Finance Committee on May 31st, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Ms. Sawyers. I'm sure that members will have many questions for you.

Now we're going to the Financial Data and Technology Association of North America.

Mr. Boms, I understand there may be some challenges with your headset or with the sound, but we're going to do the best that we can.

[Steven Boms, Executive Director, Financial Data and Technology Association of North America]

Thank you very much. Hopefully you can hear me clearly.

I appreciate the opportunity to appear today on behalf of the Financial Data and Technology Association of North America, or FDATA. We are the leading trade association advocating for consumer-permissioned access to financial data in both Canada and the U.S. Our members today collectively provide millions of Canadian consumers and SMEs with access to vital financial services, products and tools. We enable Canadian consumers, for example, to access more—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Mr. Boms, I have to interrupt. The sound quality is insufficient for our interpreters to do their job, so we won't be able to hear your remarks unless that can be fixed.

I'm not sure if our technicians can work with Mr. Boms, but we will move now to the Public Service Alliance of Canada. I believe it's Mr. Weber who will be delivering remarks.

Go ahead for five minutes, please, Mr. Weber.

[Mark Weber, National President, Customs and Immigration Union]

Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to address the finance committee today.

My name is Mark Weber. I appear before you today as a member of the national board of directors of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents 245,000 members, most of whom are federal public service employees. Many also work for post-secondary institutions, territorial governments, non-profits, indigenous organizations and even some private employers. I am also the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, a component of the PSAC, which represents over 12,000 employees of the Canada Border Services Agency. That includes 9,000 members of the border services group, who have now been without a contract for two years.

On the positive side, budget 2024 provides significant funding for post-secondary students, workers and institutions, especially in remote locations. This is good news for our members in that sector, and we congratulate the government on these announcements.

We suggest that the list of eligible professions include occupational therapists. Also, if not already included in the definition of “nurse”, please include registered practical nurses, RPNs; licensed practical nurses, LPNs; and registered nurses. Ideally, distribution of these funds would happen no later than 30 days after the act receives royal assent.

Bill C-69 provides language that clarifies in the Canada Labour Code that employers are responsible for properly identifying employees as such, instead of skirting responsibilities by claiming that they are contractors. This is also a welcome and long-overdue change for Canadian workers.

We are also pleased to see language around an employee's right to disconnect during non-work hours. Unfortunately, this section makes some of the same mistakes that the Ontario government has made in its changes to Ontario's Employment Standards Act and should include minimum standards that apply to all workers and employers, along with meaningful penalties for breaches of these standards.

While the elements mentioned above are certainly positive, we are concerned that the budget and the bill leave out some important aspects. There is no money for Phoenix damages or increased funding to hire and retain more staff to deal with the nearly half-million Phoenix cases still in the backlog currently. There is no money to increase capacity at the pay equity commission, which is sorely behind.

Even more concerning are two issues that are included in Bill C-69.

First, changes are made to the Public Sector Pension Investment Board Act. We understand from different sources that these are housekeeping changes made so that the Treasury Board can move money to and from members' plans in the case of a non-permitted surplus, or possibly in the case of increased draws from the plan or reduced revenues. The federal government would do well to remember that any surplus that may be realized will have been built on employee contributions. Before any move is made to use that surplus for government spending, it is essential that members be consulted and that inequities be rectified.

One such inequity is the differential treatment for public safety occupations. The PSAC has long called on the federal government to provide border officers, federal defence firefighters and fisheries officers with pension provisions equivalent to their peers in public safety divisions of other departments and governments. Right now, CBSA officers, federal firefighters and fisheries officers must work at least five years longer than their peers, leaving them at increased risks for occupational diseases and injuries, and making recruitment and retention increasingly difficult as well. The fact that the federal government continues to refuse to implement the simple legislative changes that would correct this inequity is deeply insulting to our members. Budget 2024 is a chance for the government to change this.

We also have questions about proposed changes to the corrections act to permit the housing of immigration detainees in federal correctional facilities. As the bargaining agent for CBSA, Correctional Services and immigration workers, PSAC must be consulted on any changes to job classifications, locations of work and responsibilities. Who will provide what service to detainees under this new framework? How will jobs interact and overlap, and will the government confirm that services will not be contracted out? Public safety duties should never be offloaded to the lowest bidder, and private security companies have no role to play in these or any public institutions if we wish to ensure the integrity of sensitive public safety processes.

I thank the committee and look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Weber, for those opening remarks.

I'm sure members have many questions, so we are going to move into our first round, which is six minutes of questioning by each party.

We're starting with MP Lawrence for the first six minutes.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

I understand that Mr. Boms isn't able to participate. I'm wondering if I can ask him a couple of questions, and maybe he can respond in writing to the committee if that would be acceptable to the chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Yes.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

I apologize, Mr. Boms, for your inability to participate, but if you could, write to the committee with respect to the following two questions.

Are your members satisfied with the progress of real-time rail and open banking? If you could expand on that, it would help us in our deliberations.

That's it, Mr. Boms. If you could write to the committee, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much, sir.

I'll be splitting my time with Mr. Morantz, but I have a couple of questions for you, Mr. Weber.

In budget 2024, the government proposed to reduce the size of the public service by 5,000 full-time equivalents from 368,000. I want to get your comment on that if I can.

[Mark Weber]

It is concerning. We're not sure exactly where these cuts are going to come from. Right now, the component that I'm president of, the Customs and Immigration Union at the CBSA, is short between 2,000 and 3,000 officers just to keep our borders running. That's just to give you an idea of how bad the shortfall in staff is. I don't think our situation is unique either. To think of where those cuts are going to come from is extremely concerning.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

In the context of the government's plans to reduce the public service, they're still spending, depending on the number you use, anywhere from $15 billion to $20 billion on consultants. Do you believe that your members would be capable of fulfilling some if not all of the work of consultants?

[Mark Weber]

Absolutely, we do. There's no need for that kind of money to be spent on consultants. As with our employer, with the CBSA, we saw what happened with ArriveCAN and everything surrounding it. That was a monumental waste of money that was absolutely unneeded. Our members could have done that work.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

You kind of stole my thunder there. I was going to ask about ArriveCAN. Perhaps I'll allow you to repeat some of the things your team has put on the record with respect to your ability to accomplish work. That's not just with ArriveCAN, which is to get headlines, clips and stuff like that. I'm more interested in digitization, because there's going to be a lot of it. There's going to be a lot of IT work that needs to be done too, irrespective of any government, for the next 10 years. I just want to hear from you about the confidence you have in your members to get that work done.

[Mark Weber]

I have complete confidence in our members to get it done. When ArriveCAN happened, none of our members or the people who work at the border were consulted on what was needed for an application to work at the border. That's not uncommon at the CBSA. We are generally not consulted on anything. The people who run the CBSA are almost universally not people who have ever worked at a border.

It was ill-advised money that didn't need to be spent and work that members could have done. The outsourcing was unneeded. Again, I don't think the situation is different from any component of the PSAC.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you for your excellent testimony.

I'll pass the floor now to my colleague, Mr. Morantz.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Mr. Weber, in your opening comments, you touched on the disaster around the Phoenix pay system. Do you have a sense of what the global damages are to the public service because of the debacle of the Phoenix pay system? With a dollar amount, how much does the federal government owe in outstanding pay to public servants?

[Mark Weber]

I know that about 400,000 cases are still unresolved. That work is still ongoing, with very few resources for those cases to be resolved. I don't have the exact dollar figure. I can tell you that the mental health toll, the anxiety, from the years that members have been suffering just to get paid for the work they do is absolutely extreme.

Michele, perhaps you have more on that.

[Michele Girash, National Political Action Officer, Public Service Alliance of Canada]

I don't have the numbers, but we can get back to the committee in writing if you wish.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

I would really appreciate it if you could provide a number.

Is it still going on? Are people still not getting paid appropriately?

[Michele Girash]

We're eight years in, and there has yet to be a pay period that has not had mistakes. As Mr. Weber said, there are over 400,000 cases yet to be resolved, and it keeps happening. It continues.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

You have one minute.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

All right. In that time, I think I'll turn to Ms. Sawyers for a second.

Could you describe some of the valuable programming that your organization provides to children and youth?

[Utcha Sawyers]

Definitely. As I mentioned before, we provide programs from cradle to career. That's infant care all the way up to youth outreach, youth academic bridging and youth employment programs. We operate a main site and a hub site. We provide services in 26 other satellite sites. They range from licensed child care and early years learning to children and early teen recreational programs.

We run Circle of Friends, which is the autism recreation program, for two groups of children. One is for those in their early years, and we've now developed a tween program for children who identify on the spectrum and are in need of interaction and recreation support. We also run criminal justice support for youth who are navigating the criminal justice system. One thing we're newly embarking on is affordable housing for young Black youth in our community, who are a common denominator among those being underserved and under-represented in the housing landscape in east Scarborough.

That's just a snapshot.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you so much, Ms. Sawyers. I apologize for interrupting. The chair is telling me that I've run out of time. That was very interesting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I was just enlightened and delighted to hear about all the programs that Ms. Sawyers delivers. My goodness. I don't know when you guys have time to sleep with all you do.

We are now moving to PS Turnbull for the next six minutes.

Members, I want to let you know that the sound may be working now for Mr. Boms. I think he's working with a new computer. We may be able to go to him for questions.

PS Turnbull.