Government Operations Committee on Nov. 19th, 2007

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Did you also do an audit of the Office of the Correctional Investigator?

[Maria Barrados]

Yes.

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

You said that 9 out of 10 appointments were not compliant with the delegation agreement. Did you find any other problems with the Office of the Correctional Investigator?

[Maria Barrados]

The Auditor General previously carried out an audit, and we did our audit because the Auditor General had done an audit. We are responsible only for staffing and recruiting. These are the only matters that we deal with.

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

So you have no spending authority?

[Maria Barrados]

No, this falls under the Auditor General's Office.

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

I think that you can see me coming.

If my colleague has any questions, I will share my time with him.

[Robert Vincent, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Let me continue.

You spoke about staffing; let me quote what you said:

However, in the third audit, an audit of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, we found staffing patterns that compromised the values of fairness, transparency and access.

Could you tell me more about this?

[Maria Barrados]

Pursuant to the legislation, we have policies and regulations. Audits are meant to determine whether every staffing action is compliant with the process provided by the policy and whether it is compliant with values and regulations. We also check that there is a framework for the staffing process and whether the framework is respected, in other words, whether they are complying with their own planning, their own policies, and we look at their relations with the people in charge of training, people who are aware of their responsibilities.

Regarding the Correctional Investigator, we concluded that they made some progress since the Auditor General's audit, by setting up a framework and a better policy. However, there are still some problems with staffing. This case really provides an example of the problems which arise when people are hired although they have no experience in the kind of work concerned, and when these people are given the opportunity to get training by assigning them to temporary positions and by following through with a permanent staffing process that requires experience in the field.

We have a problem with that. It is contrary to principles of accessibility and fairness for all those who apply for such positions and who expect that their application will be considered.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Mr. Vincent, we will come back to this later. Then you will be able to put further questions about this matter, if you wish.

Mr. Kramp.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Let me do something a little unusual. A lot of times when we have witnesses before our committee we find fault and make recommendations as to how you do this and that, on everything from transparency to accountability. But, Madam Barrados, let me give you and your staff, all the way through the system, a total thumbs-up. And I say that with great sincerity.

In all our deliberations there have been challenges, and for the most part you've acted very, very strongly on these. You've acted in a proactive and accountable manner, on everything from the phantom positions to temporary staffing issues, the problems identified as correctional and others, the language evaluation, employment equity, which you've demonstrated is still a challenge—and I expect my colleagues will go to that if I don't have a chance, to see what your recommendations are for the future—to the pay and benefits officers, which we recognize still present a bit of a problem. Overall you've made remarkable progress.

I hope I speak for most of my colleagues when I say it's rare that a department has such a handle on both problems and solutions. On behalf of my colleagues, thank you for the work you have done on this. It's refreshing to see that we have such a significant portion of government that appears to be not only in good hands, but is running fairly smoothly--as smoothly as can be with all the hiccups and burps you would expect to have.

I have a small question before I hand it over to my colleague. I notice on the staffing services volumes page that you have internally advertised, externally advertised, and non-advertised positions for your executive staffing. I'm curious as to what you use for criteria to decide the category. In other words, why would it only be advertised internally, and why would it be advertised externally? Could you give us some parameters on that so we have a bit more transparency?

[Maria Barrados]

First off, thank you very much for your comments about the work of the commission. It really is only possible because I have a great team. They have gone through an enormous amount of change, and they are working very hard to move on new directions. I must say I'm encouraged by the kind of support we're getting from the deputies and the departments, even though they sometimes don't like to hear my little lectures. But we are working and making progress, so thank you for those comments.

On the question about the internal, external, and non-advertised positions, you will note that the years are on top. This chart reflects a very big change that occurred with the new legislation. The first two columns are entirely the old act, the third column is partially the old act and partially the new act, and the last column is entirely the new act. Under the old act you had to do everything internal before you could go external. You had to come to the commission before you could go outside. That was the law. That was dropped, so you see the external advertising shows quite a rise. The last column has a bigger number in it. That was a legislative change. It was a parliamentary decision that you go outside if you want, or you do it inside, but it wasn't a requirement.

The decision as to whether you look for a position—and these are all executives—inside the government or outside is entirely the hiring manager's. I think that's appropriate. It should be the hiring manager who decides. The hiring manager has to make that determination based on their needs and what they think the availability is.

In terms of the non-advertised positions, if you refer to the last column, under the old act this was very much controlled. Under this new act, non-advertised positions are allowed. The commission doesn't encourage them, because I think it violates transparency, but there are cases where it makes sense. These numbers reflect the work that comes to the commission. It's optional. You don't have to come to the commission.

With the past two columns, you had to come to the commission. Now you don't. If you're doing non-advertised positions, why would you come to the commission? There's not much we can do to help, except to discourage you from doing it.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Thank you.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today.

I just noticed in the first page of your comments, you outline the fact that it's the first full year and you've also highlighted that as you explained these columns to us. Are you fairly confident after one year that we're on the right path in terms of implementing this?

Then possibly second to that, what are some further actions you envision in the next couple of years?

[Maria Barrados]

So far I would say I think we are on the right path. I worry about losing momentum. That is part of one of my jobs, to make sure that people don't lose momentum. There has been a tendency to talk about renewal instead of talking about public service modernization implementation. These are very consistent; you can't do renewal without public service modernization, but I'm not sure people always realize that. That is a concern of mine.

We have found going in that some things in the legislation don't work quite as well for us as we had thought, so we are trying to make some of those adjustments to the extent we can within the powers we have. If we have some things we really can't do within our powers, we would have to come back to Parliament before the five-year review or at the time of the five-year review, but a few things in there we're thinking haven't really helped the way we would like.

I think we're doing pretty well as long as we don't lose momentum, as I say, which I think is our main job. Big challenges, though, really are that we make sure the human resource community has the capacity to give the managers their support. Managers in the government, particularly the ones we call middle managers--and they tend to be more out in the regions--have a lot of responsibility, and for many of them it's another set of responsibilities, wondering if they are going to be given more to do, yet we all know if they can get the right people around them, if they can get a good team, they can do so much more.

It's so important, but they have to be supported. We have to work on that HR community to make sure they have the capacity, the tools, and the knowledge to provide the support to the managers to do the work.

On the system side, I worry, because I think overall, if I could put it in a rough way, we haven't paid that much attention to the back room. We've done a lot of worrying about the front room, but for the back room systems, I think we have to make sure we get those things in place.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

We'll come back.

Mr. Angus.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for this excellent report. My first question, because I'm new on this committee, is are you establishing baseline data with this report that will be used in future years, or do we have baseline data that you could compare it to so we have a sense of whether we're making progress in these various areas?

[Maria Barrados]

That's very much what we're trying to do. The other thing we're trying to do, and Mary Clennett may want to talk a little bit about it, is we have undertaken an international benchmarking study, because it's not only for us to see how we're doing over time, but it's also an effort to see how we're doing vis-à-vis others.

Mary, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

[Mary Clennett, Vice-President, Audit, Evaluation and Studies Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada]

Yes.

We haven't really progressed very much on the benchmarking study, but what we want to look at is other countries that won't be set up exactly like the Public Service Commission but have a similar way of staffing in their governments. Then we want to look at them and we will also consider looking at the private sector as well to establish those benchmarks.

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

Thank you.

You certainly identified a number of the common red flags that would come up if we were at least thinking of a review. The one I'm interested in is the whole movement of public service employees to political staff and then back again. You point out that you looked at 157 cases where this happened and 24 raised questions and 15 you felt were “...a misuse of the staffing system. Special efforts were made to move people into positions in which they had no reasonable intention of staying. This was done to facilitate the movement of the individuals concerned and to ensure they had an easy route back into the public service”.

This is a serious issue for anybody wanting to make sure that our public service isn't tainted with partisanship in any way. Can you tell us in what departments that happened?

[Maria Barrados]

We actually put a list of the departments in the report. They're actually spread all over the government. It's a long list of the departments. Do you want me to read them or do want me to just give them to you?

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

Were there a few highlighted more than others?

[Maria Barrados]

No, this was spread pretty well across.

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

So it was a general pattern.

[Maria Barrados]

Yes.