Government Operations Committee on March 22nd, 2007

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

We have quorum. We'll call this meeting to order.

I'm just stepping in briefly for Madam Marleau, who has other duties today. I look forward to working with the rest of my colleagues in a collegial forum here on a very straightforward issue, with the hope that we would be able to get through this in a beneficial way.

Today we have witnesses to follow up on a request for a study of the demographic challenges of the federal public sector, primarily dealing with the phenomenon of the baby boom as it goes through.

We are pleased today to have Madam Barrados. We welcome you, Madam Barrados, as usual. You're always forthright, honest, and very complete in your evaluation. We look forward to having you back again as we have done before.

Also we have Madam Gobeil and Monsieur Coffin. Thank you very kindly for your attendance today.

We will start with opening statements.

Madam Barrados, you have the floor.

[Maria Barrados, President, Public Service Commission of Canada]

Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me to appear before the Committee as part of your study on the demographic challenges of the federal public sector. Today, I have with me, from the Public Service Commission, Linda Gobeil, Senior Vice-President, Policy Branch, and Dan Coffin, Director General, Special Projects, Staffing and Assessment Services.

The Public Service Commission (PSC) is an independent agency reporting to Parliament on public service staffing and political impartiality. We recruit talented Canadians to the public service, drawn from across the country. We continually renew our recruitment services to meet the needs of a modern and innovative public service.

Our mandate is staffing—more on the supply side of the supply-demand equation. Others such as Statistics Canada and the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada, with us, describe the demand for public service workers. I have also provided an overview of the federal public service population numbers in Attachment 1. I have shared with you summaries of two Statistics Canada reports—Attachments 2 and 3—that provide greater detail.

This is what we know. Turnover is already starting, and hiring activities are up. The public service is on average older than the labour force. The public service will be affected by the baby boom retirement wave before the labour force. There has been a shift to more knowledge workers in the public service. With an increase in qualification requirements, the average age of entry is 35. The average age of retirement in 2003-2004 was close to 58.

The rate of retirement, based on data from Statistics Canada, is increasing from a rate of 1.6% in 1999-2000 up to 2.3% in 2003-2004. It is projected to go up to 3% in 2008-2009, peaking at 3.5% in 2012-2013 before it gradually drops again.

The overall departure rate from the public service was 3.7% in 2003-2004. The overall departure rate include retirements, voluntary and involuntary departures, and death. This is a low rate compared with those of other public services and the private sector.

Can we meet the future needs for the public service? Here I can only speak to our experience at the Public Service Commission to date. Under the new Public Service Employment Act, the employer is responsible for determining what its staffing needs are. You may wish to follow up with the Public Service Human Resource Management Agency of Canada.

We have seen and continue to see a strong interest in public service jobs. Within a 10-month period from April 2006 to January 2007 our public service resourcing system, an automated application and screening tool, processed close to 920,000 applications. Within this same period, our jobs.gc.ca website received close to 19.5 million visits. This number includes repeat visitors, but it demonstrates the level of interest in public service jobs.

We have surveyed post-secondary students. In a sample of 29,409 students, the public service was identified as an employer of choice.

Of course, the whole selection and assessment process is about matching supply and demand. For the system to work well, we need to understand both supply and demand. Right now we are operating a supply-driven recruitment system. We know that shortages of workers appear in some areas. Overall, though, there is no shortage of potential public service employees.

On the demand side, better plans are required that identify current and anticipated human resources needs, integrated with business planning. With better planning, staffing can take place before there is a critical shortage. When the public service identifies areas of shortage, such as HR specialists, we along with the departments run special recruitment initiatives that identify many qualified candidates.

For example, there is a current shortage of compensation and benefits advisers. We ran a recent external staff process for compensation and benefits advisers. We received 6,000 applications. With the help of our automated system, we determined that 652 applicants met the requirements for the job and we referred these applicants to organizations for further consideration.

We have made numerous adjustments to large, government-wide recruitment programs such as the Post-Secondary Recruitment program, the Federal Student Work Experience Program, and the Recruitment of Policy Leaders program. Applicants to our programs are highly representative of visible minorities; however we have yet to achieve appointment levels equal to workforce availability. I have provided you with more detailed information in Attachments 4 and 5. Consistently we get many applicants with few permanent hires.

These programs are supply-driven programs. They demonstrate strong interest in the public service but departments and agencies are not hiring in large numbers from these programs. More often, hiring by departments is based on immediate short-term needs.

We are looking closely at how the permanent hires enter into the public service. Last year, out of 44,662 hiring activities, 11.4% (5,090) were for permanent jobs and 22.6%—10,088 positions—were for a specified period, the rest were students or casuals.

The use of contingent workers—temporary, casual, or other arrangements—is a key indicator for ad hoc staffing and often a way to get into the permanent public service. We found that 17% of new employees appointed to term and indeterminate positions had a recent history of casual employment.

The system needs to be more strategic. Contingent workers mean that delegated managers are making ad hoc decisions adding up to big numbers. Deputy heads delegate their staffing authority, but they must lead departmental HR planning, strategies, and corporate approaches to meet long-term business needs.

Mr. Chairman, on another issue, in April 2006 the PSC enhanced Canadians' access to federal public service officer-level jobs by implementing a national area of selection in the national capital region. We are on track to expand the use of national area of selection for all officer-level jobs open to the public across Canada by next month, April 2007. Subject to an impact assessment, we aim to use a national area of selection for all jobs in the public service by December 2007.

In conclusion, there is no lack of interest in the public service. We see no sign of this changing. For many it remains a career of choice. Best practices from the public and private sectors show that for effective recruitment to happen, four things are required: human resource needs must be understood, brand should be established, talent attracted, and processes enhanced.

Attachment 6 includes more information about best practices in recruitment. We at the Public Service Commission are improving our processes. The public service needs to improve its definition of need through planning of its human resources requirements to develop appropriate strategies.

Mr. Chairman, the PSC has the capacity to undertake large recruitment initiatives to meet identified needs. We are committed to supporting an accessible, non-partisan, merit-based and representative public service.

Thank you for your attention. I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very kindly for your presentation, Madam Barrados.

We will start our first round of questioning, of seven or eight minutes.

The first questioner will be our colleague Mr. St. Denis.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for the presentation.

I represent a northern Ontario riding, so I'm very pleased, if I understand it correctly, with the national area of selection. It means that people of working age from across the country will eventually have equal access to jobs in this area or elsewhere, so I'm very pleased with that.

I have young people whom from time to time I meet in my riding, and they ask about working for the federal public service. I'm sure it has been said many times around this table, and I'm here just for today, that we have one of the finest, if not the finest public service in the world. I commend not only the part you play, but that of all the other agencies and their leadership that maintain that reputation.

What are the odds for a young person graduating from university or college with the requisite skills for a typical—if such a thing exists—federal position? What are the odds of obtaining employment? We hear the odds of getting a job in the oil patch, if you happen to be in a trade. Those percentages are high.

Can we say to young people: you have a good chance if you want a career in the foreign service or in the administration of government? Could you just deal with the supply-demand question?

[Maria Barrados]

Thank you very much for the question.

Just to clarify on our national area of selection, what we're doing is applying the requirement to have the competitions open to all Canadians for all the officer-level jobs. This means that the junior clerical support and labour types of jobs are not yet open. That's the final step, if we can get all the systems in place. At this point, as of April 1, we're at the point where 55% of the jobs in the federal public service will be open to all Canadians.

On your question about the odds of getting a job, I'm worrying about that issue. If you look at attachment 4, we have some numbers for you. These are recruitment programs.

What you see in something like post-secondary recruitment—this is to get the entry-level or junior-level officer jobs, people who are recently from college or university—is that we had over 35,000 applications. Some people apply more than once, because you can apply to different streams. But 550 got hired, and not all of those are permanent. So you can see that there's quite a big difference between the number of applications and the number of hires.

If you go down a bit in the attachment, you'll see that for the federal student program, 76,000 applied; we had 8,500 who ended up getting a job. So we have many more who are interested than who actually get the jobs.

That's not the total picture, and this is why I have a worry. I was talking in my opening statement about 45,000 coming in last year. They don't all come through these programs. There are many different routes into the public service. So to answer your question well, I have to have a better sense of all of those. I'm worrying about the routes by which they're coming in, and we're actually undertaking quite a bit of work so that I can get a better understanding of them.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

If I understand you, then, the odds are better for the employer. In other words, you have a good pool from which to draw. For the person seeking the position, the odds are longer.

I've been around for a few years, and I recall hearing some years ago that there was going to be a crisis at some point, which may or may not happen. But it sounds to me that the incoming applicant stream is solid and strong enough. I assume that's not a worry.

Or is it a worry? Is the quality of applicants sufficient for you to maintain the quality of public service that Canada deserves? What's your worry? I guess that's the question.

[Maria Barrados]

I believe we have enough of a potential pool of people who are interested in public service work. Not everybody is suited to public service work.

Sometimes we have problems of mismatches, and there are some specialties where we can run into shortages. But again, I think with planning we can handle it.

What we are facing as a public service, however—and this is not really my responsibility so much as that of other players in the system—is that we are seeing a ramp-up of departures, lower than in any private sector organization but more than what we're used to. Of course, because people tend not to leave in mid-career but at the end of their career, what we're seeing is higher departures in the executive ranks, which is normal. People get older, or they get to the executive ranks, and they're retiring. But because that is higher than we're used to, we have to pay attention to making sure we have the development, the knowledge transfers; that we have those transitions in place to allow a smooth moving forward, for an organization that hasn't seen what is essentially a doubling of the departure rate.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Do I have another moment, Mr. Chair?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

No problem.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you.

So globally it looks okay, but when you break it down, at the senior levels I imagine there's lots of competition with the private sector. There's less competition at the junior levels with the private sector, presumably, than at the senior levels. Is that how I should interpret your comments?

[Maria Barrados]

The tradition of the public service is to have people enter at the bottom and grow up into the public service. We have enough in the feeder groups to feed the requirements at the senior levels, as long as we have people trained and developed to go there. That's where the challenge is: to make sure we give the training and the experience and the development so that they can take those jobs.

If you talk about competing for a senior public service job with the private sector, that's a different conversation. The benefits and the type of work and the development, if it's a career, get very much more difficult, if you're coming from the private sector. At senior levels, you'd get paid a lot more than you do in the public service. There, it's not an easy transition; the benefits aren't the same; the work isn't the same. That has proven to be more difficult.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

If I can conclude again with my northern Ontario constituency, to refer to it, it has a high percentage, happily, of first nations and aboriginal people from urban and first nation lands. You made reference to minority employment, but I wonder whether you could speak directly to the programs that deal with first nations. I'm used to dealing with a lot of aboriginal people at Indian Affairs, and a little bit at Health Canada. But outside of that, how are we doing? There is a population boom, as you know, within the first nations, and they are a valuable source of future employees.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[Maria Barrados]

There are two separate issues we have with first nations. One is a specific commitment that the Department of Indian Affairs made, as part of a settlement with the Manitoba chiefs, to have 50% of the employees at Indian Affairs aboriginal. That's a target that's not being met. There's a challenge with that target.

As far as work force availability is concerned, first nations are about representative overall, but we have concerns about having sufficient pools of first nations available for areas where it's particularly important to have first nations people working. That's particularly true in western Canada.

One of the things we've done at the Public Service Commission is create a centre of expertise in first nations employment and recruitment, out of my Winnipeg office, to address those particular concerns in the western part of Canada.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Madam Barrados.

We'll go to the second round.

Madame Thibault.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for being here this afternoon, Ms. Barrados, Mr. Coffin and Ms. Gobeil.

We know this isn't a news item we learned about before inviting you to come and testify. For a number of years now, we've been hearing, and there is evidence to support this, that there will be a deficit, regardless of the size, that the reason is demographic and that the people in the baby boom generation will be leaving.

Ms. Barrados, my first question concerns planning. I listened to you attentively and I understand that you're also inviting us to speak to the agency officials. I'd like to know whether we can find some comfort, not to say some trust, in the fact that better and better planning is being done. Or should we be concerned instead by the fact that there has been or there still is a certain abdication in the delegation of authority?

The person who delegates is always responsible. It's good to delegate; I'm in favour of it, but, when I hear your remarks regarding what I call employees who are recruited in the short term, for example, I still find, as before, that ad hoc decisions are unacceptable. The fact that managers make ad hoc decisions, knowing they will create a problem over the long term, may become unpardonable.

My second question won't surprise you. It concerns official languages, and it is very much a concern for me. We've talked about representation. That's important as well. In view of the fact that qualified people in all fields will be leaving, and thus in the official languages field as well, can we have some assurance that those who are recruited will meet the language requirements of the positions, in terms of both service and of their rights, both Anglophones and Francophones, and that they will be able to work in the official language of their choice? This therefore means that supervisors will obviously be able to supervise in the language of their choice.

Those are my first questions, but I have others to ask as well.

[Maria Barrados]

Thank you very much for your questions.

In my view, there has been an improvement in our planning, but progress hasn't been rapid enough. This is an entirely new approach. All the deputy ministers have made a commitment to our delegation to begin their planning process. I'm not prepared to say that there has been an abdication with regard to planning. There has been a commitment to do it, but from what we've seen, it isn't strong enough. It's a start.

There are demographic challenges, and we must improve the system as a whole. The agency can provide more information on this point. However, we are talking about more than the system as a whole. We also have to do planning in the departments, especially in the largest ones, which have a lot of employees. We have to make improvements there. In addition to planning, there also has to be the intent to take corrective measures. It's one thing to have a plan, but the actions that come with that plan have to be taken.

Looking at the figures concerning the central recruitment programs, I realize that we don't completely control the system that has to be planned and organized, which is more than a process for meeting all demands in the short term.

As regards your second question, concerning official languages, Linda can provide you with more information. However, you will find a table in Attachment 5 that provides figures on the implementation of official languages. You can see that there are a lot of candidates whose first language is French.

But that isn't exactly an answer to your question: are people meeting the requirements of the positions? I believe there has also been an improvement in that regard, but what concerns me is that people who meet all the requirements of their positions often lose the use of their second language once they are in those positions.

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

The language requirements must still be met, having regard to the requirements of the position. To answer your question, yes, that will remain.

You also mentioned that supervisors and employees must be able to work in the language of their choice. In view of the fact that these are principles guaranteed under the Official Languages Act, that will not change.

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

Do I have any time left, Mr. Chairman?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

You have one and a half minutes.

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

This is nothing personal, Ms. Gobeil, but I have experienced it, and I still hear about what officials are going through. I'm not just talking about senior officials, deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers, but there are baby boomers among the directors general and directors who haven't become bilingual or who are no longer bilingual. That's why I ask that question. For those who are interested in these bilingual positions, will we ensure that, in future, we can rely on our education system to produce functional bilingual people across the country?

I say “across the country” because I'm not talking about Anglophones or Francophones in particular. If someone is interested in a designated bilingual position for any reason, it is up to that person to remain bilingual and it is up to that person's manager to ensure that he or she does so. However, that person shouldn't use all kinds of excuses. If, in 15 years, I were to see that there were still people who occupied positions and, for all kinds of reasons, still had an exclusion or an exemption, I would find that unacceptable. I think it is unacceptable after more than 40 years; imagine what I would think in another 15 years. That's my concern.

I have another question to ask. In your document, you—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Your time is over. Thank you very kindly.

Mr. Poilievre.

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

What percentage of public servants will be retiring in the next 20 years?

[Maria Barrados]

In my opening statement, I gave you some figures that are based on the present situation. According to the latest figures, in 2003-2004, 2.3% of public servants retired. I used those figures from the document prepared by Statistics Canada, which estimates that 3% of public servants will be retiring in 2008-2009 and that 3.5% will do so in 2012-2013.

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

You don't have the total number for the next 10 years.

[Maria Barrados]

That's for each year. If we total all those figures, we can see that nearly half will have left by 2018.