Thank you for the question, Madam Chair.
The Clerk of the Privy Council just yesterday issued his fifteenth report to the Prime Minister on the state of the public service, and the notions advanced in that report, which also includes the report of the Prime Minister's advisory committee--Mr. Mazankowski and Mr. Tellier chair that committee for the Prime Minister--on the public service. Basically the approach set out by the clerk in that report I think is relevant to all the HR challenges facing the government, notably in the HR community.
The emphasis is basically on four elements, which are general in nature, but if you just give me a minute, you will see the link to the specific problems for the pay community.
First of all, the first approach is integrated business planning. In the past, as a result of insufficient planning, departments were not even in a position to know what their HR needs were going to be next year, two years, three years down the road. So the clerk has challenged all deputy ministers to ensure that every department has an integrated business plan that makes the direct link between their priorities in terms of what the department does, to the HR needs of the department, to ensure they have the right people in the right jobs to get things done and to identify exactly what their needs are. Marilyn gave the example in PCO. I'm pretty sure that for every single department they're going to identify in their HR group some specific needs that need to be addressed. Now, it's just a plan, a first step, but you have to have that plan in order to be able to address it thereafter.
The second element is recruitment. Because of the churn right now in the public service and because of the demographic pressures on the public service, the emphasis is on recruitment to make sure we're bringing in the people. This won't solve the problems immediately, but it's a necessary step to ensure that the problems can be solved, if only two or three years down the road. So there is an emphasis on recruitment, and once again, the Clerk of the Privy Council challenged all deputy ministers to ensure that they focus on the recruitment needs of the department and that they don't just rely on the Public Service Commission, but that departments take the responsibility for recruitment within their departments personally.
The clerk has challenged deputy ministers personally, along with their senior management teams, to go to job fairs at universities, to actively recruit within universities. He likes to use the example of how Bill Gates personally calls the top students at some of the key engineering faculties in North America to invite them to come to work at Microsoft. Now, if Bill Gates can find the time to make those phone calls, then senior executives in the government should find time to participate in job fairs at universities and colleges.
The third element is development. Okay, it's one thing to bring in new staff, but then you have to ensure the development, especially because of the demographic challenge. We have a real need to be able to bring people up to speed rapidly. The HR field is a very specialized field and compensation is a very specialized field. It takes at least two years to get the person trained to do the first aspects of the job. It takes three to five years to get them fully trained, and so the emphasis is on development. Once again, as part of the integrated HR plan, deputies are expected to identify not only their recruitment needs, but then to say, “What steps are being taken to ensure the development of those employees as quickly as possible?”
The fourth element set out in this report is the enabling infrastructures to ensure that we have within government essential HR functions that are controlled either by the Public Service Commission or with a public service agency--Treasury Board Secretariat or the Canada School of Public Service--to ensure that those services are as efficient as possible. Notably, on the issue of compensation, there is a notion that our colleagues at Public Works are working very hard at modernizing the whole pay system, which is antiquated, and they would be the first to say so, that this needs to be modernized. I know they are working extremely hard at doing that.
So those four elements, which apply to all elements of HR within government, I think are relevant to the specific issue of the compensation community. And this is not just PWGSC's problem; it's every single department. HR groups have to ensure that, because of the churn, the compensation trail follows the employees in an efficient way. In order to do so, the departments have to clearly identify what their needs are and provide for them through recruitment and development.
