Government Operations Committee on Feb. 7th, 2008

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

You said that enabling infrastructure is at the bottom of your list of priorities. That is what you are saying. You have managed to create enabling infrastructure to support the other target groups, but you have not, as yet, done so for visible minorities.

[Karen Ellis]

Across the public service as a whole, we are achieving fairly good results with regard to workforce availability for the first three groups.

With regard to visible minorities, our figures are good because there is a generalized upwards trend in the number of members of visible minorities working for the public service. The figures rise year on year, but have not yet reached workforce availability levels. Workforce availability currently stands at 10.4%, and the public service has reached 8.6%.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

That is very interesting. I am currently looking to recruit an assistant for my Ottawa office. All the answers I have had to my job offer thus far are from members of visible minorities. This means that there is a pool of people looking for jobs. Furthermore, I can assure you that these are people qualified way beyond the requirements of the job that I am offering.

Clearly, there is a large pool of graduates who want to work, but who cannot find a job—and I am only referring to the National Capital Region here—the same would be true across Canada. I am sure you have heard the saying: first hired, last fired. Could you please send these figures to me or the chair at some point?

I would urge you to work harder on this issue because it is both an employment problem and one of social equity. It is also a political problem, but above all, it is a social problem. If these people are unable to find work and go on to have children, we all know what lies ahead for the second and third generation.

[Karen Ellis]

I firmly believe that this is a very important issue. As a vice-president of a central agency, I am responsible for this issue. As a member of a visible minority, I have personal experience of this issue. I have made good progress in my career thanks to good career management and good managers who have helped me in the past.

You also asked about the typical career path of visible minorities in the public service. It depends on where they work, their manager, their experience, and the planning available to them. It varies from one department to the next. Some departments have very good figures and very good methods. One of my responsibilities is to identify best practices and share them with other departments that are looking to improve their results.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you. You have already gone over your time.

Mr. Warkentin.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for coming in this morning and sharing what you know about the situation. Turnover is something the committee has been concerned about.

I'm wondering if you could provide us with some numbers on the current vacancy rate within the public service. Do you have numbers such as those?

[Karen Ellis]

The current vacancy rate in the public service would have to come from the Public Service Commission, and Madam Barrados, who was here. She's the one who collects that data.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

You wouldn't know offhand if it's rising compared with years past?

[Karen Ellis]

I really couldn't comment on that, and I don't want to give you something on that.

But as I said earlier, the trends in the movement within the system are not really that different from what we've had in the nineties and other years. It's a real trend, which you have to pay attention to and manage, but I wouldn't say we're in a crisis mode over this.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

There seems to be a little bit of a contradiction, I guess, in terms of the numbers.

We did have an opportunity to meet with the pay and benefits people the other day. What they've seen in terms of their workload as a result of people moving in the civil service, leaving and coming, is an exponential increase in their workload as a result.

So we're getting different anecdotal evidence.

[Karen Ellis]

I wouldn't disagree with that. You were hearing about a community that's been particularly vulnerable and that needed to be built up again, because I think they have just had a wave of retirements. I'm not an expert in that area, but I know that as a group, compensation specialists have required special attention—and I wouldn't contradict that at all.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

But I asked specifically about the increase in workload in general, not in terms of individual groups but the entire community seeing an increase in their workload as a result of the higher turnover. It was their perception, at least, that there's been an exponential increase in turnover or in the number of people coming and going over the last number of years.

That was more of an anecdotal perspective, but I'm concerned that we are getting different numbers and are seeing a little bit of a contradiction here, because you're reassuring us that this is a trend that we haven't seen any significant change in over the last number of years, but Madam Barrados was the first person who brought to our attention that this was something to be concerned about.

[Karen Ellis]

And it is. I agree with that, because the trends are there.

What I'm saying is that the trends aren't different, but that what we have to work on, and what she and her team are working on, and we are as well, is what we mean by the term “turnover”, what we mean by “mobility”. You have to actually define what you're covering under those terms if you are to get solid numbers. She said her numbers were fairly rough.

I work with one of her ADMs, and she's saying that we have to dig deeper as to what we mean by the terms and what numbers match which type of movement.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Exactly. That's what we're concerned about. We're concerned that we don't have those numbers yet. We're concerned enough to bring this forward to committee.

I'm wondering when we might have some concrete numbers to work from.

[Karen Ellis]

I believe Madam Barrados and her team are working on more precision on numbers and standardized definitions of which numbers match which type of movement. I really don't want to make a commitment for Madam Barrados or her team, but I know they are working on this.

I would ask that a follow-up be done with her. She is not my boss, and I would hate to try to.... I know they're looking at this. We also have work to do on this, because we have different data and we measure some of the things in different baskets.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Is there a standard measuring tool across the industry that is used to measure movement within an organization?

[Karen Ellis]

My statistical experts are saying no, and that's with respect to the private sector as well.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

It's going to be difficult for us to compare the difference between the public service and the private sector. First and foremost, we want a sense from the numbers, when we see that 40% of the people who were working in one job last year are no longer working in that job, that type of thing. Those numbers concern this committee.

As we've talked about, the corporate memory and stability in the public service are tied to that. We're concerned, so I think it's important that we get a handle on that. Obviously as the demographics change and we see at least some of the baby boomers leaving the public service for retirement, that's also an issue we have to address.

I wonder if there has been any research into the possibility that we're going to have a complete worker shortage in the years to come. I know there was an opening of applications for some public service jobs to the regions. That's something new. It's an initiative that has just come on stream. The interesting point is that far fewer applications came from the areas than expected.

I wonder if anybody is looking at those retirement numbers in terms of possible replacements, whether we're going into a crisis situation, and if we are, what we're going to do about it. I think all these things have to start to be considered. Is there much consideration of those issues?

[Karen Ellis]

I hope I address everything, and remind me if I don't. I really appreciate the interest by this committee, because this is really important.

Again, I will try to give the message that we are not seeing this as a crisis; we're seeing it as a real challenge, and issues that we have to work on and plan for because we know they're coming. When you talk about the wave of retirement, for example, we know that over the next three or four years we're going to have a steady increase of the baby boomer generation moving on. But it stabilizes. I think in 2015 that's going to even off.

The thing to remember is that this is normal. When you had the post-war growth in the public service, those people entered at the same age. In the 1970s a lot of them left, and a lot of people who got great jobs and opportunities from that thought that was just fine. Now we're in another natural cycle of demographics. What's challenging is that for a period of about 10 years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we didn't do a lot of recruiting. So we're experiencing that natural group who would have moved on, but the natural successors are also moving on.

You asked what we're doing about this. We're trying to do a lot of good work around succession planning. That's actually asking who has the critical knowledge positions and what we are going to do to make sure there are two or three good people who will be able to replace them at the right time. That's one example.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

In a region like northern Ontario, we take our federal or provincial civil service jobs very seriously. As Madam Marleau would attest, if you lose civil service jobs in your riding, you're pretty much out of a job in the next election, because it's a very serious issue.

We see a trend. You can see this provincially. A number of political parties over the years in Ontario have run campaigns in northern Ontario on promising to move civil service jobs to northern Ontario—“elect us and we're going to move a big department”—and it never happens. Its just doesn't happen. As soon as the government comes in, they realize that there's such an entrenched way of doing things that it just doesn't happen.

Then when you see a downturn and civil servants are let go, it really is a case of the empire striking back. The first places that lose the jobs, it seems, are always the regions, and jobs are sucked back to the centre.

My concern here is ensuring the fair distribution of geographical locations, number one, because it is a fundamental issue of fairness and accessibility for all Canadians, and number two, because it makes economic sense, because these are jobs with low turnovers and high commitments.

Yet the way the departments are working now, deputy ministers have substantial authority. Under the changes to the Public Service Employment Act, managers have much higher, greater powers to hire.

It seems to me that the decision to actually locate work outside of the great empire is a political decision. It needs political will. It doesn't just happen because the deputy manager wakes up one day and says, you know what, I think we should make sure Lethbridge is well accounted for. It just doesn't seem that works in the corporate structure.

Given that so much responsibility has been given to such a great extent to deputy ministers—and I'm not saying that's a bad thing—and that there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in place to ensure geographic fairness in the allocation of jobs, how do we do that?

[Karen Ellis]

That really is a decision for the elected government. Anything of that nature really would be a political decision, and I'm unable to make any comment on things like that. It really, as you say, has to be made at the political level.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Just to confirm what I think, there is nothing in position right now to make sure there are checks and balances? That is a political decision that has to be made.

[Karen Ellis]

Any decision about moving a location of a department would be a political decision. There probably is some scope at the departmental planning level for looking at the smaller scale or moderate scale, at how they distribute work and things like that, and at the structure of a regional office. Those are day-to-day operational decisions that would be handled by a department. But anything major, such as what you're talking about, would be a decision of the elected government of the day.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Okay. Thank you very much.