Government Operations Committee on March 29th, 2007

[Lisa Addario]

As a practice, we do, yes. We represent our members in respect of harassment and discrimination, but just to be clear, sir, about these data, these surveys are anonymous, so the people who report experiences of harassment and discrimination do so anonymously. We don't follow up with each person in respect of their survey responses.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

These data are not as a result of grievances; they are just from the survey.

[Lisa Addario]

Correct.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Okay.

I have seven minutes, don't I, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

You have one more minute.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Thank you.

I want to talk a little about pensions and retirement. It seems to me there is a potential for a two-sided argument here on encouraging people to retire early, because that takes away, as your report says, institutional memory, etc. You have some statements later on about being able to continue to work while you're building pension benefits in order to keep people on longer, yet you're saying it's an advantage if you allow people to retire early--say, at age 55--which some 1,278 of your people did in 2004-05.

Are you not shooting in two different directions with this? It seems to me you can't--well, maybe you can have it both ways, and if you can, I'd like you to explain to me how that works both ways. Maybe that's a good way of putting it.

[David Orfald]

What we're suggesting here is that the pension plan is an important attraction for recruitment and retention purposes, and the appropriate strategy for attempting to retain people longer would be to introduce options allowing for greater flexibility around the taking of your pension. We've mentioned two things in particular.

One is the idea of the pre-retirement transition, which does exist as a policy currently and provides an attraction for people to stay longer. The other thing we've highlighted is the proposal for a phased retirement, which was in the budget. We're suggesting federal public service workers should be included in that plan as a strategy for dealing with demographic change in the federal public service.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My time is up, according to my clock. Please put me on the list for the next round, if there's time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

I certainly will.

Mr. Dewar is next.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the guests today for their presentation.

I want to focus on two related areas. We've heard comments from Ms. Barrados as well about the area of temporary help services and the effects they have on the overall public service and how that relates to hiring people out of the equity groups.

I'm going to start with the temporary help services. I've done a little homework. I did some order paper questions. It just so happens, and sometimes you just get lucky, I guess, that these are the order paper questions I asked for: five years of inventory in the national capital area--I was hoping to get the whole country--and how much was spent on temporary help services, and I was able to come up with the amounts.

The committee might be interested in this. Over the last five years we spent $644 million on temporary help services in the national capital area. In 2001-02, the total expenditure on temporary help services in the Ottawa area was $114 million. Fast forward to 2005-06. It was $194 million, and for the first half of this fiscal year, it's $110 million. Do the math. If we're halfway through the year at $110 million, we're on our way to possibly hitting $220 million.

I mention that, Chair, because if you go back to 1995, we know about 45,000 jobs were shed from the public service, and it's pretty obvious they had to fill in the services somewhere.

The definition I got from the standing offers Treasury Board puts out to local contractors is that the supplier must provide temporary help services as and when requested by various federal government departments and agencies located in the national capital area in accordance with the classifications indicated in the temporary help services online system. Temporary help services are to be used against vacancies during staffing action, when a public servant is absent for a short period or when there's a temporary workload increase for which insufficient staff is available. The last might be passports, which I think we'd all welcome. In fact, I would like to see more temporary workers hired.

My question to you is, first of all, were you aware we were spending this amount of money? Maybe you weren't. I was able to get the order paper questions. I would just like your comments on the fact that we're spending this amount of money on temporary help services.

I will follow up, because I have some information about what kind of people we're hiring for temporary help and the classifications they have.

We seem to have runaway costs in temporary help services. Getting back to what Mr. Epp was saying, presumably we want to attract people by saying we have a place for you in the public service. There's a job, a career and there's work to do.

On the other hand, we seem to be using temporary help services as a proxy so that the public service can actually hire people.

[David Orfald]

I'm not surprised by the numbers you've got. We recently had access to a study from the Conference Board of Canada. Their approach into looking at temporary help agencies was to more or less celebrate it and suggest to their members that they've got opportunities here for bidding on contracts.

Nevertheless, their figure was $200 million a year in the national capital region alone. If you multiply that across the country, obviously it's considerably more.

What we hear from our members is that temporary help agency employment is being used for purposes well beyond the kind you were listing. It is being used essentially as a replacement for core work.

That leads into all the concerns we raised about developing a stable workforce, about the ability to attract the best candidates into long-term employment, about the concerns around knowledge transfer, because if somebody's going to come and do a task in a temporary help situation, the second they've got a chance for a longer-term contract somewhere else, they're going to move on to that. So it really does undermine some of the demographic transitional goals we think should be there.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I think it's worth noting as well, Chair, when we go back to the shedding of jobs in 1995, that the reason was to save money.

What I'm seeing here is that we've got runaway costs for temporary help services that you could argue aren't saving money, because these are expenses when you're hiring people.

Again, I underline the fact that temporary help services have a role, no question. When you talk about what's happened with passports recently, I wish more were hired to do just that. But when we see that people are being hired for jobs like pharmacy and epidemiology, this is not a temporary help service.

Canadians should be shocked that those are the kinds of people being hired temporarily. That's what's happening, Chair. I think we need to address that.

The last point--I just wonder how much time I have left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

You have a minute.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

It's to connect the dots now between the utter failure to deal with the equity targets.... I am hearing from people in my constituency--I'm here in Ottawa Centre--from new Canadians who are qualified professionals who have had their credentials recognized. They are knocking on the door, but they can't get in. I see this as a problem because temporary services are the ones that are hiring in areas like epidemiology, for instance. We have qualified people, but the public service isn't hiring them. Temporary services are, I guess. So there is a disconnect.

I'd just like your comments on that vis-à-vis temporary hiring and meeting our targets on employment equity.

[Lisa Addario]

Casual employees are not subject to the Employment Equity Act, so the employer doesn't have to meet employment equity objectives with casual employment.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

In other words, there is a disconnect here. We have people who can do the job, people who are capable, who are often new Canadians. They have their foreign credentials, if they get them recognized, which is a challenge, and many of them are able to do that. They just aren't able to get in; they're hired for a temporary period, but that's not acknowledged. We have chaos here, is what I see from these two examples--in other words, not meeting the targets in employment equity and a huge runaway cost in temporary help services.

I have a last comment. When I received the results back from the order paper questions, I was shocked at the amount of money but also at where we're spending our money. It's quite revealing.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

I'm going to intervene here for a minute because I have a pet peeve, which is that the Government of Canada seems to be having a hard time paying its employees on time in certain departments. I'm astounded by this.

I made this remark a month or so ago, and since then I've received a deluge of information. Some of the information I've received is that in some departments they've centralized the payroll function away from the benefits function. In other areas, though, the real problem is that this group of people is being paid perhaps as much as $10,000 less a year than they are in other unions--and I believe under your union--and that's the compensation and benefits advisors. I'm told they are hired. They have to be trained for two years, but the workload is so heavy and there are many opportunities in other parts, so they leave, and that's part of the problem. It's not really an administrative problem. It's a problem perhaps that they're not being paid enough or perhaps it's the way it's organized. There are two issues there.

I'm told that in those departments where they haven't really centralized the payroll function away from the others, it's still working well, but it's a huge challenge. I'm wondering, now that you're starting the new negotiations, whether you will try to move this group of people up to a higher category. Obviously we have to do something, because people aren't going to work for us if we can't pay them. I've heard so many horror stories lately. I've heard that people who have a promotion go to another department and they can't get their increase in salary. They can't even get their bus pass covered because they haven't been transferred properly. People are sick and don't get their disability because they can't seem to get it done. People want to take their pensions and they can't because they're not being processed.

It's a real challenge, and I'd like you to speak to this.

[John Gordon]

You have hit one of the areas in which we are very much involved in our union. It's an issue that we've been attempting to address with the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada, and we have had some discussions with them and continue to have some discussions with them.

Everybody recognizes there is a problem, but the question is to try to get people to sit in a room to try to address that, and that's what we're attempting to do. We've had a couple of meetings, and there are more. Obviously we're going to try to address some of these things through the negotiations bargaining process, but there is a problem that exists today and we ought to be addressing it today. It's not necessarily just something that can wait until the end of the bargaining process to be reasonably addressed. That's what we're attempting to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Can you address that now, not within the negotiations? Can you go and make changes now? Would you be able to do that? Or do we have to wait six months to five years so that we keep having more and more problems? That's what bothers me about this particular problem.

[David Orfald]

There are a number of solutions that we've put forward, which come from working with this group of people and the experience they've had. We have to recognize that in fact the modernization agency has moved on some of those. They've made some efforts around recruitment. That's positive.

They're starting to look at a more thorough training program, and that's positive, but they have a lot further to go. Certainly we've advocated and continue to advocate that they move more quickly on that.

There is a fundamental underlying problem with the group. We're convinced that they are improperly classified. They're classified under a standard that dates back to 1965. It hasn't been updated since then. It doesn't recognize the changes in the nature of the work they do

We think there is room within the existing classification standards, preliminary to a more wholesale change, for their classification to be improved. We don't have control over that; the employer does. Our job is to bring that forward. We've been bringing it forward. We've not made as much progress on that as obviously we think needs to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

I've been told that as soon as they're trained, they tend to be offered better-paying jobs in other parts of the government, and they go for it. Why should they stay at a lower-paying job once they're trained?

It's a real concern of mine. I hate to hear these kinds of horror stories, and I would hope that I hear fewer of them as time goes by.

I'm going to go to Mr. Albrecht now. Thank you for allowing me this chairman's intervention.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I don't have a lot of questions. I may share my time with Mr. Kramp.

Thank you for being here. On page 4 of your submission today--I think it's in the fourth paragraph--you talk about the workforce adjustment policy indicating that federal public sector workers employed directly by Treasury Board have this opportunity. Roughly what percentage of workers would that include?

[David Orfald]

It would be roughly 60% or so, because you have a large number of employees in other agencies like CRA, Parks, CFIA. Those separate employers have not necessarily adopted that same approach.

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

Even though this plan has been in place since 1998--you've had nine years to observe the performance of this plan, and to me it looks like it's a good policy, and I think I would agree with your statement here that it is--it would seem to me rather strange that this hasn't been adopted in wider circles. Can you comment on the reasons for that?

[David Orfald]

Well, it's certainly something that in the case of some of the separate employers we have brought forward as a bargaining proposal from time to time in various rounds. It's difficult to explain exactly why we've not gotten agreement of the employers in those situations to extend the policy.

As you know, we're entering into another round of collective bargaining, and it's something that is being pursued at a number of the tables at which we have an opportunity to do so.