Government Operations Committee on May 6th, 2008

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

If we add Ontario and Ottawa together, we see that 50% of your employees work in Ontario.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

Yes, more or less.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

How can you explain that only 14% of employees work in Quebec, when that does not represent the number of people who file a tax return in Quebec?

[Lysanne Gauvin]

I cannot explain why. It is for historic reasons. The headquarters has always been in Ottawa, since income tax collection began, in 1917, I believe. The taxes were, in principle, to be temporary. Over time, offices have been opened up throughout the country. I am not going to make something up, because there is nothing else to say. It is historical.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

While you are not making anything up, the fact remains that in Ontario, 30% of employees work outside headquarters. Do you realize just how disadvantaged Quebec is by the situation that you call historic? You are not alone. In research, it is horribly similar.

If I examine this, I see that given the number of people filing taxes in Quebec, there is a shortfall of 5,000 employees in the province. That represents $350 million per year. In terms of buildings and maintenance, one could say that there is a half-a-billion-dollar shortfall in Quebec each year. That is huge.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

But you should bear in mind that the Quebec Revenue Department administers the GST in Quebec for the federal government. An agreement to that effect has been in force for several years.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

But Ms. Gauvin, how does that justify there being fewer employees in Quebec? As I told you, there is a half-a-billion-dollar shortfall, which means a lot less income tax and revenue paid to Quebec. The money for your employees comes as much from Quebec as elsewhere. I don't understand why there is such a gap. If it were 2% or 3%, I wouldn't even mention it, but the gap is huge.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

As I mentioned, the GST is administered by the Government of Quebec for the federal government. The Quebec government is paid a contribution for the work it does. Apart from that, I cannot really answer your question. As I told you, I am not going to make something up. The situation is historic. I started working at the department in 1996, when it was called Revenue Canada. From my perspective, the distribution has always been as it is now.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

The number of employees in Quebec is not going up, it is going down. There were 6,400 in 2003 and now there are 6,100. Is there no strategy in place to correct your historic situation?

[Lysanne Gauvin]

We have overcapacity in our tax centres. In Quebec, there are two tax centres: one in Shawinigan and the other in Jonquière. The one in Shawinigan is quite large in terms of operations, whereas the one in Jonquière is a bit smaller. Efforts to maintain the work and to use the overcapacity in our tax centres continue. I think we have been successful in keeping full-time jobs for employees in the tax centres by transferring work from the TSOs to the tax centres.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Mr. Ouellet, before you conclude, I would like to tell you that having experience here is an advantage. There are two differences between Quebec and the other provinces. First of all, Quebec collects its own income tax, whereas in Ontario and the other provinces, the federal government does that.

Secondly, Quebec is also compensated for the shortfall by means of certain transfers. People have thought about that problem and resolved it a long time ago. The only problem that remains is the breakdown of federal employees between Ontario and Quebec in the national capital region, and not that you get less for the work, because that has been taken care of. Several governments attempted to solve that problem. They are attempting to reach a 75-25 breakdown. They continue to try and meet those standards, or to exceed them, if possible.

I would like us to take a five-minute break. After that, we will come back for some additional questions.

[Diane Bourgeois, Bloc, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

I have a question and a comment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

We are going to take a break.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

We are back, and the first person to ask a question will be Mr. Warkentin.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for coming in this morning. We appreciate your testimony thus far. We're trying to get a handle on the turnover rates and different realities in different departments.

I recognize that your agency is quite different from many other areas of the civil service, but I'm wondering if you can shed some light on the turnover of people who aren't necessarily leaving the agency but are changing from one position within the agency to another. I wonder if you have any statistics on that. We know that across the civil service that kind of turnover is quite high.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

We call that internal churn, which is not a very elegant term. We absolutely have movement of employees from one job to the next, but I don't have statistics on that right now. We're in the process of trying to pull that information together.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Can you give that to our committee when you have it available?

Within that, is there an ability to distinguish between those who are turning over within an office and those who are turning over from one region of the country to another? Can any analysis be done on the cost of transferring those employees? Obviously some types of expenses would be covered by the agency for people who are moving. Maybe you can provide us with the numbers of those who move from one office to another, and then the total amount you're paying for transferring employees. We could probably use that information in the study we're undertaking right now.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

Okay, we'll see what we can pull together for you.

The number of employees moving from one location to another is substantially less than the number moving internally within an office. I'll use Toronto as an example. We have four offices in Toronto, and an employee might move between the four offices, but there's no cost to us because they stay in their homes.

We've just started trying to analyze that and pull the information together. Keeping your request in mind, we'll try to structure it so you get the answers.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

As much information as you can get will be helpful. Of course we would like everything to be itemized and everything else, but we're not expecting that. We're just looking for the broad strokes in the end, but as much detailed information as we can get would be helpful to us.

I'm wondering if you do exit interviews with those people leaving the agency.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

We don't do them in a formal, structured way at this time. I am aware that offices and branches in certain areas in headquarters have undertaken to do this on their own. Just this past year we ran a pilot project for the staff in human resources, where we did what we called engagement interviews rather than exit interviews. We looked at three groups of staff: those who had left us, those who were eligible to retire within the next two years, and new staff who had joined us in the last year.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Do you have any anecdotal evidence that would give us an indication of whether people leaving the agency are going to another part of the public service or leaving the public service altogether?

[Lysanne Gauvin]

The biggest reason people leave the agency is that they retire. The second biggest reason is that they go to another government department.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

If there is any information within any of your offices, we'd be curious to find out where people are most likely to move and what positions are most likely to transfer to another department. Are we looking at auditors, highly educated people, or people who are in the administrative end of things? That's the kind of information we're looking for.

[Lysanne Gauvin]

If you look on page 7 of the deck, we provided a little bit of information with respect to separation for our full-time employees. It tells you the percentage of employees who have left for other government departments, the other reasons they've left, and then the retirements, which is the higher column in each of those instances. We can break that down by region or however you want that information.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

That may be interesting for us. I suspect that in Alberta there will be a different reality compared to what is in some of the other regions. I know that from personal experience.

I am a member from Alberta, and we deal with the Edmonton office often. What inevitably happens is that we will call for somebody we've been dealing with, and we'll find that the person has been replaced. We know just anecdotally that there is a major cost because of the turnover within that office, because every time we call for information on an audit or for different things for constituents, somebody is just being briefed on something that the person before that and the person before that had been briefed on. That's just the reality in that region right now.

I'm wondering if you, just anecdotally, have any information with regard to compensation advisers within your agency. Do you have a large turnover? Are you having problems retaining these employees?