Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Finance
Issue 2 - Evidence - Meeting of November 2, 2004
OTTAWA, Tuesday, November 2, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance met this day at 9:34 a.m. to examine the Main Estimates laid before Parliament for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2005.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I call this second meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance to order. As you are aware, this committee was created in May 1919 under the name of the Committee of Finance. In 1968, it became the Committee on National Finance.
The committee's field of interest is government spending, either directly through the estimates or indirectly through bills.
Today, we are deeply honoured to have with us the president and senior officials from the Public Service Commission of Canada. The Public Service Commission — the PSC — is important because it deals with safeguarding the values of the professional public service, with issues of competence, non-partisanship and representativeness, et cetera. Maria Barrados is the president of the PSC. From 1993 to 2000, Ms. Barrados was the Assistant Auditor General, Audit Operations, at the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. She was educated at the University of Saskatchewan, McGill University and Carleton University, as a sociologist. She has a background in audit, evaluation, and statistical analysis.
Ms. Barrados has brought with her today Ms. Anne-Marie Robinson, Mr. Gaston Arsenault, Mr. Greg Gauld, and Mr. Jacques Pelletier.
We are delighted to have all of you here. As you know, we are examining the Main Estimates and we have a number of questions to put to you about your new operations.
Ms. Barrados, please proceed with your presentation.
Ms. Maria Barrados, President, Public Service Commission of Canada: Thank you for inviting me here today, Mr. Chairman, to discuss our Main Estimates and our progress in building a new Public Service Commission. You have introduced the officials I have with me.
[Translation]
I appeared before this committee in May of 2004 as part of the required nomination process under the new Public Service Employment Act. With the resolutions in the Senate in May and the House in April, the Governor in Council appointed me President of the Public Service Commission on May 28, 2004. At the same time, two part-time commissioners from outside the Public Service were named — Manon Vennat and David Zussman.
[English]
In addition to the estimates documents before the committee, I would like to draw senators' attention to the Public Service Commission's annual report tabled October 19, 2004, and two audit reports released at the tame time.
The Public Service Commission is an independent agency accountable to Parliament. The commission was created in 1908, charged with ensuring that appointments to the Public Service of Canada are based on merit and are independent of the government of the day. The Public Service Commission, and not ministers, was given the exclusive authority to appoint public servants based on their qualifications to do the work and not based on their relationship with the governing party or with the person hiring. The PSC is also charged with maintaining the political impartiality of the public service. Public servants seeking either nomination or to be a candidate must obtain permission from the commission to let their name stand and must also take the appropriate leave. We do not report to a minister except for the purposes of the Financial Administration Act and for transmittal of our annual report to Parliament.
As a result of the passage of the Public Service Modernization Act and related changes to the Public Service Employment Act in November 2003, a number of responsibilities were transferred out of the PSC.
[Translation]
Career development programs such as the Management Trainee Program, Career Assignment Program and Interchange Canada Program have been transferred to the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency.
Learning programs, such as Training and Development Canada and Language Training Canada, were transferred to the new Canada School of Public Service.
[English]
The 2004-2005 Main Estimates are based on a business line structure that does not reflect these changes that came into effect on April 1, 2004. The budget figure of $147 million for 2004-2005 becomes $92 million after the transfers. Of the $55 million, approximately $32 million was transferred to the new school and $23 million to the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada. We have a smaller organization of approximately 900 full-time employees. We still have a regional structure in place that provides services and oversight.
Our Report on Plans and Priorities sets out our plans for next year. We will be working to achieve implementation of the new Public Service Employment Act, modernize a new service vision and modernize the governance structure of the Public Service Commission.
Under the new legislation, we are transforming the commission to increasingly focus on our core mandate of safeguarding the integrity of the staffing in the public service.
The measures we have taken so far include the following: renewing our audit capacity; creating a new audit branch; ensuring a continuing investigations function; enhancing our reporting to Parliament, and as I mentioned earlier, the appointment of two new part-time commissioners from outside the public service who are focussing their efforts on strategic direction and advice; and setting out a new approach to service.
[Translation]
To better distinguish between our roles as overseer of Public Service staffing and as a service provider to departments and agencies, a new service agency will be created within the PSC by April 1, 2005. It will operate with greater independence from Commissioners and change the nature of the service provided.
In a fully delegated staffing system, departments will have the flexibility to determine which service option best suits their needs.
[English]
Further changes are to come with the full implementation of the Public Service Modernization Act. Over the next year, we will be transforming our investigation branch from one that deals now with over 1,100 appeals and 300 investigations in staffing a year, to investigations in the area of external staffing and political partisanship. We will be providing more audit reports to Parliament, and fully delegating staffing authority by December 1, 2005.
[Translation]
We are working with the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency, the School and Treasury Board to implement the Public Service Modernization Act. The PSC is on target in its implementation plan to develop the policy frameworks, hold extensive consultations sessions and provide information to departments.
[English]
I would like to now turn to our annual report, which was tabled on October 19, 2004. This was my first annual report as the president of the Public Service Commission. The report found that, on the whole, public service staffing respects the values of competency, non-partisanship and representativeness, as well as the process values of fairness, equity of access, and transparency. Our findings show that, in a staffing system with thousands of transactions, managers are, on the whole, appointing competent employees both to and within the public service.
There are, however, some issues that need to be addressed if this trend is to continue, including the following: a lack of adequate departmental human resources planning; inadequate human resources capacity in many departments; the continuing increase in the proportion of short-term hiring; the small number of university graduates offered employment through the post-secondary recruitment program; the application of the area of selection policy; and slow progress in increasing visible minority representation in the executive ranks of the government.
I have an overriding concern about the lack of both adequate human resources capacity and planning in departments and agencies. These issues take on additional urgency as the Public Service Modernization Act comes into full force in December 2005.
The implementation of the Public Service Modernization Act and, in particular, the new Public Service Employment Act will bring about significant changes to the staffing regime. Departments will need to do more long-term human resources planning to identify their current and future needs and to determine how to meet those needs. HR planning needs to become a standard, integrated part of organizational planning.
Turning to some specific findings of the report, I would like to talk about the frequent use of short-term hiring and underutilization of post-secondary recruitment.
Last year, there was a drop in permanent hiring and a continued reliance on casual hiring. During fiscal year 2003- 2004, close to 40,000 appointments were made to the federal public service. Of these, 4,368 were for indeterminate or permanent jobs; another 9,841 appointments were for students. The balance, close to two thirds, was short-term employment.
Term workers often represent a less costly and faster solution for recruitment than permanent recruitment. Once hired, however, term employees are often able to gain permanent jobs. They have an advantage over others who have not benefited from public service experience, thereby reducing the access of others also qualified. Further, short-term hiring often does not involve the same rigorous and transparent evaluation processes. Moreover, managers are not taking full advantage of flexibilities in the system. The post-secondary recruitment program is an effective program in identifying a pool of qualified young Canadians. However, it is underutilized.
[Translation]
In the fall of 2003, approximately 22,000 university graduates from across Canada and abroad applied to the recruitment program. Although the PSC referred approximately 9,000 tested candidates to departments, fewer than 500 candidates were hired, of which only 300 were appointed to indeterminate positions.
We continue to be concerned about the low take-up of this program by managers and its effect on recent university graduates' access to federal employment. We are seeking other approaches to further promote the program as a recruitment avenue and get firm commitments from departments and agencies to both consider and use this valuable program.
[English]
At the same time that we tabled our annual report, we released two audit reports. I would now like to turn to one of these reports, the follow-up report on the audit of the Office of the Privacy Commission.
As you know, audits of the Office of the Privacy Commission were released just over one year ago by both the auditor general and the Public Service Commission. Our report, one year later, summarizes the PSC's interventions at the Office of the Privacy Commission since that time, both audits and investigations.
Since our initial audit, we have received considerable cooperation from the management of the Office of the Privacy Commission. They indicated to me that they have had a difficult year, and I believe that they have worked hard to put in place the changes we have requested. Nonetheless, a follow-up to the initial staffing audit concluded that the Privacy Commission had not yet made sufficient progress implementing the audit recommendations to return to full staffing delegation. Follow-up activities on the part of the PSC will continue until we decide that the Privacy Commission has satisfied the conditions for restoration of its delegated staffing authority.
We have also conducted individual investigations under a separate part of the act, which concluded that, despite lack of adherence to staffing values and the staffing delegation and accountability agreement, eight of the nine appointments were either in accordance with the Public Service Employment Act or that further corrective action was not warranted as the individuals concerned had left the public service or were found qualified for the position they occupied.
In one instance, an appointment was found to be not in accordance with the act. This resulted in a board of inquiry and the revocation of the appointment. The board of inquiry concluded that the candidate for the position of administrative assistant and the former executive director had participated in fraudulent staffing practices when the executive director shared the questions and answers for the written exam.
[Translation]
I would now like to turn to our last report which concerns the staffing practices of the Military Police Complaints Commission. This organization was created in 1998 in response to the federal government's commitment to modernize Canada's military justice system. It provides independent civilian oversight of the Canadian Forces Military Police.
As of December 31, 2003, it had a staff of 25 appointed under the Public Service Employment Act. Based on complaints received and issues raised in the Complaints Commission's reports to us, we launched an audit in February 2004. We conclude that the Complaints Commission abused its delegated staffing authority.
[English]
The audit revealed serious deficiencies in the application of staffing policies and practices, which included the following: incomplete files; insufficient justification of the use of non-competitive processes; overly restricted rights of appeal; and reclassifications done retroactively. Nor did management resolve problems of poor staff morale, alleged harassment and fear of reprisals.
As a result of these serious deficiencies, we have withdrawn the complaints commission's delegation for all appointments to executive positions and placed conditions on its delegated authorities for non-executive staffing.
Finally, I want to emphasize that the recent staffing performance of these two small agencies is not typical of the public service as a whole. Achieving and maintaining a professional public service depends on the quality of the people hired. Our task is to make sure this continues.
That concludes my opening remarks. We would be happy to respond to any questions honourable senators may have on any aspect of our work.
The Chairman: Thank you for that most interesting overview. In your opening remarks, you told us that you have been recently appointed and that there have been two appointments of part-time commissioners from outside the public service. You have told us that they are Manon Vennat and David Zussman. Later in your presentation, you told us that one area of concern to you is ``slow progress in increasing visible minority representation in the executive ranks of government.''
In the past, the Public Service Commission commissioners have always been represented by a visible minority — there has been at least one. Are there any now? If not, why not? Are there any visible minorities in the senior ranks of the public service today?
Ms. Barrados: My two commissioners are not members of visible minority groups. The legislation says that we must have two or more commissioners in addition to the president. There is an opportunity to appoint more part-time commissioners, which I hope we will do.
The Chairman: Are they needed, or would they just be making an appointment?
Ms. Barrados: To start, we have to set up a new governance structure and a new approach. The two people who were named part-time commissioners had been part of the advisory group to the clerk on the public service modernization legislation. The pool of people was drawn from those people who had been part of that process.
There was not a member of the visible minorities that was part of that group who was also bilingual, because I was trying to get someone who was bilingual as well. Once we have that separated, we must ask the questions about whether we have a commission that is fully representative of the Canadian population the same way that we ask the question about whether we have a public service that is fully representative of the population. It was for that reason that I think we would probably expand the commission. We must get it working first in this new way of working.
Your second question was whether we have visible minorities in the senior ranks of the public service. Yes, we do. We have a number at the director and the director general level. You and I had another conversation in which you were asking me if I had any vice-presidents who were visible minorities. The answer is not yet.
Senator Ringuette: I have a few questions.
The Chairman: We all know you have a very deep interest in this subject.
Senator Ringuette: Madam Barrados, it is always a pleasure to meet you; you are very dedicated to equality of access with respect to the public service.
In your statement, you say — and I quote — that you will be:
transforming our investigation branch from one that deals with over 1,100 appeals and 300 investigations in staffing to investigations in the areas of external staffing and political partisanship.
Will you also investigate bureaucratic patronage?
Ms. Barrados: Under the new legislation, our investigative powers have been changed. Currently, we have investigative powers for all internal and external appointments. In the future, the investigations for the internal appointments will go to departments, with access to the tribunal. The Public Service Commission will be investigating the external appointments and political patronage.
However, we will also have the audit mandate. We fully intend to be looking at issues of favouritism. If I would use another term for bureaucratic patronage, what we are really talking about is favouritism. We intend to have our first round of work completed for next year's annual report.
Senator Ringuette: I do realize that this bureaucratic patronage or favouritism was not covered in Bill C-25. I was wondering how you would look into this issue — because there was a report last year about summer student hiring. The auditor found that 25 per cent of summer students were being hired by bureaucratic patronage. That is definitely not fair.
Ms. Barrados: Our legislation is pretty clear. The new act is pretty clear on the kinds of values that are expected to be adhered to. We expect fairness and representativeness in the processes of making appointments. That is still part of the mandate for the new Public Service Commission.
The summer student audit was a study done by the Public Service Commission itself. We are continuing to monitor that.
Senator Ringuette: The last time you were at this committee, we talked about departments having to submit HR plans to have the delegation of authority to hire, fire, and do all the HR functions.
How many departments have submitted an HR plan?
Ms. Barrados: Senator Ringuette, I do not think we actually require a submission to us for approval of the plans. What we require is to have the plans in place.
We are now going through a process with the other players in the system to talk a lot about what is required in those plans, because for them to be really meaningful, they should not just be an HR plan. They should be a plan that fully integrates the human resource component with the business planning. Otherwise, it does not have much meaning.
We are now going through a process to assess what should be there before we put the delegations in place. That is now underway. We want to ensure that we get the right balance between having the essentials in place before we do the delegations and recognizing that the whole planning enterprise in government is not that easy. We do not want to make it impossible for us to move ahead with the delegation. That discussion is now underway.
Senator Ringuette: Are you able to tell me how many departments have a plan in place?
Ms. Barrados: Actually, I am not. Where we have looked, we are concerned that there is not enough focus on that. It is not required yet, although if you are managing well you should have it in place.
We have asked specifically for the plans on how to increase visible minorities, and we are getting some of those back, but we have not made that request across the board as to where the plans are. We are now doing a checklist with the other players of things that must be there. That plan is one of those things that must be there.
Perhaps Mr. Gauld wants to talk a bit more about where they are with that planning component.
Mr. Greg Gauld, Vice-President, Merit Policy and Accountability Branch, Public Service Commission: As the president explained, we are very concerned about HR planning linked to business planning.
We are really focusing on the new legislation and looking together with the other players on how to ensure there is enough of that in place to have the new system bring the benefits it is supposed to bring with the new legislation. To that end, there are a number of working groups set up under the aegis of several deputy minister committees to look at HR planning and other tools for the new staffing regime.
There is a lot of work underway. We have had two major consultation sessions with departments, with over 300 participants each, in June and September, and another one coming up in about 10 days to go over this. In fact, in 10 days we will be sitting down in more detail talking with departments about HR planning.
Senator Ringuette: On another issue — all related — I received a call from a New Brunswicker who had been contacted by a headhunting firm in Gatineau for a public service job. Why are they not going through the normal public service employment process? How many departments are using headhunters to fill their positions?
Ms. Barrados: That is a good question. They are using headhunters. We have, as a commission, not objected to the use of headhunters in the absence of something else in place.
That leads me to what we are trying to put in place for our service vision. Currently, external recruitment is done by the Public Service Commission, and you must come to the Public Service Commission for external recruitment. By December 2005, that will be fully delegated. We will have a capacity to assist departments in providing a service, but that service will be including that headhunter component. Currently, we have a process where we post a job, we get the applications, process the applications and appoint a candidate. Some departments are finding, however, that for some of those specialty areas they do not get the pool of people they need to fill the kinds of specialty positions they are looking for. Those are the ones that tend to use the headhunters.
Perhaps Mr. Pelletier wants to expand on what we are trying to do in putting this new service vision in place, because obviously there is a gap or a need in government.
Mr. Jacques Pelletier, Vice-President, Recruitment and Assessment Services Branch, Public Service Commission: There is and there will be a major gap in the future. When we think about what is coming up in five to six years, we anticipate, and we said this in the annual report, that 40 per cent or so of civil servants will be in a position to take their retirement. The federal government will have to compete against every other organization in the country to get the brightest and the finest people to work for it.
We also know, and the president mentioned, that in December 2005 documents will be delegated for their outside recruitment. They may come to us or they may decide to go to other organizations to staff from outside. They will be delegated. We want to offer the best recruitment agency to which they can go, so we are building up that organization. The president mentioned that we are building up this organization. It will be put in place by April 2005. We will have to review all the recruitment programs that we have, not only to make sure that they meet the needs of the federal government of today but in the coming years. We need to plan ahead. We say departments need human resources plans, but with those plans we need to look ahead and ensure that we are in a good position to recruit the best possible candidates for the federal government.
Senator Ringuette: Can I jump in and add to my young New Brunswicker's story? This young New Brunswicker is a specialist. He never saw the special position posted on the government website. If it was there, he could not apply because of geographic restrictions. He was one of 22,000 university graduates in that program. He was never called for an interview.
Basically, the departments are running around you guys big time already. What we are looking at here, this ``flexibility,'' is going to be the perfect excuse again for them. Regardless of the different application processes you have, the flexibility in graduate student hiring and all of that, the departments will still hire 40,000 employees on a yearly basis, bypassing you guys. I do not know how much money they spend on headhunters, which is essentially your mandate.
I find the system very inefficient. You know all my past arguments about the geographic restriction in hiring, which is removing from the employment process able and productive people who are not living within 50 kilometres of Ottawa. That is my beef.
Mr. Pelletier: Of course, senator, I cannot specifically answer your question about the New Brunswicker you referred to, because I do not necessarily know the case. If you give me more information, I can check into it. In the year 2003-04, the federal government recruited in excess of 15,000 casual people, and the case to which you refer might be one of those. The government recruited from outside more than 15,000 casuals last year. I guess that is the concern of the president, who talked earlier about that type of recruiting and not using the permanent recruitment. While they are using the permanent recruitment, they would have to go to PSC.
Ms. Barrados: The point, too, is that my concern is that we have invested a lot in the post-secondary recruitment program, and it is not used. This is one of the areas that I have been consistently raising. I am raising it with senior officials because they complain about not getting people right away, yet they are not using that program.
I am saddened to hear of the type of case you cited, senator, where they had someone sitting in an inventory and then spent money on a headhunter to get the same person. It does not make any sense.
Senator Ringuette: My concern, in addition to the geographic limitation that is still there today — which one year ago we were promised would be removed. There was $11 million set aside for the implementation of Bill C-25, $11 million that would be going to you guys to upgrade the technology to remove the geographic barriers. One year later, that is not done. One year later, we are hearing of 40,000 public employees who have been hired outside of your services. If that is not bureaucratic patronage, what is?
Ms. Barrados: Can I get to national area of selection?
Senator Ringuette: Yes, please.
Ms. Barrados: This is a frustration for me, as well — I have to say that. When I started, I had meetings with various people on the Hill, and they all voiced their frustration with the geographic restrictions in selecting people eligible for a competition. I challenged everyone in the organization about why we were doing this and how we could fix this. The problem is evident. The problem is that there are still many jobs that are very attractive for many people in the federal government — which means that we get many applicants. There is an effort to get a number of applications that are manageable.
I know this violates the concerns that say we want to have a more representative public service so we want to draw from people across the country. The obvious solution here is technology, doing it in such a way that people can apply, where there is no limitation on the geography, yet respecting all the requirements.
The commitment was made on the part of the government to set $40 million aside.
Senator Ringuette: That was to set $40 million aside for the entire Bill C-25 implementation, was it not?
Ms. Barrados: No, that figure was set aside for the e-recruitment. We got $3.2 million to do the preliminary assessment and detailed plan, but we cannot go any faster than the approval process. We are required to go through the Treasury Board approval process.
We sped up the process by a year. We have moved it forward, because we know of everyone's concern, but I know that is still not fast enough for you, senator.
Senator Harb: At the outset, I wish to congratulate Ms. Barrados on her appointment. I had the pleasure of working with her for a number of years on the public account. She brings to the job a tremendous amount of professionalism, intelligence, dedication and ability. We are well served by that. As well, I wish to congratulate the two additional members to the board and the management who are with you.
My first question deals with Bill C-25. Your former president had some concerns about the merit issue. He spoke about the balance between a competitive and non-competitive aspect of the merit principle of merit. While we wanted to protect that, I want to find out whether there has been any progress on this subject in terms of your views, whether you share what the former presidents have said or whether you have your own views on that.
Ms. Barrados: Thank you for your kind remarks, senator.
There is always a concern about how to protect merit. What occurred under the previous legislation is that there had not been a definition of merit, but merit had been defined through a series of court procedures and decisions that gave us a very technical process-oriented definition of merit. Hence, the new legislation was an effort to define merit in the legislation.
A key part of that definition is that there is a plan, as Senator Ringuette points out, a plan and a clear statement of what a department or ministry is trying to do in its HR and what their needs are. There is that statement of needs and then more flexibility in how that is filled. There is still expected to be a transparent process. Departments will be expected to have transparency and be accountable for how they fill positions on that new definition of merit.
Is there a further element of risk? There probably is a greater amount of risk. There always is when you are delegating instead of doing something yourself. It can work, but we have to be vigilant in the accountabilities. I have to build up my audit capacity. I do have more auditors looking at these things. We have to look closely at the delegation accountability reports we get, as we did in the case of the military police, where things do not match or work and then we go in and look.
That is what is required when you have more risk on one side; you have to take care of it on the other side. I believe it is workable.
Senator Harb: My second question deals with the notion of geographic hiring. It is imperative for us to go beyond the obvious. We have a situation where we are dealing with the issue of not only geographic hiring, but also migration. Over the past 25 to 40 years, we have seen Canadians from rural settings gravitating toward the cities, for a number of reasons — including more opportunities and a decline of services in the rural parts of the countries.
In the past, we have seen the Canadian population shift from a rural base into that of an urban base. One of the ideas behind this notion of geographic hiring was not to exclude people from other parts of the country. However, it had the opposite impact. If there is a position available in P.E.I., it is not to be open for everyone else in Canada to go and grab that position, but rather to make it possible for a resident of P.E.I. to apply and compete with another resident in P.E.I. for a P.E.I. job.
We must be careful when we revisit this notion of geographic hiring. Rather than opening it up, we must bear in mind that there is a side benefit that protects jobs in rural settings and in different regions of the country, that if we do not have the geographical hiring mechanism, these jobs may not be protected.
It is not a secret that we have more people with university degrees in urban settings than we do in rural settings. It is not a secret that we will find a bigger pool of talent in an urban setting than that of other parts of the country.
I want to be careful about how we get around it. If we were to designate certain positions to a certain level in the public service open for all, no geographical limitation, that is fair game. However, I beg you to think it through carefully before you open the doors as a result of the pressure that might come from political interests, public interests or individual interests. We must think about the interests of the country as a whole. The interests of the country will dictate that at times we do discriminate and create settings whereby certain parts of the population will have to benefit, even if that is to the disadvantage of other parts of the populations, for economic reasons, planning reasons and in the interests of the country in the long term.
On a final note, in the late 1980s, I was the MP for this riding. I raised the same question with the then Minister of Revenue, Otto Jelinek. He reminded me of the government policy at the time, which I agreed with and that I bought into at the time, of protecting smaller communities outside the urban setting.
Ms. Barrados: Another consideration is cost. Moving people all over the place for jobs and job competitions is another consideration. Currently, we have opened up all the executive positions and one level under the executive positions to national area of selection.
The phenomenon that we are faced with is that the Internet is now the tool that most people use. We now have 88 to 90 per cent of people applying to us through the Internet. People are now seeing all the jobs. In seeing all the jobs, that is what has increased the pressure to broaden up the area of selection.
Our intention is to fill the Ottawa jobs first. There is a consensus that Ottawa should be broadly represented. We will be careful in how we extend it out further. Obviously, there is one arm of government that wants to have regional job creation, and do we do something that is contrary to that?
We will do a lot of consultation with the government and with members of Parliament before we move there. We are confident that opening up the Ottawa jobs is the place to start, and then we can automate that and see how it works.
The Chairman: Coupled with that problem is the issue you raised earlier in your introductory remarks about short- term hiring. If the government insists on most of the people who are hired being hired for a short term only, it would seem like an awful waste of money to hire someone from Halifax to go to British Columbia, after you have paid a consultant a fee to find that person, and then hold them only for a short time and have to fly them back to Nova Scotia. Those two are interwoven.
Senator Murray: With regard to the appointment of the two new commissioners, Ms. Vennat and Mr. Zussman, I know them both, Ms. Vennat going on for 40 years, and Mr. Zussman not quite as long. It would be a fair comment that both of them would be considered politically reliable by the present government. I am not asking you to comment on that, and I have no objection to governments appointing their political friends if their political friends are capable. In these two cases, I think you will find they are outstanding, if they have the time to devote to the commission. They are both of them very fully occupied with other matters in their normal, professional business lives.
Going back 25 or 30 years, one thing that Ms. Vennat was closely involved in was helping and advising private- sector companies in Montreal to develop language policies. She may be able to help you there. I wanted to ask you about that.
There was a letter, the content of which seems to have leaked, from the head of Statistics Canada, Mr. Fellegi, addressed I think to you, in which he expressed serious concerns about language training. He thought the objectives were becoming blurred. He described depressions and stress among those who must pass language tests or lose their jobs and obscure demands in testing for certain grammatical forms — too much of the subjunctive, perhaps. He was concerned about it. He cited ballooning costs. He thought the focus on the test should be changed. He said it is the ability to function, not the test, and some kind of sensible assessment process was what he was trying to advocate.
I take it that you replied. Both of these letters have been referred to. I am not sure the texts have been made public. If they are not, I think they should be. There is no point trying to content ourselves with excerpts that may or may not be accurate. I think we would like to see the letters.
I take it also that a group of assistant deputy ministers has taken this matter up. I would like you to bring us up to speed on this situation. Mr. Fellegi is a long-time champion of bilingualism in the public service and of language duality. I have been a staunch supporter of it for many years. I am concerned about anything that will put at risk a consensus that has built up over a period of 35 years, sometimes quite painfully, certainly gradually, and that is still rather fragile, but it is there, across the country. If there is any widespread sentiment of injustice or inequitable treatment, it is important that that be put to rest publicly as quickly as it can be done. What can you tell us about that?
Ms. Barrados: If I could make a comment about the commissioners, they do certainly seem to have the time or make the time to attend commission meetings. We take about two days a month from them. We meet for a full day. We tend to meet the night before. They have been invaluable to me in providing strategic kinds of direction and advice and discussing the policies of the commission. I am very pleased. It seems to be working well.
On the issue of the French language, the letter I got from Dr. Fellegi reflects many comments I received. When I was appointed, the one thing that people went out of their way to talk to me about was their frustration with language training and language testing. A large part of that is the requirement that it be tied to a job. You must meet the language requirement because it is part of the job qualification. There was a tightening up on the part of the government, in terms of saying, ``If you are going to be a manager, we expect you to go with imperative staffing.'' In other words, you must be bilingual before you take the job, and only under certain circumstances will you have to have good reason for giving people time to learn the language. These policies have been around for a long time, but now the government was saying, ``We really mean it. You have had enough time. Get on with it.''
The sentiment that Dr. Fellegi expressed was a frustration on the part of his staff, his employees, finding the testing difficult and finding the availability of training and the type of training difficult.
We take all this seriously. A piece of legislation sets out the framework under which we are operating on official languages. We are not changing that. That is at parliamentary discretion. That is the consensus, and we are trying to implement it.
There are many things we do that can have an impact on how you implement that. We have undertaken a broad- based review. Mr. Pelletier is one of the co-chairs of that committee, and they are being asked to examine everything. Perhaps Mr. Pelletier can take a few minutes and describe the work of that committee and the timelines for the senators.
Before he starts, we will send you the letters, both Dr. Fellegi's letter and my response.
The Chairman: Could you send those to the clerk?
Ms. Barrados: Yes.
Mr. Pelletier: Thank you. Indeed, a group of 25 ADMs across the government, representing departments small, big, and large, meets every month. We are looking at the language training and testing, and the governance of bilingualism. We are not looking at the law itself. We are looking at ways to improve. We meet with outside organizations and universities across Canada and abroad, and we try to find the best practices. We have created five subcommittees, and those subcommittees are working specifically on language training and language testing.
We hope that by December the subcommittees will come to us with some recommendations that we can review and take back to our president. Our game plan following that will probably be to go to COSO, the Committee of Senior Officials, in early spring to implement some of those recommendations as early as possible next fiscal year, so April 2005.
I must say that without waiting for the results of the subcommittees and that committee, the commission took some steps to see what could be done to simplify the lives of those who go for testing. For instance, a couple of months ago, people would have to wait many days before being tested; but we are working on reducing that wait. The backlog now is not more than 10 days. Many people told us that waiting for the test creates a great deal of frustration and stress, so we eliminated that long wait.
We gave the candidates more information on the language nature of the test — what the test is about and what testees will face. There is much more information available now than there was in the past.
We try to get our examiners to work in portfolio, so that they know more about the department where people are being tested. For instance, last week, the Department of National Defence started six examiners that will be devoted to DND. Thus, the person will be able to understand the jargon of the department. We will do that as well with many other departments.
One successful element was the development of a digital video disc, DVD, to explain what the test is all about. We present that mainly to candidates from outside the department because they often have no idea what to expect. The DVD has been successful in providing candidates with the appropriate information.
We have heard that the tests are tougher now than they were in the past. All tests are recorded, so we retrieved those the ones from five to ten years ago. We asked our examiners to review those tests, without telling them they were old tests. The result was about the same.
Senator Murray: Do you mean to say that half of them are failing?
Mr. Pelletier: No. I mean that the results achieved are at exactly the same level as the results from the previous assessor of five or ten years ago. They are about the same.
Senator Murray: It appears that there is a high failure rate on the final test.
Mr. Pelletier: For the French oral interaction test, if I recall, the failure rate is about 47 per cent, whereas it used to be about 52 per cent.
I would say that people who go through language training are successful at a rate of 85 per cent, in the end.
Senator Murray: I will not take any more time on this, but with 25 ADMs meeting once a month on five subcommittees, it is obvious that you will get right into this. My point of concern is about the people who are directly affected one way or the other. I am also greatly concerned about public opinion, and this has become a public issue. CBC English radio in Ottawa did a whole series on this a couple of weeks ago. It will be important to reassure the public about what is being done, to keep matters on an even keel. I will leave that, unless someone else has something to say on this.
On the question of headhunters, perhaps I should know how prevalent the use of them has been within the government in the past. It raises certain concerns with me. I do not know what the fee arrangements are for headhunters, what it costs and how that cost is determined.
Is there not a somewhat greater danger of political influence being brought to bear indirectly if the hiring is done through headhunters or if headhunters are involved?
Headhunters belong to a private-sector culture that knows, I suggest to you, nothing of the constraints and values that should be obtained in recruiting for the public service.
Perhaps these are issues that your former colleagues at the Auditor General's office should look into, if it is a prevalent practice in the public service. Can you offer any reassurance as to how all this will play out? In combination with the increased delegation of authority from the Public Service Commission to deputies, we may be letting ourselves in for some problems that we do not want.
Ms. Barrados: I am not sure how the fees for headhunters work. In my experience with headhunters, the fee tends to be a proportion of the salary for which you are recruiting.
We expressed a concern in one of our audits of the military police complaints commission that, when outside headhunter firms were used, which was the case in some of the appointments, they did not keep the files and no paper trail was available, which we expect to have in the government. We have made it clear for any of those areas that we are still responsible for one more year. As well, we will make it clear to departments that when they use an outside recruiting firm we expect them to have the files and other relevant items for any recruiting. Whether an outside firm is used or it is done within the department, the PSC expects to see the paper trail of the process. Certainly, we will look at that as an audit issue.
Our intention is such that, with those delegations, we will ask for the full file on how an appointment was made, whether there was due process in looking for candidates, and we would expect to see a different process in a highly technical unique area. The Public Service Commission has agreed to the use of a headhunter when recruiting is for specialty areas and the attempt to recruit within the public service has not succeeded. Not everyone looks at the job Web site. If a job is posted online for two weeks, will specialty people see it when we are trying to attract them? That is part of the dilemma. I assure you that we will follow up on this because we are concerned about how the freedoms are used.
In terms of the fees and how much money is being spent, that is a question for Ms. Sheila Fraser, the Auditor General of Canada.
The Chairman: The PSC has an audit function, so why could you not look into that?
Ms. Barrados: We can look into the use of headhunters and the process that was followed in making appointments. We have already sent out letters to let people know that we expect to have the files in place and to have access to those files. We go outside our mandate when we ask how much it costs. We can do some cost-related questioning — roughly how much something costs — but to do the costing work and the impact on the overall budget would be outside our mandate.
The Chairman: Ms. Fraser will appear before the committee on the estimates. Perhaps we could put that question to her then.
In your presentation, Ms. Barrados, you spoke to the Main Estimates. Some of the numbers indicate that your budget is relatively small compared to some other departments. The budget figure of $147 million for 2004-2005 became $92 million after various items were transferred to other areas. In other words, the PSC is about one third smaller than it was.
Bill C-11 is currently before the House of Commons and deals with whistle-blowing. I read the transcript when the President of Treasury Board appeared before that committee. There were a number of questions relating to the Public Service Commission, who will be charged in part at least with implementing some of this proposed wrongdoers whistle- blowing legislation. What impact will this have on your resources? If $32 million of your money was transferred to the new school and $23 million to the new Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada, where in the world are you possibly going to get the money to run a whistle-blowing operation out of the Public Service Commission?
Ms. Barrados: Thank you for that question. The other thing we are trying to do with our $92 million is find the money for our audit function. We have gone through an internal exercise of looking for economies, challenging how things can be better done, trying to streamline many parts of the organization and reallocating money to audit.
We have managed to do quite a bit of that. A year ago, when I started, two or three people were doing audits, and they tell me now that I am up to about 20. We have made some good progress in terms of our internal reallocations.
If we get the responsibility for the whistle-blowing, and the bill is before committee now, this would not be something we could take on within our current budget. We would have to have new money for that function to come into the organization.
I have already expressed a concern that the mandate as proposed is much broader than the experience government has had now with Mr. Keyserlingk's operation, so there is an element of the unknown in terms of how big this will be. It may not be that big. In fact, it may be big.
I do have a concern that a mechanism be set up that Treasury Board would give us more money, if that is required. However, the government has agreed to give us additional money to carry out this function, roughly based on the estimate of what they think the initial volume will be.
The Chairman: Do you have a figure for that?
Ms. Barrados: I believe the number we are talking about is $3.2 million.
Ms. Anne-Marie Robinson, Vice-President, Corporate Management Branch, Public Service Commission: Approximately $2 million, with my understanding of another $600,000 for the increased activity. We would still need to have further discussions with the board to refine those figures, and sit down and look at the numbers and types of positions, et cetera.
Ms. Barrados: The advantage of putting it in an existing organization like the Public Service Commission or another existing organization is that we do have that corporate service infrastructure. There would be just a marginal increase in cost, but the main function would have to be new dollars for new people.
Senator Mercer: Welcome to our meeting. I have two comments before my two questions. With respect to the French-language training, I am aware of a case here in Ottawa of a former colleague of mine, a Franco-Ontarian whose first language is French. Over the past 10 years, he has worked as the French spokesman for an organization I used work for, in written and verbal French. He has now, I understand, been interviewed for a job at an arm's-length agency in the government and was told that he has to take a French-language test, which is fine. However, to dispute what Mr. Pelletier indicated, he was told it may take up to a month and a half before he could be tested. He is coming from the outside. He is not a member of the public service now.
If that is the case, here is an individual who, if another opportunity comes along outside of government, will probably take it, and the government would lose just an absolutely terrific asset. I think you need to monitor that.
With respect to geographic restrictions, there is another way to do this. We could move everything out of Ottawa, which is something I would like to see, and then we would be happy to have regional restrictions in Charlottetown and Halifax and Kamloops. I am very concerned that this is not happening fast enough.
The price of moving somebody from Halifax to Ottawa to do a permanent job, I am not talking about casual or part-time jobs, the price of moving people around is the price of doing business. It is the price of being the Government of Canada.
The person that lives next to me in my home in Halifax, or next to my cottage in Pictou, has every right to come to work for the Government of Canada as somebody who lives on Metcalfe Street. I really believe that. If you fail to balance back in favour of all Canadians, then you have failed in your job. I make that comment.
I have two questions, one very specific. With respect to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, you make some references to the former staff in your comments. I am concerned about those members of the former staff.
Some of those people were tainted because the Privacy Commissioner himself and one or two others were found to be wanting in their administration of that organization. Others became tainted with that. I am concerned about the people who are left behind, and who are either in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner or who have moved out of the office because it was not practical to keep them there.
I am concerned that they may not now have been taken care of, in the sense that they now have other jobs in the public service which they qualify for. Can you enlighten me on that?
The second question, I will give you both of them at the same time, is with respect to the headhunters. I am familiar with the use of headhunters. I have been headhunted a couple of times myself. It is an interesting process. I am familiar with how they are paid because I have also used them myself.
My concern is this: Are we going to have standing orders for headhunters? Are there going to be five, ten headhunters across the country that departments can use because they have provided certain bids to the government? If so, how do we address the area of expertise?
I spent 25 years in the not-for-profit world as a senior manager of charities and NGOs across the country, and there are only about three headhunters across the country who have enough expertise to hire people at the most senior level in that group. I know that that applies to finance, that applies to legal recruitment, that applies to engineering, that there are only certain headhunters who have the ability to do that.
I cannot throw my shingle out in downtown Halifax and say that I am a headhunter and be able to recruit good lawyers for the government or good engineers. If you want me to recruit heads of charities, I may be your guy. How are you going to regulate that? How are you going to make sure that that is happening, that we are not going off to a reputable headhunter in many fields who is not a reputable headhunter in the field in which they are recruiting?
Ms. Barrados: On the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, I have had a number of meetings with the Privacy Commissioner, Ms. Stoddart, and she is concerned about the wellbeing of her staff. We are concerned that they do not move forward fast enough and we, in fact, say that in our report. I think now that the audits are complete, the investigations are complete, it is important to move forward.
Senator Mercer: What about the former staff too, the staff that may not be there but was not found to be in any conflict?
Ms. Barrados: We are hoping that the report does that, because the report looked at all the files, took the cases that it felt needed to be investigated, drew the conclusions and said there is no more to do. People have to now move on.
The Privacy Commissioner has quite a job in terms of making all the changes that are required to be made there, and not only in terms of the staffing and the appointments, but also in the classifications. There are a lot of things she has to correct, in addition to her challenges for her job. We are working very closely with her and trying to do everything we can to facilitate that.
On the issue of how you regulate the headhunter, right now the Public Service Commission is responsible for appointments to the executive category. The way that works is that a proposal comes forward in terms of the strategy that is going to be used in how the appointment is made. That proposal is approved by the commission; it is reviewed by the staff of the commission and is approved by the commission. The process then goes forward. If there are any deviations, there is an issue; but the process is followed and if it is a normal process, the appointment is again approved by the commission. That will run for one year and at the end of the year it will be fully delegated.
At that point, I do not believe the PSC will have a role in regulating in the way that you suggest, except to say to departments that it is their responsibility to do this and that it must be done well. We will lay out the standards for what we expect in terms of how to go through a process of advertising positions, letting it be known that positions are available, the process that is followed and how the appointment is made. We will follow through.
Obviously, departments would have to follow the contracting rules and procedures that are in place in part of the Government of Canada. The issue of standing offers and the competitive process for getting the contractors would follow through another process.
Senator Mercer: I hope this does not happen in this government, but I will be the first in the country to predict that at some future time this will be the subject of an Auditor General's report, that some government department has contracted to a headhunter to recruit people, and they really do not know what they are doing. They will do exactly what Senator Murray suggested: They will become the political conduit through which patronage will be passed. I would much rather patronage be up front and open.
Senator Murray: Hear, hear!
Senator Mercer: I firmly believe in it, because if you do not like political patronage, throw the scoundrels out. That is the way it should work. I predict today that, if this is the way it unfolds, the Auditor General — maybe not this Auditor General or the next one — in the future will do an audit. We will have someone who will do the knee jerk reaction and call an inquiry into that. I hope they go back and read the testimony at this hearing to see that I did predict it.
Ms. Barrados: I hope, senator, that we put enough of an audit and surveillance capacity in place that we will be deterrence against that. That is the model. The model is that we are delegating more to the managers to let them have the discretion. In doing that delegation, there is a requirement, there is monitoring, there is surveillance and there is a real persistence in us doing that. That is why it is so important that we build up our audit capacity, get out there and do those audits and have the discussions on the results.
Senator Mercer: But the further away we get from employees of government agencies doing the work, the harder it is to audit. I do not want to mix my committees up. I am on the Agriculture Committee, and I can tell you that the Auditor General cannot audit literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone to people under the BSE recovery program because they have gone to private companies.
It is out there. It gets very fuzzy, and I think you should be very careful.
Ms. Barrados: Thank you for that. From my days at the Office of the Auditor General, I remember all those frustrations.
The Chairman: When you were giving your introductory remarks, you told this committee how you were appointed. You said that with the resolutions in the Senate in May, and the House of Commons in April, the Governor in Council appointed you president of the Public Service Commission on May 28, 2004. In the House of Commons, in discussions of the bill that I raised earlier on whistle-blowing, known as Bill C-11, there were a wide variety of questions from a number of different members on the impartiality of the person who would oversee the whistle-blowing legislation by virtue of the method of appointment. Earlier today, you said that you wanted to enhance your reporting ability to Parliament. To me, the two are somehow tied. Could you start with the latter and tell us what specific steps you intend to take to enhance your reporting to Parliament, to Senate committees, to House of Commons committees, and so on. In what way will that give you the independence that members would like to see for something such as whistle-blowing?
Ms. Barrados: First, on enhancing the reporting to Parliament, we have started that process with the annual report that we tabled and the audit reports that we released. Presently, there is no mechanism for the Public Service Commission to table audit reports. The only mechanism for bringing anything to Parliament's attention is the annual report through the Minister of Heritage. When the new piece of legislation is fully enacted, December 2005, there is a clause in that legislation that allows the president to table directly in Parliament. I intend to use that clause to table the audit reports. I do not think it is appropriate to be tabling these audit reports through a minister. I spent too long at the office of the Auditor General to think that that is a reasonable route to go.
We will be making sure that we cover the areas of concern in our audit reports. I have taken careful notes about the concerns about bureaucratic patronage and the use of headhunters. That must be on our list of things we are concerned about in making sure that these reports address these issues.
We have also now had more direct reference and regular access to the House of Commons Government Operations and Estimates Committee and this committee. This is the second time that I have attended here. I am hoping that, in tabling those reports, this is an opportunity to discuss these with the committees.
We will formally be increasing the amount of reporting and the type of reporting that we are doing. At the same time, I am encouraging my staff and my executive to have as much direct contact as they can with individual members of Parliament to talk about what the PSC does, its role, and facilitate questions that members get in terms of appointments and jobs. Those are things that we are doing.
I hope that by 2006 we will have that whole machine working. As you can imagine, there is quite a difference in process — that is, how you prepare the reports, how you present the reports, and moving the reports to simple language. We are doing all those things.
An important element of that, too, is, when you are making the public reports and you have the challenges of members of Parliament, it is a very public process. That is important for us to maintain our independence and for Parliament to have that confidence in us by it being part of that process. We try our best. We will not always have everything right, but this kind of discussion is extremely useful to us because it flags things that we have to be more vigilant about.
On the impartiality of the appointment, unfortunately the timing of the appointment was just before the election call so there really was no announcement made. I believe that a lot of members really were not aware that it had occurred and that the process had been completed. There are a lot of new members in the House. I am finding that, as I am having my discussions about what the PSC is and how I was appointed, they really were not aware that that was the process.
The Chairman: But you are a Governor-in-Council appointment. Compared to something like the Chief Electoral Officer or the Official Languages Commissioner, is there a difference?
Ms. Barrados: It is actually the same process for both the Official Languages Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner. Technically, there must be a GIC to make the appointment. However, the GIC cannot be made unless there has been the resolution in both Houses. It cannot be done without those resolutions. Parliament has the say.
The same process must go through if there is a decision that I am not doing my job and that I am to be dismissed.
Senator Ringuette: The headhunter thing has lit up a few minds about what is happening out there.
I want to go back to language testing. From my perspective, language is a skill that can be recognized and certified by an educational institution. It does not need to be tested within the public service. For instance, if you require an engineer, UNB or the University of Ottawa or Carleton University or the University of Toronto will certify that this person has met all the requirements of the profession.
Why can you not see, after 40 years, that we have moved further than that, and recognize that language, be it French or English or both, is a skill set that needs to be certified by an educational institution? You do not need to be involved in identifying who is qualified for a particular skill. Therefore, if a person, like, for example, the candidate that Senator Mercer was talking about, wants to apply to the public service, he would visit the nearest post-secondary education institution and pay for the test.
We are 40 years after the fact. We have to move on this. I do not see this as being one of the costs that the federal government has to put forth to recognize a skill set. If you want to apply for a certain position, one that requires X, Y, Z, E in skills, then it is the applicant who should provide the certification and the competency within those skills sets. We have to move forward. This is like going around in circles.
Mr. Pelletier, some might be offended if I ask you, but I shall ask it in any event. Of the current bureaucracy in Ottawa that requires language skills, additional ones in order to function within their promoted, hopefully, position, how many of them are anglophone requiring French certification and how many are francophone requiring English certification?
Ms. Barrados: May I make a couple of comments while we dig out the numbers? We have those numbers in our annual report.
The PSC is in fact charged with ensuring that qualifications are met and that policies are set in terms of how the qualifications are met. Language skill is one element of determining whether someone is qualified. The issue we have to address, and I will ask Mr. Pelletier to comment on the kinds of questions being raised in the ADM committee, is that at the end of the day we have to have some process that is fair so that everyone agrees that it is a fair process. Right now, we have a lot of challenge to us, but that there is a process whereby people say that if you get your certification from there as opposed to there it is fair and reliable. That, in fact, is a tough issue because there are many different views on the level of the language skill. Do we actually need, for example, the components in the C level that we have, or is a B-plus level adequate? Those are all the kinds of things we are looking at.
In terms of the annual report — and then I will turn over to Mr. Pelletier to comment further — on page 61, we describe the appointments to the public service by language group and the requirements. We have the table here, in terms of all the appointments the language required and the groups who go into those kinds of positions. Therefore, French essential, not surprisingly, 97.4 per cent of the people who go into French essential are francophones; English essential, 96.4 per cent are English. The different ones are bilingual imperative and the bilingual non-imperative. That is where there has been some controversy about the bilingual imperative, so a candidate must have both languages when he or she takes the job. There, 66 per cent are francophone and 34 per cent are anglophone.
Senator Ringuette: My specific question was in regard to language training and testing, to meet the current requirements of the employees that are within the system now, not outside hiring, how many francophones would require English training and how many anglophones would require French training?
Ms. Barrados: We might have to get you those numbers, because what we have here is all the appointments, and I believe you are asking about the internal. These are the outside ones; you are asking about the inside ones.
Senator Ringuette: Yes. In regard to your responsibility and the language-requirement issue, if you are hiring an engineer or a lawyer, you depend on the high quality of our post-secondary education system to say this person is qualified and this person is not.
The same perspective can be brought into the language issue. That would remove time barriers. We are in the 21st century; it is time to get over this language thing. Canadians, if you want to work in the public service, and if you want to work in the private sector as well, right now, your best asset is to have at least French and English, and consider Spanish as well in your skill set.
That is my spin in regards to language, and I hope you look at the possibility of getting out of this testing for new hiring. We rely on Canadian universities to be able to provide the training and the testing, and let us move forward.
Coming back to the geographic restriction and to the comments by one of my colleagues here, in the 1960s and 1970s geographic limitation policy was right, because some of the departments and operations were being implemented in the regions. It is not the case in the year 2000. It is unacceptable, for instance, that, in Ottawa, 0.4 per cent of the Canadian population that resides within the 50 kilometre geography of Ottawa has exclusive access to 60 per cent of the federal government jobs. It is not right that the people living within 50 kilometres of Fredericton, where we have maybe two or three government offices with very limited staff, within 50 kilometres of that provincial capital, have sole access to the potential federal jobs in Fredericton, whereas the people in Bathurst, the people in Edmundston and Woodstock have restricted access to those jobs.
This spin of protecting jobs in rural settings is a false premise if you look at the current situation. I am somewhat concerned, Ms. Barrados, because last week we had the president of the Treasury Board before our committee. I asked him the specific question about the removal of geographic barriers, whether the money was there and the process was in place, and would this removal would be accepted. This committee was told by the president of the Treasury Board that very shortly we were going to have an announcement of the removal of barriers. You are the person responsible for the removal of barriers. What is shortly? When?
Ms. Barrados: The money has been set aside for this, in terms of the money for the implementation of the Public Service Modernization Act.
As I indicated earlier, we do have the money to develop the plan. It is a technical plan, so all the components have to be laid out. Our approach in that plan is that by going with a mixed public and private sector, doing those things in which the PSC has expertise — that is, setting those job requirements — means setting out all the job requirements for different types of jobs, so it can be automated, and going to the private sector to buy the technical components. All of that must be spelled out in the specifications.
At the same time, we are working with the initiative that is on in government in shared systems and shared systems — the shared systems in terms of human resources management. This is an initiative that the minister is pushing very hard.
We expect to have our plans ready to go, everything ready to go to the board for implementation by the end of May. That date has slipped a couple of months from what I had in the estimates documents, because even though we are the PSC I had trouble getting people lined up and in place and all of the contracts in place.
We have the people there now. By the end of May, we should have it ready to go. The minister is waiting for that. If we get a quick approval, we will move on. I cannot go any faster than those approval processes.
I have a tool that we have to have in place, the technology and staff must be in place, and then there is the policy itself. That is entirely in the hands of the commission. We can move as quickly as we want on the policy, but I believe it is irresponsible to be opening up the areas of competition very broadly without having the tools and mechanisms in place. We would just stalemate the system. In doing that, we would encourage people to go around it more and do more of the casual kind of hiring. That is not the solution we are looking for.
Senator Ringuette: In your report, we are looking at 40,000 appointments, and two thirds of that figure is short-term appointments getting through the back door. How much worse can it get? It cannot get worse than this?
Ms. Barrados: It is particularly the casuals that the PSC has no role in. In regard to the part-time appointments, there is still a mechanism where there is some involvement, but these are short term. If you are short term, you do not have the same kind of appointment process that you have in the long-term process. I am not happy with that. That is why I raised it.
Senator Ringuette: I acknowledge your goodwill and your understanding of what needs to be done and so forth.
I have been involved in government since 1987. The government is a service industry. Any service industry that does not regard human resources as 90 per cent of its success story will fail. We are 100 per cent in the service industry, and 100 years later there are departments that have no HR planning, departments that are bypassing completely the hiring process that we have.
The Chairman: Did you want to respond to that Ms. Barrados?
Ms. Barrados: I share a number of the concerns. I have to come back to what we made in terms of an overall statement. Overall, there is a respect for the values. I see the warning signs. We have a system that operates on thousands of transactions. However, there are issues and we must be persistent about those issues.
Senator Ringuette is correct about the importance of human resources and the proper management of human resources. If you look at even the discretionary spending that departments have, if you take out the obligations for debt servicing and the obligatory transfers, the discretionary spending is by and large salaries. It is a huge chunk of the business of government.
The Chairman: Human resources used to be with the public service, but that is one of the many things that has been spun out of the Public Service Commission and is now with its own agency. You have an audit function for it.
Ms. Barrados: An interesting evolution has gone on for about 100 years. The Public Service Commission had all aspects of human resource management in the early days, but there has been an evolution in the PSC. The authority to appoint is still with the Public Service Commission; it is maintained in an independent organization. The other parts of human resource management policy are with the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency. Parts of the Public Service Commission went to that agency. Its core was in the Treasury Board. The Treasury Board had its human resource management responsibilities as the employer, and the core of its responsibilities is actually from that Treasury Board component with some things from us.
Senator Murray: I have two questions. I will ask them quickly.
First, the act provides that there will be at least two part-time commissioners. The question is: Are you expecting others in addition to the two that have been appointed to be named in the near future?
Second, on the question of language, is the committee of ADMs or one of the subcommittees taking a look at the designation of bilingual imperative positions? Are you satisfied that there are some controls on that? As long as 20 years ago, Max Yalden was the Commissioner of Official Languages and the then Joint Official Languages Committee was concerned about what appeared to us to be a kind of hit and miss approach to designating bilingual imperative positions. The question is: Is this process a science or an art, and who is in charge of it?
Ms. Barrados: First, in terms of the part-time commissioners, at the end of the day — and this was an interesting discussion we had during my confirmation process — the decision to appoint those commissioners is not with me; they are GIC appointments.
Senator Murray: You told us that you expect to be consulted.
Ms. Barrados: I was consulted on these last two appointments, and I expect to be consulted on further appointments. If I am not, I think I would come here to complain.
My hope is that we get the new commission through the transition, the devolvement, the delegations, have that stabilized. It is a huge change for the organization to have gone from three full-time people who were deputies. At the end, there were three deputies there. Now it is more like a board. Once that takes place, I would expect to see two additional commissioners come on and then worry about representativeness as part of the makeup of that commission.
I consider myself from the West, but I have not lived in the West for a long time. I have two easterners essentially on the commission.
With respect to language, and I will get Mr. Pelletier to add on to that, my understanding of the designation of the bilingual imperative is that it is in the hands of Public Service Human Resources Management Agency, in other words, the employer. The area of service, everyone is clear: Service has to be provided in the language of choice of the Canadian asking for the service. I do not think we see too much debate or uncertainty in that area.
Where there is more of an issue and where you have the debate is in the management of the jobs. Here it comes around the ability to be able to supervise in the language of their choice. How much of a language skill do you need to have to supervise somebody in the language of their choice, or is it all right if you have one speaking English and another speaking French?
Right now, that is at CBC, and we are asking questions about the appropriateness of that.
Senator Murray: At what?
Ms. Barrados: CBC, it is the standard; ABC is the level. ABC and exempt is how it goes. C is the level in oral interaction where you are expected to know what a subjunctive is, but I passed the test without using any because I knew I would get them wrong.
Mr. Pelletier: I do not have too much to add to what we are saying, not in the subjunctive in any case. The departments are delegated by the employer to determine the designation and the level ABC. It is the policy that all executive jobs are CBC in Ottawa. A, B and C are well defined in terms of what is required for the incumbent — the skill of the incumbent for A, B and C — and the Public Service Commission tests the candidate against those standards and ensures that the tests are valid. We can explain the tests, and they are fair for everyone, and everyone has been tested the same way. That is in a nutshell our responsibility.
The ADM subcommittee is looking at the designation, how we are doing it now, and will look at whether they would recommend a different way of doing it.
Senator Murray: Or of monitoring it. Thank you.
Senator Harb: Speaking about the staffing, I have a couple of questions for the president. The first is in terms of remuneration of the public service, in particular when dealing with professionals. I take the case of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. I participated in many missions where I was told that the local hired commercial officer was making almost double the salary of his boss, who was the trade commissioner in one of the countries. That is not an isolated case. It seemed to be across the board.
I spoke with some other professionals within the public service, who I have been told have salaries, in some cases, somewhere in the range of 25 to 35 per cent less than that of the private sector. It is no wonder we have been losing much of the talent from the public sector, going into the private sector — because of the remuneration factor.
Is it in your cards to have a look at the salaries of the public service from the bottom up, from the front-line clerk to the deputy minister level, to find out how we rank compared to other places in the world, other economies of similar magnitude as ourselves?
In terms of the staffing in the department, one that comes to mind is the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. That is a department that is stretched to the limit, not only here in Canada but also abroad, so much so that while we are dealing with some cases, we are told that the visa is there but they do not have the necessary resources in order to issue it. It is that bad.
One would think that there is an opportunity for you and your staff to aggressively tackle this issue, particularly when it comes to departments that are offering services to Canadian citizens and to those who may want to become Canadian citizens from overseas.
Finally, on the notion that our chair raised, that is visible minorities in the public service, I cannot tell you how often I have had middle management public servants who are visible minorities come in to complain about the fact they reached a certain level in the public service and hit a brick wall. They do not seem to be able to go beyond that. There the frustrations start, and before you know it they are offered a package to take an early retirement or they quit on their own and join other services in the private sector. That is an important thing to keep in mind.
Finally, a comment about opening up jobs: I have no problem. Open them up. It cannot hurt the urban setting as much as it can hurt the rural setting. My fear is that when a job is opened up here in Ottawa for everyone else to apply for from across the country, you are robbing different parts of the country of their talent and bringing it here to the capital of Canada. To that extent, you are not solving the problem. The issue here should be economic development in different parts of the country, whereby if there is a new initiative by the government to set up new departments, it makes sense to explore the possibility of regionalizing or decentralizing future jobs, not sucking away jobs from one part of the country to another. That is an important point to bear in mind.
The Chairman: We have five minutes and he has asked three difficult questions.
Ms. Barrados: I will try to be succinct. First, in terms of the question of remuneration, how much people are paid, that is in the domain of the employer. Right now, the audit mandate of the Public Service Commission is appointments, the audit of appointments and related activities. I think pushing it to salaries pushes me further than the related activity allows. However, I think the classification issue is an important related one, because appointments and classification go together. The area where we feel there is abuse is when you are fooling around with those classifications, but it may be a reflection of some of the compensation issues.
In terms of how we would be the most effective audit organization, we would be a more effective one if we audited all aspects of human resource management. However, I do not think salaries are within our scope right now in the way you talked about it.
The second question in relationship to Citizenship and Immigration and the pressures they are under — and this speaks to Senator Ringuette's issues of planning. It is planning not only for business planning but linking people planning into that. We have to bring those things together, and have the discussions within the system that if that does not work we have to come to Parliament about how these pressures are not being met, given the policy that is there.
I am hoping that is one area that, if there are these pressures, it has to come through in the plans, because if it is not, there is not a planning with integrity.
The other question you asked was about the visible minorities and the concern that people have come to you feeling they cannot get further ahead.
I have heard the same kind of thing. I have had people come and talk to me. I raised in my opening comments that I am concerned that we are not making progress on the representation of visible minorities in the EX group. We have an advisory committee that is advising both me and the president of the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency on how to make improvements. I have asked each department where the representation numbers are low to come forward with a specific plan in terms of how they will make use of some of the flexibilities that we already provide to people so it is easier to make these appointments, and how they plan to do that.
I would ask Mr. Gauld to add another couple of comments on other initiatives we are trying to get underway, because we are not making progress fast enough. Before he starts, I will say that I will take under advisement your comment about the jobs.
Mr. Gauld: As the president mentioned, we have put in place what we call a new employment equity program, which is actually a cafeteria menu of special authorities that we will give to departments to hire members of employment equity groups. They have the authority to target competitions or appointments to members of those groups, internal or external in most cases, and certainly for the EX ranks. We have asked for the plans and we are following up on those. We are just compiling that information now.
We are working with one major department, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and Social Development Canada, which was HRDC in the past, who have undertaken a large project to try to find people within who are members of employment equity groups, to put them in EX-1 jobs that they have identified and set aside in that organization for them. They had, I think, 440-odd candidates. They are in the last phase of winnowing that down to a number of qualified people, and we look forward to some appointments there.
We have delegated some authorities to that department to facilitate that work. We are linking in other initiatives, for example, Senator Oliver's work with the Conference Board, looking at the representation of visible minorities in the private sector and the public sector, what can we do to increase it, what are the benefits, and the work with the external advisory committee that the president mentioned.
We have been very successful for a number of years with the management development programs — the advanced executive development program and the career assignment program — in getting high levels of representation of visible minorities and some other equity groups in those programs. They were a useful way to give people a boost up, from people within the service and some people from without. Those programs have now moved over to the agency, of course, but they are on a good footing to do that sort of thing.
We are in discussions now looking at what else we can do. I am trying to get a conversation going with the departments and the agency about how we can best reach outside to bring in more people at senior levels.
The Chairman: President Barrados, I want to thank you and all of your senior staff very much for attending here today. We appreciate your directness, candour and frankness. It has been very instructive and informative for us. It will be useful as we continue with our study of estimates and estimates problems.
The committee adjourned.