Government Operations Committee on Nov. 28th, 2006

[Maria Barrados]

You do in some cases, but it's not the standard procedure. The standard procedure is by position.

Donald, do you want to add to that?

[Donald Lemaire, Vice-President, Services Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada]

I don't have more information specifically about that, but what we're starting to do now with departments is in post-secondary recruitment. For example, Foreign Affairs has done campaigns targeted to EE groups—employment equity groups. We're starting to have a more targeted approach towards different career choices. For example, it was done for the political and economic foreign service officers. They did it also for trade officers.

That's what we're trying to promote with departments for their use, but it's their call. We're only there to assist them with those campaigns.

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

So are all of your pre-qualifications done to the EE groups? Is that usually what you do then?

[Maria Barrados]

We did this as an example, because you know the arguments. First is that they don't have any available. I remember this in the discussion about women and about French language skills, that we don't have any. This is a demonstration that we have them, and they're—

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

I'm sorry, but I'm trying to understand. You did this on purpose. You don't normally pre-qualify individuals. You did this on purpose to highlight the fact that we have a qualified, readily available visible minority candidate?

[Maria Barrados]

I don't want to be evasive, but we have an old piece of legislation and a new piece of legislation. In the new piece of legislation, departments are empowered to do this themselves. We did this under the old legislation to demonstrate how it could be done, and yes, we did it on purpose. We did it on purpose to demonstrate that the people were there and they were executive-ready.

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

Thank you.

The other thing I want to talk to you about, which is relevant to this, is that you talked about the two major activities within the commission: the appointment integrity and political neutrality, and the recruitment and assessment services.

I wonder if there's an opportunity to create a responsibility or a position within the recruitment and assessment services for somebody to examine or pay attention to the equity issue. As we know from our daily lives, each department, each individual has a lot of responsibilities, and sometimes the equity issue may not be an essential pursuit of their job requirement. If there's an individual, or if there's a position for someone to encourage departments, procedures, and raise awareness about this challenge....

I think it's highly important in the public service, more than in any other sector in our society, to have an adequate representation of visible minorities, of bilingualism, of women, and aboriginals. That's why it's really important that if there's a chance to highlight and raise the level of awareness, this responsibility within the public service would be useful.

I don't know if you would comment on having increased attention to such a mandate.

[Maria Barrados]

I agree with what you're proposing. What we really have to have is a public service that is reflective of the society that it's serving, and I think that's also very important. In fact we do have a separate group that deals with employment equity issues. They're the ones who are producing the analysis, and they are also the conscience, if you'd like, of the whole organization.

So I want to make sure that we have concerns with employment equity and bilingualism as well, that we have those concerns in all our work, so you see it in the audits and certainly on the service side. As Mr. Lemaire was saying, they are setting up special parts of programs, so that when you recruit post-secondary students, you have an employment equity stream. So as we're pushing for greater representativeness, people in departments will easily be able to go to these programs, where they're identified, and where they have expressed an interest and have met a certain number of the qualifications to enter into the public service.

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

Are you saying there's a plan to move in that direction, or are you just describing your ideal scenario to us?

[Maria Barrados]

No, we have it.

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

We have the—

[Maria Barrados]

We have it. We have the person sitting just behind me. She's there.

I haven't quite gotten the full plan that I want to see in terms of how this group, which we keep allocating resources for and we're maintaining.... We want the analytic capacity—so we come up with those numbers and a better understanding of why we're getting this drop-off phenomenon—and that they also sort of serve as the conscience to the organization, saying, recruitment and assessment, what are you doing? On the assessment side, we have to be very concerned that we don't have bias in any of the assessments, that cultural language biases don't creep in.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Mr. Poilievre.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Thank you.

You said that due to irregularities you've discovered through the hiring of exempt political staff into the public service, you are conducting a sweeping investigation of the last 10 years. Is that accurate?

[Maria Barrados]

My investigation will go back as far as my records will take me, and it will go to at least 1990.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Okay, so due to the phantom jobs and the irregularities we saw with the previous government regarding political staff getting special employment treatment in the public service, you believe there is cause for an investigation going back that far.

[Maria Barrados]

The way we work is to look at specific appointments and we make the corrections. These two cases came to us as cases asking about a priority system. They came to our attention, we investigated them, we corrected them, and we did the revocations. And I made recommendations about how the system could better deal with this, because it is totally unmonitored; it's a total policy vacuum. I made several recommendations, first to the Treasury Board and then in the context of Bill C-2.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Were your recommendations followed in Bill C-2?

[Maria Barrados]

No. That really was not because there wasn't an interest in the recommendations, but it was because they were considered outside the scope of the legislation. That's the route I had taken. I had said there's a vacuum here, let's put the framework in place to deal with this.

Subsequent to that, the committee here and the President of the Treasury Board expressed a lot of interest in how much more of this there was. I can't answer that question without doing the analysis. That's why we're doing the analysis, to see how much there is, but I want to look at several government transitions. That's why I'm pushing back as far as my data will take me.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

That's good. I encourage you in your work.

On the issue of language testing in the public service, it's no secret that anglophones taking the French oral exam have failed in spectacularly high numbers over the years. You've acknowledged that there is a problem there. You have announced that you are changing the testing regimen to make it more user friendly and to ensure that it is a better reflection of the linguistic capability of the subject. When are those changes expected to be implemented?

[Maria Barrados]

I'll get Donald to talk to you about the specific dates we have in mind.

We have done a number of things on the language testing already. The real issue is that you have adults who have not had any language training take language training and then be put into a test environment--and they haven't taken many tests, so some of them are very ill at ease about that.

We've taken a number of steps to try to make the testing environment easier to face, giving more examples of what the standards look like in whichever language they're dealing with, and trying to get testers matched up with the public servants in terms of the areas they work in. And we're exploring pilots to have alternate ways of testing. This means following people, or making a presentation, having a dialogue, appearing before a committee perhaps, and doing it in the other official language.

The problem is that we have, on average, about 22,000 tests a year...20,000 to 25,000 of each of the written and the reading, and of the oral expression. We have a very high volume so we have to try to get something standardized. With all our efforts, we have actually seen some improvement in the oral interaction.

Donald, can you tell us what the timelines are for the changes in the test?

[Donald Lemaire]

Yes. We're in the development phase of the test and we expect to pilot the test for roll-out in April 2007-08. As the president mentioned, it's over 20,000 tests, so it takes a bit of time to implement and also to properly test before we move to a full roll-out.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

For implementation in 2008-09?

[Donald Lemaire]

No, in 2007-08. We'll be starting to implement rollout in 2007-08.