going to be filling out income tax forms, and they're unreasonably complicated. When we see the distress of senior citizens trying to cope with these forms, I wonder who's serving whom. We can go on down the list. For instance, I was at a town hall meeting with seniors trying to get veterans benefits. With the initiative of government online and so on, the government is actually retreating and disappearing from clients with the emergence of call centres and all this kind of thing that they just can't cope with.

    We're now going to look at a new bill that's supposedly going to renew the public service, so we hope you'll be staying in the loop, and when the bill comes down, you can give us suggestions about whether we went off the rails or not.

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    Ms. Linda Duxbury: If you invite us back, we'd love to come.

    The Chair: We probably will. We just don't want to get you too tired coming back and forth all the time.

    Thank you, Mr. Forseth.

    Monsieur Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ): I will try to ask some questions and not merely make observations in order to give you the opportunity to express your views, because we will need your expertise.

    Mrs. Duxbury, you are telling us that we must help the public service, that we must help workers in order to show that the government... They are the government's hand. I don't know how you could indicate to us how we could possibly reach our goals, because it is so much different.

    For my part, I come from the private sector; I do not have any knowledge of the public sector. The difference is that in the public sector, officials are accountable to the public at large and not only to their employer. In the private sector, the employer is accountable if the service is not satisfactorily provided. It has been said that there is greater accountability for public servants. I believe that goes without saying, but public servants are not accountable to the same person; they are accountable to the public.

    The problem is that for more than ten years already, the new management has been trying to make changes--you said earlier that you had a whole list of them--and we realize that things are not improving. Is it worse? We do not know. Perhaps it is because we have more information technologies that we are now able to get the information. The goal of the opposition is not to dig up some scandals, but to make sure that the money is being used properly. So taxes must be paid and services must be provided, the benefits that are due must be granted.

    Once again, I am more interested in the practice than the theory, because theoretically, we could pass several legislations without really making any headway.

    How can we make public servants accountable to the public without any interference from the political sector? As we know, the work being done must ultimately allow to reach the goal of the stated policy. I can tell you that we are having discussions directly with the deputy ministers. Each member of this committee is certainly doing the same thing. In a delegation, for example, we meet in private with deputy ministers. At that time, they tell us the truth. They talk to us about a host of things that should not even exist, but the day after, the discussion that we have had with them has evaporated and they toe the line and aim for the expected result.

    How will you have this new public service accept--and I hope that such is the ultimate goal--that they must try to obtain some measure of independence, but that they also must be accountable? It is difficult. I know that with judges, it is somewhat easier. They do not say anything to us, they have decisions to make and we are striving to have independent tribunals.

    I know that what I am trying to tell you is complicated, but it must be even more complicated to try and give an answer to this.

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[English]

    The Chair: Who would like to start with that?

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: It was a very complicated question. I have notes all over my page.

    I think we have to recognize that a change of this magnitude is equally complicated. One little bill or a big bill has to be seen as the beginning—not that you've done it. Okay? So the bill is the starting point, as opposed to a change that has happened. In fact, it will be how you “walk the talk” at all levels after the bill is introduced that will make the difference.

    There's another famous business article for Paul, called “The emperor has no clothes”. It talks about the fact that many people do not speak truth to power, which is what Robert was talking about. It doesn't just happen within the public service. People don't speak truth to power if they feel they'll be punished for it.

    In many cases, this political process makes people feel more concerned about keeping their file out of the press or not embarassing their minister than they are about....There's a hierarchy of embarrassment. You don't want to embarrass your minister, then your deputy, and then your ADM. We should give some recognition to the fact that, while this hierarchy of embarrassment exists, there's also a fear factor.

    I keep saying that we have to defend people in the press. Canadian citizens have to see that public servants are not a cost; they're an asset. Right now, they are always presented as “Look at your money and where it's going to, and how much they're costing you”. We always focus on the cost side of the equation, not the delivery side. All I'm saying is there should be equality in this: yes, public servants cost us taxes, but here's what they give back. I think there should be a lot more talk about what they give us, as opposed to how much they cost us.

    Does this make sense?

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: I fully understand.

[English]

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: It's not easy, though. You're talking five to ten years. Since we might go through several clerks during that time period, I believe the House has to take ownership. If the House doesn't take ownership of this initiative, then public servants are going to see it as another bill and another initiative, but not real change.

    Does anybody else want to comment?

    Mr. Ercel Baker: If I may, all I would really add to that is to re-emphasize the fact that what has to occur is a cultural change. It's not something that comes about by just training and development. It's a whole change in the way all players look at what public service means.

    I mentioned my feeling that there needed to be a particular position in the Privy Council Office that would look after deputies. The last two years of my service was in PCO, and one of the things that struck me was that you have in one position the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Secretary to Cabinet, and the head of the public service. I think it's unreasonable to ask one individual to try to play three roles of that magnitude. I mention the one simply because we're dealing with human resource management, but there is this combination of looking at structural issues, recruitment issues, the environment that we try to have in the public service, and then, what does it take to have a cultural change that will make it all happen?

    I guess I support Linda's view. I think you're looking at a minimum of ten years to have that kind of a change. The difficulty of doing that is the changes that occur in people over that time.

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[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Are we talking about a new period of ten years? We have been trying many different things for ten years already. Are we starting over from scratch? Are there any foundations? I am rather in agreement with what you are telling us. It is a cultural change. After that, you change the organization chart, but you must put in place a new mind set. According to me, what you are telling us is that it will be a new ten years period. What is needed is not to continue what has been started, but rather to start from scratch. Do I understand correctly your presentation?

[English]

    Mr. Ercel Baker: Yes, I would agree with that.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: As somebody who teaches this, you're not at zero. You have initiatives that were talked about but not delivered on, and that puts you actually below zero, in my opinion.

    You have to push the water uphill first, before it can go down.

    Mr. John Fryer: It's an interesting but complex question. In my view, the federal public service prior to the passage of the Public Service Staff Relations Act in 1967 was a completely paternalistic system. You were humble, obedient, respectful, tugged your forelock, and that was the way it was.

    In my view, there have been a number of senior bureaucrats at the deputy minister level who did not want the change in 1967. Parliament passed an act that said “You will now recognize unions; you will now bargain with them.” And I believe there was a pile of deputy ministers who did not agree with Parliament's decision and who essentially sabotaged the change in 1967, so that collective bargaining was grafted on to a paternalistic system. And we're still stuck in that timeframe.

    La Relève was a management-driven exercise; the unions weren't involved. Public Service 2000 was a management-driven exercise; the employees and the unions were hardly involved. And that's why we're trying to say that you have to change that culture. You have to trust the people who work for you. You have to treat them as equals. You have to listen to what they have to say and then respond intelligently to it.

    The fear factor in this public service employee survey that they did showed that the people who work for the federal government are scared of filing grievances because they believe they're going to get punished if they dare to do that. That is the sign of a very unhealthy workplace.

    The other thing I have to say is about you guys, you politicians. You've kicked these public servants around. Not you personally, but politicians generally think that being mean to public servants gets them votes back home. There was a gentleman who was prime minister who said he was coming to Ottawa to give the public service pink slips and running shoes. This image that there are too many of them, that they don't do a full day's work, and that they are overpaid is very much in the public consciousness and we have to change it. We have to tell Canadians that these people work very hard.

    I remember an advertising campaign we did once in British Columbia when I was a union leader there, and the ad I liked was a picture of the back of a jail guard with the cutline “Every day Murray Barnes goes to jail for you”. In other words, for you, the public, he's in there keeping the villains under control. It wouldn't be the end of the world to spend some of those advertising dollars that we spend uplifting the image of some of the jobs our public servants do.

    The reason I've changed--and it's also a response to Mr. Forseth's question--is that we're not going to get there by fining each other. The only way we're going to get there is if we work together, and in order to get there, working together, the legislative framework has to show some trust of the employees and their bargaining agents so we can share the job of getting there.

    So you're righ, we start almost from scratch. Until we put a stake through the heart of paternalism in the federal public service, we're not going to get there.

    The Chair: Mr. Baker, did you want to add something?

    Mr. Ercel Baker: I just wanted to tell a very quick anecdote. In one of my line management jobs I was ADM for operations in the Department Fisheries and Oceans, which was, frankly, not one of the more pleasant positions in government at the time--we were closing the cod fishery in the Atlantic. What made me get up in the morning and come to work, and really feel good about doing it, was a minister who said to me at the end of every briefing, “Okay, that's what the analysis tells us to do. What is the right thing to do?” That was a very small thing, but it was the only time in my 37 years when a minister actually made me feel that he valued my views, my opinion, my judgment. It's that kind of an environment we have to have, and it's a combination of many factors. But I think it's possible. I know it's possible.

½  (1915)  

    The Chair: Thank you. Merci beaucoup.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: I would like to follow up on this. It is true that a cultural change is needed and we are fully aware of it, but in order for these workers to be respected, they must earn that respect. Given what we are seeing at senior levels, I can imagine the number of people who, within that framework, have had to close their eyes or avoid making waves or not provide the information. It will not be possible to do it even in ten years. How can you implement some changes if you want the population to respect the public servants? They must start somewhere, but they will have to work hard as well. They will have to be accountable, and I am not talking only about the deputy minister. Up to what level will we make them responsible? To what degree? It is not only the deputy minister that must be accountable, as you were saying earlier, except that it is always the deputy minister that is required to play the role of human resources director. He must be competent in this area and that. One can not be an expert in everything, that is impossible. In the private sector, there is some specialization. I hope that in the public sector as well, it will be possible to obtain some specific competencies.

[English]

    The Chair: Merci beaucoup.

    Ms. Sgro, please.

    Ms. Judy Sgro (York West, Lib.): Thank you very much to all of you.

    When you sit here you can look at the expertise at the end of this table and the commitment that I know you all have to Canada. We all live here, and the public service and this whole political place of ours here is critical to the success of Canada as a whole.

    And yet, Linda, you made the comment about the public service, by and large, feeling that they don't care about us, that those guys are only here to get elected, and about the disconnect. “Disconnect” is a word I've been using more in the last few months about the disconnect between members of Parliament and the bureaucracy that is necessary to run the place and the role of MPs.

    So you talk about the public service and their frustration. I can assure you that on this side of the table it is just as high about the disconnect in the role of what we're supposed to be doing and our ability to do it.

    You talk about all of these studies. When I hear about more studies, whether or not they are talking about the urban file or other things, it's always that more studies need to be done. As we do our study, there are twenty other people out there doing more studies on the exact same thing, and then where does it all go?

    I haven't been here that long, but I can imagine what the public servants must feel in many ways in their frustration to deliver a service. That whole issue of being at risk, of feeling that they daren't stray from the box the slightest because if they do they will be criticized and chastised and never go anywhere, leads to discouragement rather than recognizing visions and opportunity.

    We have so many studies and this place is so huge and you say it will take ten years. A lot of people who are working here now are hoping that change will come sooner than ten years.

    I try to refer to this here as the Queen Mary, but occasionally I have referred to it as the Titanic and trying to turn it around and making a difference in all the areas you're talking about that we care about: accountability, having some vision, recognizing and holding people accountable. At the end of the day, the elected officials are all accountable. For whatever happens, we're accountable. So you often have the feeling that, well, we're the ones who are going to be held accountable at the polls, but the bureaucracy is protected.

    It takes a building of both. It takes that political will. We're only going to be as successful, frankly, as the civil service helps us to be. The attitudes concern me immensely, and I think mutual respect for each other has to be there in order for this to move forward.

    You mentioned a bunch of ideas that you thought would move things along. If we help to drive this new bill that's going to come out in the House of Commons and try to get the House of Commons to take ownership of this bill, which means we try to get it debated and get our colleagues involved in the debate, it is probably the best thing we need to do right now, over and above what we're trying to do here to move this agenda along. Since we have one coming right ahead of us in a few days, it might be that opportunity to take the information you're giving us and try to drive that home with some changes, perhaps.

    How do we change that feeling for everybody--that they're all part of the same team, that cultural change? We don't get a new prime minister who stands up and says everything's going to change as of today; start thinking differently and we're all going to love you. It doesn't happen that easily.

    So when you want to drive the cultural changes you have to show you're going to deliver change. Going through this bill sooner and making those kinds of changes, would that start to give the public service the feeling that we are serious about making some of those changes that have been in these umpteen reports?

    I guess I throw that out at anybody who wants to comment. I know all the work today was the government's doing.

½  (1920)  

    The Chair: Mr. Fryer.

    Mr. John Fryer: We set up the CCRA, which was the Department of National Revenue and is now where my taxes go. Part of the transition from being in the real public service to this sort of slightly arm's-length public service means that there are adjustments for the employees and also for the unions and the collective agreements.

    They were having all kinds of trouble getting their first collective agreement at the new Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, although the people had all worked before at the Department of National Revenue and had been covered for years, and it was breaking down. So people were rattling the sabres, and they were going to shut the operation down. They asked me to talk to them.

    The head of it, Mr. Wright, called me up and asked if I would come and talk to him about it. When I went to talk to him, he had never met the union leaders that represented his employees. They had never sat down one-on-one and had a talk about it. So I just facilitated some of those meetings, and after that, things sort of came together for them, because they now knew each other on a first-name basis and realized that neither one of them had horns and a tail.

    I know that sounds very simple, but we have to do it a step at a time.

    When people say ten years, they don't mean that suddenly you do all these things, and ten years from now everything is okay. I think what we are trying to say is that you build.

    In your ships analogy, you don't turn one of those oil tankers on a dime. It takes two miles for one of those things to change course. That's really an analogy that fits. The public service has been run in a sort of command-and-control fashion for a very long time. It needs to change, and it needs to become a more cooperative, collaborative, “we're all in this together” thing--including, frankly, the elected politicians and the bureaucrats. We are all in it together.

    We're saying that's probably going to take a decade, if it can be done.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: If I could add some stuff, while we say it will take a decade, that doesn't mean you won't get some visible changes along the way. In fact, you want to have some visible changes, because if you don't, people will give up.

    In business, we have catchy names for everything, so in the private sector we would call that “low-hanging fruit”. So you have to identify some low-hanging fruit that's very visible and easy to pick, but not rotten. We don't want rotten fruit.

    As somebody who works with the public sector, I could identify some real pockets of excellence that you might want to show. For example, I've worked with ITB, Information Technology Branch, in CCRA, 4,500 people. That ADM has just worked wonders. But we surveyed his people every year for two and a half years before they believed change was possible--two and a half years. They kept saying “Yeah, yeah, it can, but you're going to leave, and then we're back to square one”--which is the common belief. That's why I say you guys have to take ownership, because the belief is “You're saying that now, but you're going to leave; I've come from a broken family and I'm afraid it's going to happen again, so I'm not going to love you.” It took him two and a half years.

    At DFAIT, they have a real pocket of excellence in this E-cubed initiative with David Mulroney. Again, it's a pocket. They have great leadership moving it forward.

    I would suggest looking at some of the successes within the public service to see what you can learn from them and move them out. I don't think you need more studies--my God, no. I love doing studies, but I would have to be honest and say I have enough data.

    There are pockets. We have to find out why those pockets work, some case studies of what the key triggers are. We know already from the change literature the key things that you need to have in place.

½  (1925)  

    The Chair: Does anybody else have a comment?

    Ms. Judy Sgro: On the public policy work that you do--and thank goodness you're doing it--when Sheldon spoke to us this morning he talked about, initially, what the Public Policy Forum was supposed to be doing and what it's still doing. But is it filling a void? Is it that we are not doing policy from within enough, so we are relying now an awful lot more on outside agencies to do a lot of work for the federal government?

    Mr. David R. Zussman: I think that one of the things we've recognized over the last few years has been a general decline in the ability of the public service to do good public policy. So there has been an enormous increase in the number of organizations that offer policy analysis to government. This is not a bad development by any means. In fact, I think this is a very positive one, as long as the relationship between the outside organizations and the public service is symbiotic and not confrontational and they are not in conflict with one another.

    Having said that, the Public Policy Forum has signalled on a number of occasions that there's a need to strengthen the policy capacity. One of the inadvertent results of program review was a rather dramatic decline in the size of the policy shops. I think the general view was that the federal government wasn't going to do public policy any longer but sort of live on its existing structures and programs.

    Since there have been surpluses, the government has become very active once again in writing policy and legislation, and it needs good policy-makers. But equally, and this is the point that Ercel made, it needs good managers. We have the tendency to reward policy-makers in the system disproportionately, I think, to their contribution, and we don't recognize people who run programs well. That speaks to the point that was raised elsewhere about rewarding good management and also about recognizing inherent dangers in risk-taking in large organizations. This is one of the real challenges, and one of the points I was going to use later on as a summary point. I think everybody has said one way or another that there has to be recognition and value placed on management almost as an occupation, in the same way that we see policy analysis.

    All of us have mentioned your role as members of Parliament, and I think that's interestin, since we didn't caucus beforehand. I think all of us recognize that as members of Parliament you could play a very instrumental role in making these reform measures real, by asking for them and by either holding people to account or being more encouraging or more demanding in questioning and frankly by paying a lot more attention to the public service, which in effect works for you.

    Ms. Judy Sgro: When we introduce this bill and the members of the public service hear these kinds of conversations, will they say “My goodness, what are they going to do to us now? More talk and less deliverables.” We need a couple of fast wins so that we can start to win some trust.

½  (1930)  

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: I haven't consulted with anyone before bringing this up, but I think that the public service is a fabulous environment for a thing called a dual-career track. For example, Pratt & Whitney, which makes airplane engines, took their best engineers and made them managers. They lost the service of their best engineers, and they gained absolutely horrible managers. It relates to what David was talking about. We need to reward policy people for being good policy people, and we need to let them continue to be good policy people. Similarly, we need to have a track for managers so that we have good people managers.

    Within the public service you have many good specialists who don't want to become managers. They just want to get the better classification and the reward and recognition for being the best specialist, the best policy person. I think that might be a fast win.

    The Chair: John Fryer.

    Mr. John Fryer: My silver bullet has to do with labour-management relations. The unions tell us that they don't feel respected and trusted and that they don't feel they are treated as equals. We made a recommendation in our report that in the future, union meetings should take place in the workplace during working hours. When meetings are held in the evening in a motel downtown, most people don't attend. So it's very easy for a small, unrepresentative group to take hold of the organization and then say they represent the majority. Of course the managers say “No, you don't. I know what my people are thinking, and it's not what you guys are saying.” So we said let these folks have their meetings at work and then come and talk to you about their concerns; as a manager, you can sit down and work with them.

    We made that recommendation 18 months ago, and we were told by the Treasury Board that they were going to develop a policy right away. We've seen nothing so far. So 18 months later nothing has happened with regard to that small silver bullet we thought might help along the way.

    If the new initiative ends up like that, then you will indeed have a reinforcement of all the stuff we've been talking about.

    The Chair: Okay, thank you very much.

    Since this is a small, informal committee I'm going to use a few minutes myself, if that's all right.

    I think what we're identifying here are some fairly large, important issues. And I think it is an opportunity, as Linda and Judy and David have said, to engage members of Parliament. I think we can actually champion some of these changes, which will take some time.

    I have a question for you, Mr. Fryer, and then I'd like to get into the hierarchy and risk-taking, etc., with Mr. Zussman.

    On the legislation that's coming before us, the Public Service Staff Relations Act, it's a question of whether or not it's going to come to this committee or go to the main committee. If you were to put it on a grid, just to put it into context, to what extent does that legislation, as you know it, respond to some of the issues we're talking about today? Is it a two out of ten, an eight out of ten? And I think Ms. Duxbury said it's just a start.

    Mr. John Fryer: Let me make sure I understand the question.

    When it was passed in 1967 it was at the leading edge. So I don't know how you want to apply your scale to that.

    The Chair: No, I'm talking about the legislation that's about to be tabled.

    Mr. John Fryer: I don't know. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the details of the new legislation. I'm saying that at one time the Public Service Staff Relations Act was a leading-edge labour-management legislative framework. It was the work of my committee, essentially, to give the government recommendations for bringing it back to being a leading-edge document in the future. So we'll have to see what is in the bill and whether or not, when you evaluate it, we feel it's back at the leading edge.

    The Chair: Perhaps I'll rephrase it then.

    Mr. John Fryer: Sorry.

    The Chair: I think it's no secret that your report, Working Together in the Public Interest, has certainly influenced a lot of the thinking in terms of the legislation.

    Let's suppose that the bill responded to your recommendations--let's say almost completely. How far would we have gotten, then, to addressing some of the issues we've been talking about in the last hour?

    Mr. John Fryer: In the area of labour management relations I think it would put us back very close to the top of the heap. If we follow these recommendations in the legislation, and that's how it comes down, then I think we'll again be setting an example, because it will be driving, in a labour relations sense, the culture change while other initiatives will be driving at the same time. For example, part of the legislative package is going to be around the Public Service Employment Act.

    My own view is that the labour relations piece is important, because, as Linda said, young people hate unions. The fact of the matter is that the public service is unionized, and as far as my committee is concerned, it's going to remain unionized. We don't see government deciding to have a non-union public service.

    So in a unionized context the Public Service Staff Relations Act becomes the key legal framework within which the culture change takes place, and we'll have to see what it looks like when it comes.

½  (1935)  

    The Chair: In summary, you would say it's a start, but even in HR, in labour relations, albeit an important piece, it is but one piece. We've been talking about human resource development organization, culture, morale, etc.

    Mr. John Fryer: Absolutely. I acknowledge completely that it's only a part, but if you're going to get the employees onside, and if you're going to get their elected leaders onside, it seems to me that's a critical piece. I don't pretend it's the only piece, and I don't pretend it's the most important piece, but it is a fundamental piece.

    The Chair: Okay. That's fair enough, because this subcommittee is looking at some longer-range, more global issues, and this piece of legislation is extremely important, but it's part of the puzzle, and perhaps a key part of the puzzle.

    I'd like to come back to Mr. Zussman and the question of hierarchy. We've been talking a lot at the main committee about the need to manage horizontally better. This thought has struck me, and I've been putting it out to other witnesses as they've been coming forward. In the public service, is it wishful thinking or is it too ambitious to think that we'll be able to redesign the organization, as has happened in the private sector with flatter, less hierarchical organizations, the Skunk Works, a product launch, whatever. And that's the way it seems to be progressing, although these things do come in cycles. If we want to manage better horizontally, is it possible to redesign and reconfigure the organization of government to do that?

    Mr. David R. Zussman: The answer is yes, in large part because so many of the public policy issues one has to deal with now are horizontal in nature. That's not just confined to the federal government, of course, but is often inter-jurisdictional---federal, provincial, and international. That's a challenge we can't avoid.

    But having said that, I think the answer to this lies in some of the comments Ercel and Linda have made--and John as well, but not so much on the labour side--about the need to clarify roles. You should hope to see in this legislation some clarification of the roles among the various players, as Ercel identified, and explicitly, as Linda said, about the accountability and the matrix around these new roles. That can contribute, to a large extent, to getting at some of the challenges that have been raised around the table tonight.

    Horizontality is a fact of modern organizations, where everything is linked to everything else. The challenge is trying to figure out how to organize oneself to respond, and of course there is no ideal way to do it. The simple way to do it is to find an individual, hold them responsible and accountable, give them the resources to do the job, measure the results, tell them afterwards how well they've done, learn from that experience, and move on.

    The Chair: Ms. Duxbury.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: From our work within the private sector we know horizontality works if there's a social component to work. You don't share information with somebody if you don't know they're working on a file that has a similar nature to yours. You don't share your knowledge with somebody if you don't know them enough to trust what they will do with it.

    In the private sector there's no issue with building a social component into work. There's no hue and cry about the cost of the social component: how could you be doing this as a social component? It's the social component that makes the knowledge-sharing possible.

    In the public service we don't have the social component of work, because with taxpayers' dollars, how can you afford to? Then we're surprised when there's no knowledge-sharing across units.

    It goes back to what I was saying, that these silos work when you don't need to share across, but we now need to share and be more fluid in our structures. We have to build a social component into work again if we want that sharing, because a lot of times you don't know what you need to share until you've actually made the contacts.

½  (1940)  

    The Chair: Thank you.

    I have another quick point on risk-taking and risk-aversion.

    Often in the public service when you're going through program review and huge downsizing, the sort of conventional thought is to just batten down the hatches, keep your head down, and hope you survive, which really isn't conducive to a lot of risk-taking. We also see things in cycles.

    John, when we were in B.C. we went through a massive reorganization of the Ministry of Forestry--a huge decentralization. Decentralization comes and goes, because you create more risk when you decentralize decision-making, so if someone goofs off in the district office, then someone makes the case for bringing everything back.

    It was the same thing with the HRDC scenario, where there was clearly not enough due diligence in many of the files. I read something by one of the former deputy ministers who said “Now we're going to put all this red tape on it. Maybe it was a little loose before, but now we're going to be so tight that nothing is going to get done.”

    One part of my brain says that someone up there in a senior position must make a management decision that we're going to tough this stuff out. But I've also been around long enough to know that sometimes you have to make an institutional or motivational change to have an organization stick to a certain element of reasonable risk-taking

    Does anyone have any thoughts on that?

    Mr. John Fryer: My thought would be that you're exactly on the money. That's precisely what happens, or has happened, and Ercel's recommendation for there to be key people in the four agencies, or the five, with the PMO added, with clearly accountable people responsible for the successful management of human resources.

    For example, I'm also on a committee that sets the wages and benefits for the executive community, including the deputy ministers. I think I'm the token public kind of person, because most of them are the CEOs of major corporations in Canada. Deputies have performance contracts right now, and we look at the performance pay issue regarding deputies. But there isn't a single deputy who has the human resource management file on their desk. It's always delegated. At best, it's an ADM that has human resources, and often a director general, but there isn't a single deputy who is held responsible for the management of the people in the department, whether they're happy in their work.

    There is a mindset currently that has to change. So these are the steps that many of us feel, if we start to take those steps, the momentum may gather and we really will get some change, and maybe it won't take ten years. But it's very basic. Do you know what I mean?

    We haven't made the basic changes. We don't have a public service at the moment that says the most important resource is the people who work for us. Lip service gets paid to it, but in practice, that isn't how they see it.

    The Chair: That's amazingly telling, when you think of government being so people-oriented. I know Ms. Duxbury wants to comment, but I just want to ask you something on that.

    Is that because deputies aren't comfortable with HR? Is it something that's too messy? What is it?

    Mr. John Fryer: No, I think it's because deputies see keeping their ministers out of trouble as their major responsibility, and somebody else takes care of the people who work for them.

    The Chair: Okay.

    Ms. Duxbury or Mr. Baker, did you want to comment?

    Mr. Ercel Baker: I would just add to that, it's a combination of things.

    In my mind, the deputy minister's first obligation is to ensure that the minister is equipped to function in the House and function in cabinet, and there's a very strong policy context there, which is largely why, traditionally, deputy ministers have been pulled from the policy stream.

    There is also the dimension of how much can one individual do? I'm very conscious of that when we talk about the change in culture. For a deputy minister to take on the active involvement in the human resource management of people, that may mean, among other things, that a minister is going to have to be happy with working with the assistant deputy minister of policy, on the policy file.

    That's just one alternative you could look at, but it's not as simple as I probably made it sound. But I do believe it's absolutely essential that the senior leader has that active involvement in the human resource management function.

½  (1945)  

    The Chair: We'll go to another round if we want one, but on that, would a deputy minister in the federal public service get involved with some notion of succession planning?

    I know it has to operate differently in the public service, but if you look at the corporate sector, it becomes obsessive. They're planning and plotting succession plans all the time.

    Would a deputy minister have any interest in at least being briefed and having some input into identifying some of the high flyers, some of the management talent that they were trying to bring up?

    Mr. Ercel Baker: I think it goes beyond being briefed. I think they have to be actively involved in it.

    The Chair: But I'm asking, are they doing anything now? They don't even touch--

    Mr. Ercel Baker: Well, not very much.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: It depends on the deputy. There are deputies who see the importance of that, and they do that.

    If I could make a comment back on the risk-averse culture, though, I do believe the federal public service is risk-averse, but it goes back to that what you reward gets done. So the public service says to take risks, but with risks come mistakes. You can't be creative, be innovative, take risks, and be perfect, and the public service tends to be intolerant of mistakes, especially a mistake that hits the press.

    What people hear is be creative, be innovative, but what they see is that people who make mistakes get punished. So it matters what you do, not what you say.

    We use two analogies: we say in the private sector, the squeaky wheel gets the oil; but in the public service, the nail that sticks out gets hammered in. You want some more squeaky wheels, but you can't punish them for being squeaky. That goes back to accountability frameworks: what do you do with people who make mistakes?

    The Chair: Mr. Baker.

    Mr. Ercel Baker: But we must never confuse taking risks with lax management.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: No, it's not.

    Mr. Ercel Baker: Often the reason the mistakes occurred was because some senior manager wasn't on top of it. It wasn't a question of--

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: Risk-taking.

    Mr. Ercel: --risk-taking and creativity.

    The Chair: I don't know if the witnesses are prepared to stay a bit longer.

    Are there any more questions? Mr. Lanctôt? Ms. Sgro?

    I would like to take this opportunity on behalf of all the subcommittee to thank you for coming here tonight and sharing your views, your knowledge, and experience with us. Who knows, we may ask you to come back at some point, but we do appreciate your contributions. It's going to be very helpful in our deliberations.

    Ms. Linda Duxbury: Thank you.

    Mr. Ercel Baker: Thank you.

    The Chair: The meeting is adjourned to the call of the chair.