Yes. In regard to some of your preamble, I can quickly make a couple of comments.
Under the new legislation the Public Service Commission is the only part of government that can give permission for people to be candidates for federal, provincial, and now municipal elections. And with all the municipal elections coming up, we've been very busy with that process. We've already had one court case that has reminded us of what kinds of processes we have to follow. So it's actually a big area--giving permission to be a candidate.
We're very much driven by the Osborne decision in the early nineties that said public servants have some rights to be politically active. It's an issue of balancing those rights either to be a candidate in an election or to be active in an election campaign. It has a lot to do with the kind of job you're doing and the profile of that job.
Your question on the phantom positions issue relates much more to the conduct of public servants, and a cornerstone for the Public Service Commission is that there should not be any political interference in staffing. The reason the Public Service Commission was created the way it was, without the direction of a minister--so out from underneath a minister--yet holding executive authority, was so that you would not have ministerial direction on appointments.
In this case, we saw two individuals who had come to the commission and made the inquiry of whether they had priority access to jobs in the public service under the ministerial priority, because they were public servants who had gone to work in a minister's office. Now, the way you can come back into the public service under the existing legislation, until Bill C-2 comes in, is that you can say, “I am working for a minister's office in an exempt staff position. I can come in through the priority system.” And I do have reports on the priority system.
The priority system means you are in a queue. If you are ministerial priority, you're behind people who've been declared surplus. You have to have a job that meets your skills, and you have to be qualified. If you want to go to an executive position, you would have to come to the Public Service Commission...because I think this is sort of risky, and I have a pretty clear standard on how that's to apply.
These two individuals could have gone through that priority system. But what was done instead was that from their positions in the minister's office, they had department officials create for them what we call “special assignment positions”. These positions can be created by a deputy minister. They're there for people who are end-of-career or in transition. The idea is that you have some flexibility in the system, both in terms of classification and pay.
These positions were created for these individuals sitting in exempt staff to allow them to not have to go through the priority system but directly into a public service job. The positions were created. They never occupied those positions. They never carried out any of the tasks of those positions.
Our conclusion was that these weren't real positions for these people, because there was no work done; hence, the term “phantom positions”. We felt this was not correct use of the staffing system. It certainly had all the appearance of political interference, if not absolute perception of political involvement. Hence, we revoked those positions.