Thank you for having us here today.
My name is Meredith Egan, and with me is Jeremy Ingle. Also with us are Catherine Tremblay and Barbara Cloutier, who will be able to answer any questions in French, if you so wish. We are all principal owners of local temporary help staffing firms in Ottawa. We appreciate the opportunity to speak with you about this important issue.
First, let me note that we are here on behalf of the many temporary help service companies in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, who are all members of the Association of Canadian Search, Employment and Staffing Services, an association known as ACSESS.
Also let me note that we would rather not be here today. Our business is to provide competitively priced, superior quality staffing solutions to clients, including the Government of Canada. Our business is not to advocate on how government solicits those services. However, we do feel compelled to speak to those issues, given how a good working relationship that has served the needs of taxpayers has very suddenly been soured and needs to be set right again.
Our issue is the standing offer for temporary help services. There is an offer in effect today, the product of over two decades of cooperation and consultation. However, the Department of Public Works and Government Services decided to radically change and alter that offer with an announced new document on June 30 of this year. Without prior consultation but for an impromptu meeting ten days before, and without any other notice, the temporary help services industry was suddenly faced with a dramatically new approach to the solicitation of their services.
We fully appreciate the right of government, as with any client, to change the terms of engagement for their suppliers. However, the kinds of changes represented by the June 30 document made no sense. Among other things, the new approach would have resulted in the elimination of competition from a very competitive process, ignored the issues of quality of service, resulted in the closing of dozens and dozens of small businesses, and dramatically decreased the wages of temporary workers.
In the past, the public works department and the staffing sector had an open dialogue. Yet with this new document, we were cut out from all communication, and for a reason unknown to us, we were treated like we were an adversary. The situation continued to deteriorate over the summer, until very recently, when the department finally decided to engage the industry on issues through a consultation process run by the Conference Board of Canada.
Pre-consultation materials issued by them suggested, however, that this was merely the latest in a series of consultations on the standing offer. This is not true. As internal departmental materials obtained by us through access to information make clear, the last meeting held with our industry and the public works department was in early November 2005. We now await the report from the Conference Board in order to use it as a basis for further discussions.
PWGSC has left the revised standing offer on their website as a consultation document and has promised to identify what it believes are the weaknesses of the original standing offer. Late yesterday they asked us to submit to them our comments on what could be done to improve their procurement process of our services.