Evidence of meeting #30 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was employees.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
I'd like to turn to the topic of staffing, with respect to the supplementary material that you gave to us. In some of the comments you made, you mentioned that there are problems in recruiting. Can you elaborate on that?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
I think it's a couple of things. One is the time it takes to recruit compared with the short retention period of some of these employees. There is now a dearth of employees. They are rapidly offered, once they are in the civil service—
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
We've talked about this before. I look at your commission and compare it with other commissions or other agencies that are doing investigatory work, like the Auditor General. They're all specialized jobs. My question is, why would you be any different from anybody else?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
I'm not. I'm different from the Auditor General. She has a separate employer. That allows her to offer different conditions and perhaps arguably to also adjust her offers of employment more quickly to the labour market offer. As for the others, we all need the same types of employees. Investigators, for example, are in high demand these days, so there's a certain movement.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
Why do they move on? Are they offered more remuneration? Why do they move on?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
From what I can observe, I would say that's often the case. We are a small organization, and another of the rules is that you can't create too many levels, become too hierarchical, and so on. So for employees who want and who deserve a promotion, often the only way to get it is to go to a much larger organization, where there are promotions and a level up. That has happened to many employees recently, particularly in our investigation area.
The managers move on because they can get promotions when people see the skills they have, and the employees move on and obtain promotions and so on. So there we are, back hiring people.
I'll add that in our particular case, because we're looking at privacy files, there's now a six-month wait for secrecy clearance.
Conservative
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Yes, and it's an issue that's shared by other agencies.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
A percentage of your employees are contract employees and a percentage of them are full-time employees, or whatever the terminology is. Can you tell us what the breakdown is of those two groups, roughly?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Of 122 employees, there are nine term employees right now. So it's a small number of contract employees at the present time; they're mostly full-time.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
Do you have the results of the exit questionnaire? Could you give us some general comments on that?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
No, we don't. We're still devising the exit questionnaire.
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Yes, we realized we needed more fine-tuned knowledge in order to prevent the exit of these valuable employees.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
I appreciate that you're working on this, but obviously it's a serious problem, to be efficient, to investigate. If you don't meet your timeframes or if you aren't as thorough as one should be because you're short-staffed or you don't have the appropriate people, that's a problem.
Presumably, if you're going to complain about that, or you're in the process of trying to improve this, I think the committee would like to hear from time to time your progress on this. There clearly is a problem, and I think the committee would like to hear interim reports on how you're progressing.
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Yes, I'd be glad to give them, Mr. Chairman.
I mention also in this document that I'm involved in something called the heads of federal agencies, which is simply an informal group led by the Librarian and Archivist of Canada that groups about 160 small agencies, I think. Some of them are called micro-agencies and have four or five people, up to ones that have nine hundred or so. We are attempting to bring to the attention of Treasury Board the challenges of trying to manage a small agency with the same rules as the ones that are set up, for example, for the Department of National Defence or Transport Canada.
I think Mr. Wilson has been quite successful in bringing Treasury Board's attention to the challenges we face and how perhaps some of the rules are difficult for us and cause unforeseen difficulties for us and what the alternatives would be.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
I have one final question, Mr. Chairman.
For the investigations that you undertake, are you behind?
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
Because you're behind, how much of that is attributed to this problem that we're talking about right now?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
A great amount, because as this problem has been chronic over the years we've built up a backlog of old cases. The new cases get added on to them. We get some out and they're still there. So a good part of it has to do with this.
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
Are there other agencies of the government that you can approach to...? I know you're very capable, but sometimes a second thought is a good one. Are there other agencies of the government you could discuss this with and obtain suggestions as to how this dilemma could be solved?
Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Yes, particularly the Canadian Human Rights Commission. They had a huge backlog several years ago, and we've been consulting them regularly on how they finally got on top of it. There are presentations within the groups of heads of federal agencies about how these small agencies, which have limited budgets too, have dealt with their backlog--for example, the RCMP complaints commission. So we've learned from their experience as it applies to us.
But each act, of course, is different, and the powers under each act are different.
