I want to start by saying that I am a CRA employee and have been employed for 34 years with Revenue Canada, CCRA, and the CRA, and I can say I've witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly with the department and the agency as a front-line worker and as the national president of the union. In fact, one of the members around this table, I used to call Minister.
It may surprise you, but I can say that our relationship under the CRA structure is mostly good, and certainly better than when we were a department of the government. That said, the most important area where the CRA has failed to live up to its employer-of-choice model is in the area of staffing and staffing recourse. That is the bad, and in the given time available, that's what I'll focus on.
Under subsection 54(1) of the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency Act, the agency must develop a program governing staffing, including an appointment process and employee recourse when the process goes wrong. The act further states that no collective agreement may deal with staffing.
Unfortunately, the CRA staffing directives fall far short of providing transparency in appointments and do not provide any real recourse. Our experience has exposed a number of problems that I should like to table this afternoon.
From our experience to date, I can say that the CRA has refused to implement some of the findings of the independent third party reviewers, the ITPRs, and indeed denies that reviewers can make binding orders in contravention of its own directives. When an ITPR interprets a directive in a way that expands employees' right, the employer amends the directive to limit that right once again.