Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 15th, 2024

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Prier, do you have anything to add to that?

[Nathan Prier]

The employer needs to take its responsibilities to its workers and the Canadian public seriously. The point has been made over and over again about these being Canadian citizens, as well as federal public servants. When digital policies are out of date and not respected, we find ourselves with spyware on government devices, and, clearly, enshrined rights are not respected.

The Privacy Act could be updated in all these ways, but there are strong tools in place right now with no enforcement mechanisms and no consequences for their breach.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I want you to have the ability to answer a question that has been kind of generally posed by some of the departments. Tools are being used to look into government policy violations, such as fraud or workplace harassment, so shouldn't the government have the right to look into these serious violations?

[Jennifer Carr]

If they are using these tools the way they're supposed to, for what they're intended and under the data privacy assessment that has been done, we need to make sure that.... We heard from three departments. They said they used them without doing the prior assessments. We need to make sure that the assessments are being done as they're intended.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Prier.

[Nathan Prier]

I have nothing to add to that.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

As we contemplate final recommendations, notwithstanding that your membership will likely be tuned into this issue now, what steps can we take to help restore some trust from the general feeling of having something that is now, I would argue, fully integrated into every aspect of life? You referenced the way in which applications on the phone.... I have an iPhone. I have an Apple Watch. I have the biometrics. All the different ways in which.... I have my banking information. Everything is there.

How can we help, in this committee, to restore some of the trust from your membership back towards senior management?

[Jennifer Carr]

It all comes back to accountability. If we have the directives, what happens when people don't follow directives when they're asked to do something prior to...?

Again, as I said in my statement, the government needs to acknowledge that we're Canadian citizens as well and that when we're using an employer device, it does not mean that our employer has ownership over all the data that is contained within it.

[Nathan Prier]

A full review of digital policies and a mechanism to update them along with new technologies would be ideal.

I want to just raise the point again that as the largest employer in Canada, the federal government has the power—and pretty specific powers—to be able to impose policies that do things like proactive disclosure, informed consent and the enforcement of privacy policies in ways that maybe imposing that on the private sector does not. Therefore, we have a benchmark-setting role here, as one of the largest employers in the country and also as the Government of Canada, to be able to do this with powers that might be muddier when it moves into the private sector. There's a benchmark setting here that matters for all Canadians and our members.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Prier.

Mr. Green, it was an important question, so I did give extra time for a response. There was also the fear that Mr. Green would file a grievance against the international association of chairs of committees.

Mr. Brock, you have five minutes.

We're going to go five, five, two and a half, and two and a half.

Go ahead, Mr. Brock.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for their attendance.

Earlier this week, the Auditor General, as you know, released a bombshell report exposing incompetence and corruption within the CBSA. I think the most glaring problem with this report is how the government, despite its promise in 2015 to reduce the use of external consultants and rely upon the professional public service.... We know that, over the years, it has increased the size of the public service by close to 40%.

How do you feel, as union leaders, and how does your membership feel, knowing that GC Strategies—a two-person firm working out of their basement with no IT experience—was simply connecting government with IT professionals? How do you feel about that egregious abuse of the expertise that your membership holds?

[Jennifer Carr]

I'm going to take that because I represent the IT workers.

I'll say that we are livid. I would love to come back to this committee. There's lots I could talk about with regard to this whole contracting out.

I had a member come to me this week and say that they can't even get a pencil and a notebook without two people signing off on authority, so how could something balloon so big?

I would love the opportunity to come back. I didn't prepare for that testimony today, but I would love to come back and talk to you about it.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

You have three and a half minutes. Can you elaborate some more? I'd love to hear more.

[Jennifer Carr]

Contracting out has been a preoccupation of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada. We represent professionals, including engineers, nurses and doctors—all regulated professionals who take their work on behalf of Canadians very seriously.

To watch things be contracted out.... It leads to higher costs to the government—it was 40% higher in the report—as well as less transparency, less accountability and lower quality of service. Most important, for me, is the loss of institutional knowledge because it is done out of house. That means we have to consistently be interdependent on contractors to even correct mistakes that they have made.

We need to make sure that we invest in the public service, so that they can maintain and deliver the reliable services on which Canadians depend and which they expect.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you very much.

Given the future expansion of our work here at the ethics committee, I'm sure we're going to see you again, Ms. Carr. Thank you for that.

I'll go over to Mr. Prier and Ms. Shantz with the same type of question.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Nathan Prier]

This was an egregious violation of procurement policies and an egregious violation of...a lot of different ways in which contracting out has bloated what people generally read as the public sector. Public servants actually do not make up the entirety of the public sector. A huge amount of that is shady relationships and contractors—which are sometimes needed, of course.

I'm speaking here as a policy analyst and as the president of a union that represents a lot of policy analysts. Even in that specialized world of policy development, contracting out is normal. There are databases we don't have access to. There are fields of information that we just can't have access to, but this whole element of not being able to build the institutional memory to be able to carry out our tasks in a regular way is a consistent problem.

When people talk about the bloat of the public sector, for our members it's these vast webs of contractor relationships that could probably be done far more cheaply, more effectively and in the spirit of building institutional memory and capacity in-house.

We do not believe that the public sector is overly bloated. We don't agree that the public sector requires a lot of trimming over the next five to 10 years. We do need this contractor relationship and this vast web of contractors to be severely reined in, however, because we feel that our members are qualified to do the type of work we do best, with the correct levels of oversight, which are very stringent levels of oversight.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Shantz, what are your thoughts?

[Laura Shantz, Senior Advisor, Advocacy and Campaigns, Canadian Association of Professional Employees]

I would just like to add this briefly. We're here today to talk about privacy. The minute we start adding layers of contracting out, all of a sudden we have infinite points for data breaches. We saw it with BGRS moving. Recently there was another one; I can't remember the name right now.

We see these things start to happen. All of a sudden, when we start contracting more and more, we open ourselves to more and more points of failure and more and more points of breach. That needs to be thought about in a holistic way, how we can maximize security, because that's Canadians' personal data, public sector workers' personal data and data that is important to our government from security perspectives.

This is essential stuff. It's stuff that public sector workers are trained on. They know how to do it and how to get it right. When we contract that out, we start losing control. That's something we need to be thinking about as well.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you very much, all of you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Brock.

Mr. Sorbara, you have five minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's great to be here with you as chair and with all my honourable colleagues. It's been two or three years since I've sat on the ethics committee. I sat here for a period of time. I always find this committee to be very important in many ways. It undertakes a lot of serious studies, I would say.

I welcome the panel members here today.

First off, I want to say to the panel members, to all your members and to all the employees of the federal public service, thank you for everything you do, not only for what the members of the Library of Parliament do to help us MPs out, but also for what you do for literally millions and millions of Canadians every day in delivering services and benefits to them.

I would also like to say that we have hired folks in the federal public service over the last several years. We have rebuilt it after the devastating cuts, as I would characterize them, from the prior administration, from the Harper government. They literally cut to the bone. We know what it was like to be a federal public servant under a Conservative administration, do we not?

First off, the member for Brantford—Brant recently said here at committee that if people are public servants, there are no privacy issues.

I'll ask you, Jennifer, and you, Nathan, do you believe public servants are entitled to privacy?

[Jennifer Carr]

They are entitled to their privacy, 100%. Again, we are Canadian citizens. We do not pledge allegiance to one government. We have autonomy. We can be political. We should not be able to lose our privacy rights just because we work for the federal government.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

What about you, Nathan?

[Nathan Prier]

I believe that as a point of principle. I believe that's been established in policy, as Jennifer has alluded to a number of times here.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Okay.

With respect to privacy, I have the pleasure and honour of sitting on the industry committee. With Bill C-27, there's an aspect of privacy in that, with PIPEDA and the relevant sections and so forth. Privacy is a huge thing these days, which is an understatement—I'm using very common language, if I can say that—in terms of striking a balance. Like many of our representatives, I worked in the private sector before I had the distinct pleasure of serving the residents I currently serve. When you are provided a device from your employer to utilize, it is their device. You need to use it with judiciousness and diligence. There's a balance there. I've always seen that a balance needs to be struck.

Within that, within the government operations, there have to be guardrails within the departments, and they need to follow the PIAs, the privacy impact assessments. I literally learned this in the last couple of hours. I sit on two other committees, so it's been a busy week. With the PIAs, there is an agreement that when investigations need to happen, they should happen, and the devices and the contents of those devices need to be looked at.

Also, taking a step back, if I'm working for Nathan's organization and I enter into an agreement with the federal government, there is consent that you will use this device but you will use it responsibly. I'm putting that out there, because there needs to be that balance. If processes were not followed properly, you would need to correct those internal processes and the governance, of course.

Do you not agree that consent is important and that balance is important, but the notion that there has to be responsibility on the end-user is important as well?