Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance
Issue 18 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 5, 1998
The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance met this day at 11:00 a.m. to examine the Main Estimates laid before Parliament for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1999 (retention and compensation in the Public Service of Canada).
Senator Terry Stratton (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Today we have with us from the Department of Justice Mr. Morris Rosenberg, Deputy Minister, and Mr. Mario Dion, Assistant Deputy Minister. Welcome.
We have met with a significant number of senior level people in the department including the President of the Treasury Board. Last week we met with General Maurice Baril, Chief of the Defence Staff on the Armed Forces side, and with the assistant deputy minister on the civilian side to find out how they have managed the restructuring, because we are deeply concerned. As you can see from the evidence given by General Baril, there are real problems in the Armed Forces, not just at the level of the lower ranks, but pervasive throughout.
We want to hear from you exactly how you have managed the process because it has been significant for everyone. You might ask why we picked you. The Department of Defence was chosen specifically because there was a civilian side to the Armed Forces and that was kind of unique. We had to pick one other and you were it because we are always intrigued by how you manage. Please proceed.
Mr. Morris Rosenberg, Deputy Minister, Department of Justice: We have distributed a deck with some baseline information on the population of the Department of Justice. I am pleased to learn that the committee is looking into matters concerning the recruitment, retention and compensation of our personnel in Justice, and I welcome this opportunity to appear before you today.
I should like to give you a brief overview of the department before I speak about our particular challenges and our action plan. Mario Dion, who is the Associate Deputy Minister, Civil Law and Corporate Management, will be here to answer some of your questions. I became Deputy Minister in July so to some extent I am learning about some of these issues also. I have some views on how to move forward which I will share with you.
At present, 54 per cent of our employee population is made up of lawyers. Legal secretaries and paralegals comprise an additional 22 per cent, with the balance being in other groups, for a total population in the Department of Justice of 2,880.
The people working in Justice are young or younger compared to public servants in other areas of the public service. Nearly 50 per cent of all of our employees are 39 years of age or younger compared to the general public service where only 37 per cent approximately of employees are less than 39 years old. Only 15 per cent of the Justice work force is 50 years of age or older. In the public service, nearly 20 per cent of workers are 50 years old or older.
We have approximately 1,500 lawyers located in the following areas. We have nine regional offices across the country. We have about 150 lawyers working in each of the three biggest regional offices, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. We have 23 departmental legal services units; the lawyers who are housed with the various departments of government provide legal advice and service to those departments. More than 50 per cent of our lawyers are located in the Ottawa area.
At present, 79 per cent of the lawyers in Justice are currently at the LA1 and LA2A levels; those are the working level lawyers in the department. Since 1994, the population of lawyers in Justice has grown by 16.7 per cent, and this growth is mainly due to new programs such as countering cigarette smuggling, Canada's drug strategy, child support, the integrated proceeds of crime initiative, crime prevention, firearms and so on.
In 1997-1998, the average salary for lawyers was $70,768, and overall the average salary of a Justice employee was $55,301.
I should like to turn to the challenges we face. Many employees in all categories are facing reduced promotional opportunities, particularly since few lawyers, managers or practitioners are eligible to retire in the near future. Our challenge, which is not unique to Justice, is to create career development opportunities for all employees, to increase lateral mobility through job enrichment.
There is an in-house legal education program that allows lawyers to improve or enhance their skills or to maintain their currency in certain areas of the law. We have a visitors and professional interchange program which encourages short-term assignments outside the department and assignments of people from outside, whether from private practice or academia, for example, in the department. We have a continuing management education program as well as a number of other learning programs.
The department's ability to provide meaningful career opportunities for those who are not part of the legal profession is also a challenging issue. Because the population of the department has traditionally been made up largely of lawyers, I have an interest in ensuring that a broader cross-section of expertise is brought to bear on Justice issues. That is one of the things that I should like to work on implementing, especially on the policy side where Justice is involved largely in social policy issues. One needs to have a partnership between people who are expert in the law and people who are expert in other areas of social policy analysis. I want to see what we can do to encourage some further broadening in that regard. At the same time, we will look at how best to encourage and provide training for other professionals and for support staff within Justice. That is one of the issues we need to deal with.
[Translation]
The privatization of government services, the move toward alternate service delivery agencies and the growing number of prosecutions have changed the nature of and increased the demand for legal services. Consequently, the Justice Department must see to it that it has a flexible, competent and dynamic workforce capable of delivering services effectively and quickly and of adapting to changing demands. Other kinds of changes that the department has had to contend with include mounting client expectations, financial constraints and increased client reliance on funding.
[English]
Although new resources have enabled the department to recruit young lawyers, those resources are typically sun-setting resources that are provided to the department for a specific purpose, and those resources disappear when that purpose has been fulfilled. That has led to an increase in the proportion of term versus indeterminate employees. Term employees represent 27 per cent of the department's work force; most are found in the law group, which has 56 per cent of all terms. Seven regional offices have a somewhat higher term population. We are working now to convert some of this term population to indeterminate status, but this is a challenge given the resource constraints we face which create a pressure on the department.
The retention of members from designated groups is another concern. According to figures, our department compares favourably with other departments in the public service, but we are concerned about our ability to retain those employees. Separation for designated groups other than women was also slightly higher in comparison to their representation within the department and to the numbers recruited. Indeed, the department lost more aboriginal people and visible minorities than it recruited during the period from November 1996 to December 1997. That is something we are concerned about and we are looking at a means of dealing with it.
The department is implementing a human resources strategy to equip employees with skills and knowledge that will help them to perform to their fullest potential and contribute to the success of the department. Draft universal competencies have been identified and defined for all groups, while job-based competencies are being developed for specific positions across all fields of legal practice. Implementation of this strategy will begin in 1999. This competency-based approach will facilitate the rapid deployment of legal expertise in response to shifting demands.
[Translation]
The implementation of the new universal classification standard will enable us to make the transition from a classification system geared to the employee to one geared to the work the occupational group does. The likely result of this move will be fewer classification levels and broader classification fields. This strategy ties in with the term and conditions of employment and to the administration of compensation plans for our lawyers over the long term.
[English]
In order to keep our pool of potential leaders, we must ensure that their compensation and benefits remain competitive. That is why I think the recommendations of the Strong report are so important, and that is why we have moved ahead with our extensive review of lawyers' compensation, which assessed the pressing compensation issues facing the department.
Our compensation plan, which was approved by Treasury Board ministers in June 1998, allows us to provide recruitment rates that reflect experience and that respond to internal equity along with equity with those 40 to 50 represented lawyers in the professional institute of the Public Service of Canada.
Furthermore, we are working on a longer-term plan with the Treasury Board. The overall cost of the compensation plan over three fiscal years is approximately $11.5 million in economic increases and approximately $27 million in performance pay increases.
An internal review concluded that the department's attrition figures do not currently suggest a problem. The overall attrition rate for lawyers from 1989 to 1996 was only just under 3 per cent. In 1990 we established special rates of pay in Toronto that allowed us to retain our lawyers in that area, and we are convinced that without those special rates, Toronto would have experienced significant difficulty in recruiting and retaining lawyers.
Our review revealed that we were losing lawyers who had between five and seven years experience. They were leaving in large part because our salaries were not competitive. This type of attrition is very expensive given that those lawyers are at a fully operational level and are able to handle major cases.
[Translation]
We have brought in an employment equity plan to address the problems we have had keeping employees in a designated group on staff, as well as a policy for keeping employees appointed to term positions.
[English]
To conclude, in order to achieve maximum operational effectiveness, we need to recruit and retain highly qualified people. The large population of lawyers presents some important and unique challenges with respect to recruitment, employee career development and training, as well as challenges in the development of management skills. We also need to work on the department to ensure that other professionals and support staff are fully integrated and working at their full potential.
The department is unique in that at both the working and management levels, legal professionals predominate, and that predominance has a definite impact on the department's culture, outlook and the expectations of its employees. I am pleased, therefore, that your committee is taking a close look at all of those issues that will have a critical impact on our future ability to fulfil our mandate, which is the provision of excellent legal services to the Government of Canada.
The Chairman: You seem to have managed the process fairly well in the sense that you recognized early on that in order to keep your people you had to do something. How did you do that? Other departments have suffered significant loss and had to await the Strong Report to do anything, but you did it prior to the report.
Mr. Rosenberg: Our compensation package is quite recent. It mirrors what is happening in the Strong report, certainly at the senior levels. In terms of keeping our people, you will notice that the numbers in Justice have increased. There are some charts that will show you that, as I mentioned in my remarks, that is a result of a couple of things. One, a number of programs that have a significant legal component were implemented. In order to fulfil the new mandate in addition to the existing mandate of the Department of Justice, it was necessary to put in place new resources.
More generally, there has been something of a change in the nature of the political culture of the country since 1982. There is increasingly a tendency to characterize public policy questions as legal questions. That is evident now in some of the big litigation on residential schools or hepatitis C. There is also a sense that public policy issues in the policy formulation have a legal dimension. Lawyers need to be part of the team in developing policy, and not just in the Department of Justice. I think the work of our departmental legal services lawyers is not simply to give one-off legal advice. Increasingly, their job is to work with the client departments in the development of those departments' own policies to ensure that Charter and constitutional considerations, administrative law considerations, and equity considerations are taken into account in the design of those policies. More and more they become fully integrated members of the policy development teams in those departments, which is very exciting for them but also time consuming because they are doing that over and above the duties that they already had there.
The Chairman: Who carries the burden of the budgets? Does each department carry that within their departmental budgets?
Mr. Rosenberg: It is a combination of Justice Department, A-based resources topped up to some extent through negotiations with the individual client departments.
Senator Cools: What is a client department? We are parliamentarians, and it would help us if we used the language of Parliament.
Mr. Rosenberg: Let me explain what I mean by "client department." It is the parlance of lawyers in the private sector who would speak of clients. Technically speaking, there is no separation. The Crown is indivisible; we are all one government. The government is divided administratively into departments and agencies of government. However, at the Department of Justice, we speak of client departments because the departmental lawyers are not members of the Department of Industry or the Department of Finance or the Department of External Affairs. This situation has existed since the implementation of the report of the Glassco commission in the 1960s. The feeling then was that it was important to maintain the independence of legal advice and lawyers should therefore not be beholden for their promotions, et cetera to the people they advise; otherwise, there may be a perception or a tendency that their advice would not be objective.
That is why the Department of Justice has people in place, but they are Department of Justice employees; we draw a distinction between the Department of Justice and the people they advise. The terminology that we use within the department is that they are our clients, which is analogous to the private sector.
Senator Bolduc: They are employees of the Department of Justice, but located in the ministry and serving the ministry. That is why they talk about clients.
Senator Cools: I do not think that in the kind of work we do that sort of language is especially helpful, and perhaps we should examine that at some point in time. Not to belabour the point too much, but it is my understanding that the Minister of Justice has two roles, a combination of roles. One is the role of attorney general and one is the role of minister of justice, but for the most part, when people are working under the responsible office of the minister or the attorney general, as the case may be, departments of justice are not clients at all.
My understanding is that your role is that of servants; you are servants of the law officer of the Crown. That is my understanding of the traditional system. There are two law officers of the Crown, the solicitor general and the attorney general. That is the responsible office under which the lawyers work. I do not think this business about clients is helpful or useful language. Perhaps we could examine that at some point, because the next thing that flows from that, from the point of view of Parliament, is that anything that we may want is then subject to solicitor-client privilege. In essence, you are completely altering the system of governance by changing the language of it.
That is a philosophical point that preoccupies my mind a lot. For the purposes of our discussion, I like terms like "ministries" and "departments" and so on rather than "clients."
Mr. Rosenberg: I do not want to get into a philosophical argument about terminology, but I will give you a partial answer. In the department we are trying to be more sensitive about providing a service-oriented culture. In the final analysis, we will give the best legal advice that we can, but we recognize that although we are independent, there are ways of interacting with people that are less high-handed, more accommodating, more listening, more trying to work in partnership with people. The term "client" is intended to signify that move to a service culture.
The Chairman: You said that the average age of people in your department is 39 years, whereas in the other areas of the civil service the average age is significantly higher. Why are you much younger than anyone else? I should like to hear because that is curious.
Mr. Rosenberg: That is not the average age. It is that we have more people who are 39 years of age and under than the average in the public service who are 39 years of age and under. There is a chart that will show the general demographic profile of our department.
The short answer is that there has been significant recruitment in the past few years because of the issues and the new programs, which I mentioned earlier. We have recruited new people and we intended to recruit young people for those new responsibilities.
The Chairman: Is it not because of the fact that there are too many lawyers out there?
Mr. Rosenberg: No.
Senator Cools: Is it because there are many young lawyers needing experience?
The Chairman: Other departments seem to be able to attract the younger people, but once they have five or six years of experience they leave. You seem to be able to retain them. It would appear that there are challenges within the department.
How do you manage when you have issues coming down the track all the time that you cannot largely expect or anticipate or budget for? That can be a significant cost for you. I know that when the gun control bill came down, there was probably an estimate of what the legal cost would be to the department. Logically, other events, such as the Airbus or the APEC inquiry, must come down the track at you on a regular basis. Do you just apply a global budget without having any knowledge of the events? How do you do that?
Mr. Rosenberg: A big part of the answer deals with the nature of the competencies that we are trying to develop. In order to succeed, the department must be a combination of a number of things. There is a trend towards specialization in all professions, including the legal profession, and there are some areas where we need very deep expertise.
However, we also need people who do not necessarily have a deep vertical expertise, but who have a broad "whole-of-government" expertise. It could be that some of those people will actually enrich themselves, not by spending their entire careers in the Department of Justice, but by going elsewhere. That is what I did. I was in Justice for 11 years, and for the past nine I have been elsewhere. I have not been practising law directly. I have been dealing with law-related issues, as has Mr. Dion who was in the Privy Council Office for a couple of years. We need those kinds of people too.
You never know from one year to the next or one government to the next what the issue of the day will be or where the expertise will be needed. Given those shifting demands, we also need to develop people who have a certain versatility, and we are trying to do that with the new competencies. We should like to have people who are versatile enough to move from one area to another.
For example, when the previous government started negotiating the free trade agreement in 1985, it had to create a trade negotiations office, which was a temporary Canadian model of the U.S. Trade Representatives Office. We did not have a whole lot of experience in the Department of Justice dealing with economic law, but we had people who had analogous experience. We moved those people in. There was a bit of a learning curve, but they had enough of a basis to go in and really, over the course of a couple of years, to become experts in a whole new area of the law.
Similarly, the Charter posed challenges to the Department of Justice, but we had people with analogous experience in public law, administrative law, human rights law, constitutional law, and issues of fairness. That experience helped. We move people, rather than having to create from whole cloth a whole group of people. We want to develop versatility to meet changing demands, and that is one of the major human resource challenges that we have.
Senator Cools: It is a massive department. It must be an enormous challenge to manage the components.
You told us a few things that I found very interesting. You said that the average salary of the department is $54,000 and the average salary for lawyers is $70,000. What is the average salary for lawyers in the country?
Mr. Rosenberg: I do not have that figure at the top of my head, but Mr. Dion may have it.
Mr. Mario Dion, Assistant Deputy Minister, Department of Justice: We have the recent compensation survey done by the Canadian Lawyer and published in June of this year. There is no one complete national average. The salaries depend on the number of years since the lawyers were called to the bar. This survey of 37 firms across the country reports a number of averages which range anywhere from $26,000 in the case of a brand new lawyer at the low end of the scale up to $120,000 for a lawyer who was called to the bar seven years ago or more. It would be misleading to think of one national average.
Senator Cools: I read somewhere that a national average was $80,000. I think that was a Statistics Canada figure. Was there any basis for that?
Mr. Dion: I am not aware of the study that you have in mind, Senator Cools, but that sounds credible. The range is enormous. There is an unemployment problem in some provinces for some of the lawyers so there are people who do not make a living out of the legal profession, and at the other end of the spectrum there are some practitioners who earn in excess of $500,000 a year.
Senator Cools: I am told they are not that many. They are quite few and far between.
You spoke about the lawyers who are what I would call in the service of the department or the employ of the department. When you hire outside legal agents, for example in the Airbus case, from where would you pull that money? What sort of budget is allowed for that within the department?
Mr. Dion: First of all, bear in mind that legal agents are retained only with the approval of the Attorney General. There is no budget within the Department of Justice per se for the hiring of legal agents because in the vast majority of situations a legal agent's fees are defrayed by the department for which the work is performed. The overall annual expenditures that relate to agents involve around $40 million.
Senator Cools: Do you have a separate kitty of money?
Mr. Rosenberg: That is not a stand-alone kitty. That is the aggregate of all of the amounts that are paid.
Senator Cools: That is the aggregate of everything across the nation. Would the legal costs around the Airbus case have been paid out of this $40 million? Would the legal fees to the lawyers or firms that were hired for that case have been paid out of that $40 million budget or could they have been paid out through somewhere else entirely?
Mr. Chairman, we are often not informed of the budgetary steps that are followed when the Crown is sued. We should begin to look at that more deeply because it seems to be happening more and more.
The Chairman: For everybody's sake it would be nice to understand that process and the Airbus case is an example. It could be anything, such as APEC or something else that takes place. Referring to the Airbus case, it is not often that the government is sued to that degree by that type of person. I think that is why Senator Cools is asking that.
Senator Cools: Is there an amount of money?
Mr. Rosenberg: There is no distinct pot of money. There is no distinct budget to pay for agents. Agents are generally paid for by the department that they are representing. The word "agent" is important, because they are considered to be agents of the Attorney General of Canada. In other words, they may not be employees of the Department of Justice, but they are acting on behalf of the Attorney General the way a departmental employee would.
In fact, we have an agent supervision unit to ensure that the agents take positions that are consistent with the general positions taken by the government. We need to ensure coordination, for example, on Charter or constitutional issues. You cannot have nine different positions being expressed all over the country. The funding of that and the decision on the retention of the agent is a decision made by the Attorney General in consultation with her colleague in the particular department. There is no discrete budget, as I said, so that normally if it is the client --
Senator Cools: If you continue to use the word client I will continue to challenge the word agent.
Mr. Rosenberg: I will try to speak about departments of government that have a legal problem or a litigation problem. They will generally fund the agent from within their budget so that the $40 million that Mr. Dion mentioned is an aggregate total of all of the payments from the Government of Canada for agents over the past year.
Senator Cools: The $40 million is used for the different departments. At first I thought that was part of the budget of the Department of Justice.
Mr. Rosenberg: There is no separate budget for agents. Mr. Dion should like to make one qualifying remark.
Senator Cools: When the federal government hires prosecutors to do narcotics cases, which used to be done quite extensively, although I do not know if it is still done, that is a different situation because that is the role of the Attorney General, a prosecutorial role.
On the other hand, in the Airbus case, for example, where people are being sued, the lawyers have a slightly different role. I wish you could separate this use of agents so that we could understand it a bit better, because many of us forget the role of the federal government in narcotics and drug cases across the country.
Mr. Dion: The overall amount varies around $40 million. In fact, it was $42 million in 1997-98. That is the total amount being paid to private sector lawyers conducting business on behalf of the Government of Canada as the agent of the Attorney General.
The distinction that I wanted to make is that of this approximately $40 million, $20 million is used to pay for the prosecution of drug offenses. Half of the money is used for prosecution services out of the drug fund, which is part of the departmental budget, while the other half pays for all kinds of services provided to clients, including advisory work, although that is a small proportion of the overall expenditure, and litigation, representation of the Crown before civil courts.
Senator Bolduc: How does that $40 million for private sector lawyers compare to the total cost of lawyers who are regular employees in the department?
[Translation]
Mr. Dion: The total cost of maintaining our litigation team is in the neighbourhood of $110 million.
[English]
Senator Bolduc: In other words, about 40 per cent of your budget is allocated to contractuals and the rest is for regular employees.
[Translation]
Mr. Dion: It represents approximately 40 per cent of the budget. Add to the $110 million spent by the department on salaries a total of $40 million paid to private sector lawyers or agents doing comparable work on behalf of the government.
[English]
Senator Cools: Do the amounts of money that you are talking about include any settlements or costs?
Mr. Dion: No.
Senator Cools: Let us leave out the drug cases, although I do want to pursue that and I know a lot about it because I used to serve on the parole board. It is quite a tough job that you people have to do in that respect.
Turning now to the business of cases where the department or the Crown has been sued, how does one go about determining what amount should be paid to whom to do what? How are those determinations made? Does the lawyer say, "I will do that case for you at a rate of X dollars per hour"? How do you determine what you will pay him or her to do that job? Is it a mystical process or do you have a grid or something with the amounts and fees that you pay?
Legal Aid has grids, for example. I am curious, because when you choose talent, you are not in bargain basement.
Mr. Dion: We have two sets of grids. We have a grid that applies to civil litigation work and advisory work, and on the other hand, we have a grid that applies to the retention and hiring of standing agents who conduct criminal prosecutions. The scale goes from $60 an hour in the case of a junior lawyer to an absolute maximum of $200 an hour, beyond which one cannot go without the personal approval of the deputy minister. It is based on years at the bar, just like salaries in the legal profession are based on the years at the bar. Those rates have been in effect for several years. They have been frozen since 1991. No increase has been granted.
Senator Cools: I am encouraged by that. Do you have any limits on the amount that will be paid to any individual lawyer or any individual firm? In other words, if there is a hot case, does the case stay with one firm and the bills swell to $2 million or $5 million? Are there rules that say that the business must be shared around the community? I am curious as to how this is done. It is very difficult.
Mr. Dion: There is no overall limit to the amount that can be paid to an individual or a firm in any given year. However, there are maximum hourly rates and there is also a rule whereby a lawyer may not charge for more than 10 hours per day for work. If you multiply 10 hours per day by 365 days, that would be the maximum any lawyer can be paid, but there is no stated overall limit for firms or lawyers.
As to the regulation of the appointment of agents, there is a rule of thumb that work should be distributed fairly.
Senator Cools: Do you pay attention to those sorts of considerations in order to watch out for some firms believing that they are the objects of patronage while others are ignored?
Mr. Dion: The minister pays attention to those considerations.
Senator Cools: Two years ago your predecessor, Mr. George Thomson, appeared before us. We asked him about the amounts of money that were paid to different lawyers in the Airbus case. We have been able to ascertain what amounts were paid to three of the lawyers. However, we were not able to ascertain with sufficient clarity the payment made to a Toronto lawyer named Michael Code for a legal opinion. I forget the exact issue, but I think at the time Mr. Thomson identified an amount of $66,000, which he said included the payment. He later sent a letter to the Chairman in which I believe he said that he had identified $33,000 or $34,000, but that was in that time frame. Now I understand that other amounts were paid later. Could you find out the total amount for me that was paid to Mr. Michael Code? Do you have that information?
Mr. Rosenberg: I do not have that information with me today, but I will undertake to send it to you in writing.
Senator Cools: If you could find out the total amount that was paid and the time frame of the payments, I would appreciate it.
[Translation]
Senator Lavoie-Roux: We received a brief handout from the Parliamentary Research Branch in which certain positions are identified and mention is made of an "accessible, efficient and fair justice system." I will not read the document in its entirety, but how do you explain the fact that the government is refusing to cover the legal costs of the APEC Conference protesters? Your mission should be to ensure that everyone has access to the justice system.
Mr. Rosenberg: I have to say that it is not standard procedure for the government to cover the legal costs of all groups that go to court. Obviously, this is a political decision that was made by the Government of Canada. The decision was announced by the Solicitor General and as a public servant, I am not in a position to challenge it. However, I can say that the government is not in the habit of covering the legal costs of groups that take their case to court. One of the responsibilities of the lawyers serving on this commission is to ensure that the process is fair and equitable. That is the role of the commission and its lawyers. There are ways of ensuring that all of the facts are presented into evidence and that the rights of those being cross-examined are respected.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I think you should redefine your mission, because as I understand it, the Justice Department has a responsibility to ensure a fair, efficient and accessible justice system. I can understand that do not cover everyone's legal costs, but in this particular instance, the government is implicated. What kind of justice is this?
Mr. Rosenberg: As I said, the government is not in the habit of paying the legal costs of every group that goes before the courts. The Government of Canada made a decision in this case and if you do not agree with it, then I respectfully ask that you make your views known to the government or to the Solicitor General. All I can do here is explain the reasons that prompted this decision, and that is what I am trying to do.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I can appreciate that this is a delicate subject for you. However, the fact remains that you are telling us that you respect this decision, even though this case calls into question directly the actions of the government and certain individuals. I could understand if the case involved transportation or some other matter, but in this instance, I think you should adjust your approach, unless you add, except under exceptional circumstances or except in those cases where the government is in conflict with citizens, or some such thing. As things now stands, this position seems wrong. Of course, I may be wrong.
Senator Corbin: I do not understand why you are implying that only the Justice Department or the Solicitor General employ the services of lawyers within the federal government. Some lawyers who work for the Justice Department are not paid by this department or by the Solicitor General. Do you have any idea of the number of lawyers who work in the federal government, for example for the RCMP or other similar institutions?
Mr. Rosenberg: We cannot give you a specific answer to that question today because we do not have the figures, but you are quite right to say that lawyers are employed by other departments. For example we have lawyers employed by National Defence and still others specializing in international law employed by Foreign Affairs. However, there are also Justice Department lawyers with different areas of expertise working closely with the other lawyers in these two departments. Some lawyers are members of the bar, but choose to work in other capacities, for instance, as policy officers, and they do not perform any legal functions as such, although their knowledge of the law is surely a major asset to them. That is what I did for a period of time. I was away from the Justice Department and was responsible for the Bankruptcy Act within the former Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. My legal background proved invaluable to me. However, I was not performing any legal functions as such. Rather, I was working on legislative reform.
Senator Corbin: Could you, or someone else in the federal government, possibly supply us with the names of members of the bar who now work in federal government departments and agencies? Could you possibly get that information for us?
Mr. Rosenberg: I cannot promise, because I do not know if that data is available. If it is, we will try and provide you with an answer to your question.
[English]
Senator Bolduc: A good number of your people work on the criminal cases. That takes up about half of the $40 million, I understand. Does the other half include people working on fiscal cases?
Mr. Dion: The other half comprises a wide range of other services, including tax law, civil issues, and advisory work in any field of the law including tax work.
[Translation]
Mr. Dion: Excuse me, but the government uses very few agents to deal with taxation matters. However, this is not excluded from the $40 million.
Senator Bolduc: For which area of the law, aside from criminal law, do you rely the most on the services of agents?
Mr. Dion: I cannot answer that question. The department has some tables which outline in detail expenditures by field. We could make these tables available to the committee.
Senator Bolduc: That would be interesting to have.
[English]
The object of our committee is to have a look at the problem of the regular employees. I should like to come back to that. You have a pool of about 1,200 lawyers; is that correct?
Mr. Rosenberg: We have about 1,500 lawyers.
Senator Bolduc: Some of them, I suppose about 40 per cent, are in the Department of Justice. The rest are allocated all over the place -- the Department of Transport, Public Works, Indian and Northern Affairs, et cetera. Who are the big clients?
Mr. Rosenberg: Indian and Northern Affairs is a big client in recent times because of the land claims issues and because of the residential schools litigation that we are now seeing. There are some big departments now in government since the reorganization in 1993. Increasingly, issues are taking on legal dimensions. Human Resources Development Canada is a very big client in a number of aspects of its work. Industry Canada is a very big client. There is an awful lot of work related to tax collection and customs, and Revenue Canada takes up something like a quarter of the resources of the Department of Justice.
Senator Bolduc: I suspect that a certain number of those people work in legislation.
Mr. Rosenberg: We have a legislation section. It is divided into two. There is a general legislation section and there is a specialized tax council unit that works closely with the Department of Finance in the preparation of tax legislation.
Senator Bolduc: Is most of that legislative work, the drafting, done by your regular employees rather than by contractual workers?
Mr. Rosenberg: I believe that with rare exceptions, the legislative drafting work of the Government of Canada is done by employees of the Department of Justice who have specialization and who have generally taken another certificate program offered at the University of Ottawa. That is a specialization.
Senator Bolduc: Are those legislative drafters in Justice itself or are they in the various ministries?
Mr. Rosenberg: With the exception of the tax council group, which is actually very small and whose members actually sit in the Department of Finance, the balance of the legislative group is in the Department of Justice in headquarters, and they work very closely with the ministries.
If a department wants to introduce a legislative reform, for example, if Industry Canada wants to change the Bankruptcy Act or Environment Canada wants to change a piece of environmental legislation, our legislative drafters will work as part of a team with policy people in that department and legal services lawyers in that department who understand the specific legal requirements of that department. The drafters are specialized experts in drafting and not experts in the area of law, but they learn quickly. That is part of the skill of being a drafter; they are quick on the uptake as to what the issues are and how to translate what the other government department wants to do and put it in effective legal language.
Senator Bolduc: Many of your personnel are young, and you mentioned that they need possibilities and challenges in the department. There are not many possible promotions, but one of them is to be appointed as a judge. What per centage of your regular lawyers become judges?
Mr. Rosenberg: I do not have the figures here. I would suspect it is very low.
Senator Corbin: Would they all aspire to being judges?
Mr. Rosenberg: Some aspire to that and some aspire to other things.
Senator Bolduc: Do some of your employees move in their careers to positions as deputy ministers in various departments?
Mr. Rosenberg: There are people from the Department of Justice who have served as deputy ministers in other departments or who have become senior officials in other departments, and in fact one of the things that we encourage is more cross-fertilization. For example, now we have an employee who is on secondment to the Treasury Board Secretariat. He is not doing legal work but is taking a few years to get what I call a "whole-of-government" view. If that person chooses to come back, he will bring a different perspective to his work.
Another employee left a few years ago to work at the Privy Council Office, again not to do legal work, but to do work where a legal background is relevant. I want to encourage a certain number of people to have not just that deep specialization, but also to have this broader, whole-of-government perspective.
Equally, we have had people go outside to participate in interchange assignments with universities or private sector law firms or international organizations. It all adds perspective; we have a diverse population and we want to make sure that we are not getting one homogenized view of the world. We will succeed if we have people with a variety of views and we have the opportunity to bring all those views to bear. We will achieve the best law and the best policy in the Department of Justice with a combination of deep expertise and some variety of experience.
Senator Bolduc: Did you say that you allow some of your specialists to teach in universities and college?
Mr. Rosenberg: Yes. Many of them teach in universities or in bar schools all across the country, including in Ontario. We encourage our people to be an active part of the legal community and of the general community, wherever they are.
Senator Bolduc: They do not have the right to practice outside.
Mr. Rosenberg: No, if they are in the Department of Justice, they practice for the government. They do not give advice.
Senator Cools: Senator Bolduc wanted to know if you have any data on the number of people who become judges. I have read studies on that subject, and those studies concluded that the route to an appointment as a judge now is mostly through employment or service to the government or the authorities. The evidence seems to point clearly to the fact that employment in or work for the Department of Justice, either federally or provincially, is the way to go to get to be a judge. The old political route seems to be a thing of the past.
I have taken a very keen interest in the business of how CIDA operates. CIDA is a strange and unique creature, one that really commands and compels parliamentary studies, because in all its years of existence, it has continued to be constituted as per an order in council. It really is an unusual creature in today's community.
We have had a fair amount of discussion in this committee about the question of CIDA's financing of Canadian judges to perform what you would call international activities or off-the-bench activities. It is no secret that that has caused many members of this committee some anxiety.
I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how CIDA funds judges through the Department of Justice? Maybe you do not know because you are a little new. Our understanding is that there is some complicated system whereby money comes from CIDA to the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs for Canadian judges to travel about the world performing whatever it is that they do. We are trying to find out where the money is coming from, how much is coming, who the judges are who perform these duties and how long they have been doing them. Anything you can tell us about that would be helpful. We read a lot about it in the newspapers, particularly through interviews with Mr. Justice Lamer.
Mr. Rosenberg: I do not have that information today. I will see what I can do.
Senator Cools: I thank you for your openness.
[Translation]
Senator Ferretti Barth: We hear a lot these days about labour force accessibility. I wonder if the Justice Department has a problem hiring young people to work in the public service. Young people are no longer interested in working for the government. Each year, the Justice Department recruits young lawyers. How do young persons go about applying for jobs with the Justice Department? Does the department hold competitions? Must applicants have knowledge of specific areas? If so, why do universities with law programs not identify these very specific requirements to encourage young lawyers to go into these fields so that when the time comes, the government has a well-trained pool of talent to draw on? Another alternative would be to set up pilot programs for young lawyers. Once they had completed these programs, they would be offered jobs. There are many students of Italian descent in Montreal. Law graduates often cannot find jobs for three, four or even five years. If they want to work, they must settle for doing the scut work in law firms that exploit them, and there is no opportunity for them to find work with the Justice Department.
Mr. Rosenberg: I will try to answer your question concerning recruitment. Other areas of the public service do not recruit enough young or middle-aged workers. It always comes down to a question of resources. There is no guarantee that this will always be the case. We must always bear in mind that as an organization, we must have the ability to renew ourselves. The best way of doing that is to ensure that we have access to external resources and to new ideas. It is important for young people to have these opportunities, but it is equally important for persons who do similar work in other areas, whether lawyers in private practice, university professors or even professionals who are not legal experts to have the same opportunity to bring something to our work. This should be one of our objectives. I cannot tell you right this minute exactly how we are going to achieve this objective, but it is important that we not lose sight of it. As for specific incentives, that is an interesting idea and I will give it further consideration. It is important to remember that a law student must have some knowledge of public law, of charter and constitutional law, of contract law and so forth. A sound legal education provides students with that kind of background. Should we be telling students to specialize in a particular field? I cannot answer that question. There is always competition in the field of securities and in other similar areas because it is a sure bet that jobs will be available in three or four years. We need people who are capable of adapting to change. We are not looking for individuals with specific expertise. Rarely do we recruit young persons based on their specialized knowledge of a particular area because by definition, young persons are not experts. What we want are people who are capable of learning on the job and of adapting to change. Should the Justice Department be giving out more information about the programs, roles and responsibilities and mandate of the department? Maybe. Perhaps we should reconsider the way we recruit law students because law schools are a major source of new talent. I will keep your suggestion in mind.
[English]
The Chairman: Thank you very much for attending. We appreciate very much that you have done so. We are always trying to understand a little better how you account for things. The committee will be looking at the Supplementary Estimates in a few weeks and we may ask you back for that.
The committee adjourned.