Government Operations Committee on Nov. 28th, 2006

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

But part of your report could indicate whether you made that attempt, and then that could be included in your report back to this committee and we could pursue that further at that point.

[Maria Barrados]

Yes, that first scoping one in January would tell me what the situation is. In the subsequent one, I would describe all that. But remember, what I'm preoccupied with is the movement back and forth, so I should certainly be able to get a lot of information from people who are within the ambit of my work.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Okay. And we can expect an initial report possibly sometime in March or April, if your audit is done by the end of January.

[Maria Barrados]

It's the initial scope in terms of what the situation is. If I have two cases you can get it very fast. If I have a lot more cases it's going to take longer.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Before I go to Madame Thibault, I want to ask you one quick question. What's happening with the challenge of the applications and the geographic area where the job is located? That's been a preoccupation of mine for a long time.

[Maria Barrados]

This is what we call the national area of selection. The Public Service Employment Act has a provision that allows the Public Service Commission, and anyone we delegate, to limit the geographic area where people can come from to apply for a certain job.

Members of Parliament, by and large, have been very upset about that. I've given up trying to defend it and have decided that we will change the system. We are doing this gradually, because we have high volume. People are very interested in getting work in the public service, particularly people outside of this area. So when we expand the geographic area, the volume we get increases dramatically. There are hundreds and hundreds of applications that we have to manage fairly.

It's very important to us that we get the tools for people in the system to use, because we want the system to be fair and transparent. We have started to incrementally provide the tools. Right now we have broadened the area of selection to national for all officer jobs in the national capital area. All executive jobs have been national for a number of years, but now all officer jobs in the national capital area are national. We are doing evaluations of this to see how it's going. We don't want work-arounds either; the system is good at doing that. We're putting the tools in place, making them available to people.

We have two pilots in the regions, because our intention is to expand the officer jobs to all the regions by April 2007. So all federal jobs, regardless of where they are, will be national. Then we'd like to move it more broadly to other support functions at the end of 2007, if we have all the systems in place and they're working properly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you.

Madame Thibault.

[Louise Thibault, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam. I am really surprised that it is once again my turn, but I am also very pleased.

First of all, I would like to thank you, Madam Barrados, for having talked about the language of work in response to a comment or a question from Mr. Poilievre. I believe that this is very important.

I understand Mr. Poilievre underscoring the importance of bilingual positions for service to the public, but bilingual positions are also essential in order for one to be able to work in his or her language, be it English of French. If anglophones and francophones who became bilingual talked with their staff or their colleagues alternately in English and in French — let us say half and half; I will not be too generous —, then people would make progress.

Repeat reappointments to positions in order to avoid a final and definitive appointment after three years still happen. What is your opinion of this?

Will the broadened area of selection with regard to official languages be beneficial or will it create an obstacle with regard to the language of work? Obviously, having a broadened zone means that francophones and anglophones both will be able to apply, on condition that they satisfy the requirements.

At the end of your report, on page 154, under “Human Resources Development Canada“, it is stated that of the 3,794 hiring activities, 1,057 were interim appointments. During your last presentation, you stated that in the case of senior executives, 38% of people appointed to interim positions had later on been granted the position.

These are interim positions. But if the people who fill them have any intelligence at all — which is the case of most of our civil servants —, they wind up getting these positions. This is quite an advantage. Given these numbers, we wonder if this situation exists for other job categories and if it should be a concern.

The numbers under the title “Human Resources Development Canada“ are the following: 557 from outside, 808 promotions, 1,402 lateral appointments and 1,057... I do not know the number, but does this ring a bell? The number for Correctional Services Canada is of the same order of magnitude.

We all understand that these interim appointments are necessary for one reason or another. However, the creation of interim positions in order to avoid holding a competition, because one lacks the time and does not know how to plan, is inappropriate.

I would like to hear your comments in this regard and I thank you in advance.

[Maria Barrados]

I will call upon my two colleagues to help me provide good answers.

With regard to the broadening of the area of selection, will this become an obstacle? I hope not. The objective is to have a description of the job requirements, to have the tools — often times computer tools — and to do a fair and reasonable selection in a transparent way. That is the ideal, but we must carry out an evaluation in order to ensure that this will work.

Let us deal now with the interim positions. We did an audit of executive interim positions. I do not know what the situation is everywhere, but my impression is that the workings are the same. We see that there is a lot of reorganization going on in various departments, such as Human Resources Development, for example. Departments are being split up or merged. Consequently, there are a lot of interim positions. This is difficult for people, because one is never sure of keeping his or her job, but, on the other hand, it often happens that the candidate selection process is not fair and transparent. This came out during our audit. The great majority of positions — close to 90% — are filled following a non-competitive process.

[Louise Thibault, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Precisely, Madam. If the process is fair and equitable, those people who have interim positions might — which would not be surprising — obtain the position were there to be a competition. They would be given a distinct advantage. If all you do is meet Peter, Paul and Mary or a dozen or so people and then choose this one or that one, then I believe it is very unfair. An interim process is not that long.

[Maria Barrados]

It depends. We can hire employees in a truly interim fashion, as in the case of someone who replaces a person who is away for language training or who is pregnant, and who will be absent from work for three months, for example. However, our investigation was aimed at positions of a longer duration. This is not acceptable.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Mr. Dewar, you now have the floor.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I turn to the concerns about savings within the public service. The 2005 budget was identified in your report and is known publicly. It was identified to exact about $11 billion in savings.

Recently the government essentially shelved the report from outside consultants on how to save money in procurement. We've spent $24 million on something we're not going to use. They looked toward the future in terms of the management of the system and the concerns that if we are going to be saving $2.5 billion in procurement and $11 billion generally in the public service, this is going to affect the system, particularly when you look at the capacity to do that. In other words, how are we going to make these savings on one hand and on the other hand not disrupt the public service provided to Canadians?

When you look at the skill sets of the people employed by the public service, when you've examined the priorities of the government, the concerns, the challenges ahead on the fiscal side, how are we doing in terms of meeting those demands with the kinds of people being hired? My main concern is not so much the people who are employed, but the method of the government, and I already highlighted my concerns about outsiders being brought in without consultation with the people working in the public service.

In your opinion--and this isn't something you've studied, but just your opinion--how are we going to be able to find efficiencies? What is the best way of doing that? We've seen the method used recently with A.T. Kearney, which was obviously not the way to go. We have $11 billion from the previous government that we have to find in the next five years. What concerns do you have about that vis-à-vis the public service, and what do you think is the best way of finding efficiencies, if we need to find those savings? How do we go about finding those savings, or should we be looking to find those kinds of savings?

[Maria Barrados]

I can only make one comment, actually, about the attempts to find savings, in terms of our own involvement at the Public Service Commission. Our involvement is not that great, but in the effort to find savings, every department and agency was reviewed, and there was a discussion about what could be saved. That included the Public Service Commission.

At the end of the day, we were tasked with new responsibilities and not given any money. We had to find the savings to take on these new responsibilities—that was the management of an enlarged priority system, which everyone didn't want us to delegate, and we had talked about delegating it—which we did. We ended up with a reallocation of over $4 million, I believe, as a result of it. But there was no money taken out of the Public Service Commission; it was all reallocation within.

In terms of how you find efficiencies, one of my priorities at the Public Service Commission is to try to have it become a model organization for how you manage well and properly in the Government of Canada. I can mention some of the things we are doing to try to identify efficiencies within our own organization.

We have been actively involved in benchmarking. We have, with some others, had consultants benchmark our activities with others in town and with private sector databases to see whether we could find savings. Were we more efficient? Were we more costly? In those areas where we found we were spending more than the average, we have undertaken further detailed reviews to identify and to bring it into line or explain why we have the difference.

The other thing we are doing is very aggressively budgeting, with a results focus, tying in human resource management. We're trying to bring these things together and are forcing reallocations. Areas that are less efficient are going to have money withdrawn and put into places where there is shortage. We've been going at that for the last couple of years and have reallocated over $6 million.

My staff is getting tired of hearing me talk about other things I would like to see, such as time reporting, service standards, activity-based costing. We're working on these so that we can get a better handle on what the effort is and how we should do it.

But I'm speaking about our organization and what we're trying to do.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I appreciate that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

You may have one more short comment.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I will just comment on casual employees. We had a huge increase in the number of casual employees hired in the last year. I guess this is more of a comment, and a request, looking towards the next number of years, that we see an evaluation of this, particularly of concerns around merit and about recruiting new people and, again going back, the employment equity groups.

Perhaps there's a way in that pool of casual employees to bring people on and to nurture them, because there was a huge jump in casual employees. This is a request to keep an eye on that, as you do so well, and find ways to support those, particularly in the equity groups—well, in visible minorities—where we need to see more recruitment. Maybe there's a pool there to draw from.

[Maria Barrados]

It's on my list.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Ms. Thibault tells me that she would like to ask a short question.

[Louise Thibault, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

We are all familiar with your past career accomplishments. The fact that you used to work for the Auditor General's Office is not foreign to my question.

You are aware that this Committee is studying the government's accountability system. Several witnesses have told us that a change in culture is necessary in this regard and that what is required here is that the leaders, the champions of this cause, take control of the situation. In their view, the enforcement of such an important piece will not be a walk in the park.

It is in the area of recruitment that there will be resistance. People will wonder if the necessary staff is available to take action immediately, even if the process is spread out over a shorter period, in terms of years.

Given the experience that you acquired in your previous role — and here it will be up to you to decide if you wish to respond — and in the context of the duties you have today and your mandate with regard to delegation and the capability of departments and agencies to respond, are you confident that the process to be put in place with regard to recruitment and training will settle in easily? I added in the final element, well aware that it is not your domain, but it is related to it.

[Maria Barrados]

Am I confident? Let us say that my perspective is a positive one. I believe that we must do this. We face many challenges and tremendous efforts will have to be made. Furthermore, deputy ministers will have to truly become involved. Luckily, that will also be the case for the Clerk. That is a very positive thing. Deputy ministers, for their part, have many other concerns. In my opinion, this should be one of the priorities.

As to my level of confidence, I am unable to respond at present. Perhaps I will be able to do so in one year's time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you, Madam Barrados. We will be meeting with you again during the course of the new year.

I want the committee to know we're not sitting this Thursday. On December 5, the Auditor General will be coming before us to give an overview of the report she's tabling today. On December 7, we'll be working on our draft report.

If we're not quite finished with our report on December 7, we will have time to do more work on it the following week, but it would be nice to have it finished on December 7 so we can deposit it before the end of this year.

[The Clerk of the Committee]

We hope to have the report to the members by December 5.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.