Government Operations Committee on June 15th, 2006

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

It's for different charities and things—organizations within a constituency—so there's a little bit of a difference.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

And you're not involved in helping set up criteria or making sure the process is a transparent one? That is not something you become involved in, in the program I'm describing?

[Maria Barrados]

In the other program, when it's a government outreach to the private sector, no, but in programs where any department is involved in setting up criteria for hiring public servants, absolutely, yes, because we are very preoccupied that those not be biased or introduce bias.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Mr. Alghabra.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for being here today.

I have a couple of questions. First, I'm sensing a reservation from your remarks about the way your commission reports. Could you please elaborate on the mechanism and how you see it could be improved?

[Maria Barrados]

Yes. When the Public Service Modernization Act was going through, there were a couple of decisions made to strengthen the independence of the Public Service Commission. One was the appointment of the head and the dismissal of the members of the commission. The second one was to provide a clause that would give the commission a direct report, allowing the commission to report at any time it felt it was important to report to Parliament. Everyone at that time took that to mean it was a report directly to the Speaker, not by way of a minister. There's quite a procedure set out for how you report through a minister: you have to give notice, and you have to work with the minister's office.

When the act was enacted, I had these two reports that I thought had timeliness and urgency to them. Certainly I thought it was very important to get the space agency report out, the message being you have to get a new head of the space agency in there, and you have to solve a problem. I thought it was important to get the privacy commissioner report out because a previous committee in Parliament had been very preoccupied about the privacy commissioner not getting full delegation back.

When I went to see about how I could do it—because I thought I could just go to the Speaker and table with the Speaker—I was told that the absence in the drafting of tabling to the Speaker meant it had to go through the minister.

[An hon. member]

Who told you that?

[Maria Barrados]

The Clerk of the House of Commons and the law clerk.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

How do you see us helping to improve the process?

[Maria Barrados]

I would like to see an amendment to the Public Service Employment Act. I suggested it be done as part of Bill C-2, the Accountability Act, but since it didn't really deal with the Public Service Commission it was ruled out of order. So that wasn't a vehicle. I'm going to suggest it be put through miscellaneous amendments. If that doesn't work, at every opportunity I can I will come back and ask for it, because I think it's important.

Having said that, I got no interference from the Minister of Canadian Heritage in tabling these reports when I wanted and in the way I wanted them.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Thank you for that.

The second question I have is because we talk about the commission's responsibility in protecting merit and non-partisanship, and I'm curious also about the importance of diversity. What's the perception the commission has towards diversity? Has there been any diversity, especially of gender or visible minorities? Are there any statistics, especially at a senior level and not just a generalist level, and are there any plans to get improvement if improvement is needed?

[Maria Barrados]

Yes, we have actually a specific charge under the Employment Equity Act to be responsible for removing barriers to employment in the public service. So we have been watching this fairly closely in terms of what kinds of barriers there are and what the numbers are looking like.

On the representivity side, if you take a number that reflects workforce availability, we are seeing overall that women are fairly represented, mainly a little bit over, in total, and the disabled are fairly represented, as are aboriginals, but there's a special issue with the aboriginal people. But visible minorities are under-represented from workforce availability.

If you look at the senior executive ranks, the representivity issues are more severe. I think there is under-representation across the board. So we have under-representation across the board in the senior executive ranks.

On the question of visibility minorities, it is one that bothers me in particular, in large part because of the extent to which our society is changing, and I think it's very important that our public service is reflective of the society it's there to serve.

We have initiated a study that we are terming the drop-off study, because what we have found is that in terms of applications to the public service, visible minorities are over-represented, and in terms of the actual jobs they get they are under-represented. We have undertaken a statistical study that shows what we're calling this drop-off. Now we are moving to doing more analysis on that to try to determine exactly where the barriers are and what it is that is causing this phenomenon of this high interest in the public service and yet when it comes to getting the jobs they're not getting the jobs in the proportions.

Linda is responsible for the work in this area. She might have something to add.

[Linda Gobeil, Senior Vice-President, Policy Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada]

To add to what the president just said, it's also interesting to note that in addition to the efforts we make in terms of having overarching policies that deal with employment equity and so on--talking to the department, having conferences, making sure that all the tools are available to departments--the new legislation, the new Public Service Employment Act, in its preamble made the reference to--I don't have the exact words here--the importance, of course, of having a public service that represents very well the Canadian population.

I would like also to take this opportunity to talk about one of the processes we recently launched with respect.... The president alluded to the fact that on the executive side we still have a gap when it comes to visible minorities. We just launched a selection process to establish a pool. We qualified, if I'm not mistaken--that was last March, so it's fairly recent--something like 41 candidates, highly qualified people, in that pool. Again, if I'm not mistaken, I believe that so far departments have appointed five individuals, and I think that by the end of the month we expect five more people to be appointed. So we have those programs to help departments to meet their objectives when it comes to employment equity and cover the gap that we still have with respect to that designated group.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Could I make a short comment?

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

I think we're way over time. You'll get it again.

Mr. Wallace.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Welcome. You answered some of my questions already through the process.

What's an EX? What does that mean? I don't understand EX. Executive branch? Okay, thank you.

[Maria Barrados]

Just to clarify a little bit, you have the executives. This tends to be your directors, your directors general, your assistant deputy ministers. Your deputies have a different classification. They're DMs. Deputies do not fall under the Public Service Commission, so we're not responsible for their staffing, but we're responsible for all the executives and down. Underneath the executive group you have a great variety of classifications.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

My first question is on something you said in your presentation this morning, that you hold them accountable for staffing actions. You can audit them, but what teeth do you have after you've done the audit?

[Maria Barrados]

We have an unusual set of teeth, and that's what makes us unique. Unlike the Auditor General, whose role it is to audit and make reports, we are actually in the business of auditing and taking corrective measures. That's why in our reports to Parliament we have to say what we found, but also what we did.

We have a couple of instruments. One is the actual delegation; we put conditions on delegations and we can intervene in the staffing processes. Some we'll remove; other times, we do a combination. In the case of the Canadian Space Agency, we removed some and then we imposed some very strong conditions whereby there have to be approvals by us for all future staffing actions.

The other thing we have is the power to revoke positions, so that if there has been an incorrect staffing action, we can actually go in and take the position away.

Under the old legislation we had the power to do that for all positions. Under the new legislation there is a new staffing tribunal set up, and they do that for the internal competitions, but we do it where there is fraud, inappropriate political activity, and for any of the external appointments that were incorrectly done we can revoke the position.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

I have a question about finances. What you've told me today—and I'm new, so I don't know—is that you've downloaded a lot of the hiring and staffing responsibilities. From a practical point of view you may still set policies, but the departments have to look after their implementation. But then we are still spending $64 million on recruitment and assessment services, and the one I really don't understand is $47 million on activities designed to safeguard the integrity of public service staffing and political neutrality. What are you spending the money on? What are you doing?

[Maria Barrados]

That's a good question.

Part of the $67 million on the recruitment and assessment services is for grouping these things together. That's a block of activities.

A single piece in there is what we call the psychology assessment centre. These are the people who do the language testing, who do all the psychology assessment, do any of the special needs in assessing employees. That is part of it; it's about $10 million.

I talked to you earlier about the systems we needed to put in place for national area of selection. Those systems are something we are doing overall for the whole of government; it's not uniquely for us. It has brought up our expenditures for the last years by about $10 million to $12 million a year. These are overall systems costs.

The costs you have in there are fully loaded. They now include the student programs we run for government, the post-secondary recruitment program we run for government, the specialty recruitment programs we run for government, the jobs.gc.ca website we run for government. All of these we run, to keep them unbiased and fair and with integrity. And there's our regional office structure

What is changing with the new legislation is that some of those components are going to be discretionary, whereas before they were compulsory. If they are not used, the expenditure and usage are going to go down, and you will see the expenditure going down in those areas.

But a number of those things are being done for the whole system, so we're talking about activities for 170,000 people.

As to the other $47 million, you're asking what we are doing with the $47 million, what's in that box. What we have in that box is the individual investigations we do and the appeals invsetigations we are currently running. We're looking at running about 500 to 600 individual investigations that could result in people losing their job. Those have to be done in a quasi-judicial kind of manner; they are administrative tribunals.

We have an audit function and those audits have to run to the standards of the Auditor General's.

We have delegations to 80 departments and organizations, so we have delegation agreements over which we have a monitoring function.

We have to give advice and counsel to try to keep the system running, because we're in this major transformation.

So we have that whole package of activities in addition to running a commission. When you cost each one of all those things out, they end up giving you that kind of cost.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Do you have about 1,000 employees in the commission itself?

[Maria Barrados]

Yes.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

So their salaries are paid out of the $47 million side of the equation here?

[Maria Barrados]

No, they're paid out of the whole. Of the 1,000, we have about 250 direct on the recruitment and assessment side. Then the systems side is in addition to that, because those are fully loaded costs.