My name is Casper Bloom. I'm the new president of the Public Service Labour Relations Board.
I have occupied the position of Chairperson since January 2007. I am accompanied by Mr. Pierre Hamel, who is Executive Director of the Board and General Counsel.
We are here today to explain to you why we are seeking funding of $2.5 million. I would also like to take this opportunity to ask you not to require us to come back year after year for this same amount. I will explain to you why.
After the new act was passed in April 2005, Compensation Analysis and Research Services, or CARS, was added to the board's mandate. These services, which did not exist under the old act, now represent one-third of our mandate. For us to carry out this new mandate, we obviously need funding, and not just other responsibilities and powers
which was not provided, and as a result, year after year we have to keep coming back and making the same request for supplementary funds to pay for this new responsibility that has been--I won't say forced upon us--attributed to us and that I think belongs with us. It is in the right place.
As some of you may recall, the work we're doing in this particular responsibility is as successor to the old Pay Research Bureau, which was dissolved in 1992. The purpose of the Pay Research Bureau and our Compensation and Analysis Research Services is to see that the parties in negotiations at the table are working with the same data. Part of the problem in negotiations, as those who have negotiated in the past will know, is that the parties come with different data. They say “Our data is correct because we got them here”, and the other party says “We have the right data”, and they don't come to an agreement. When there is no agreement at the table, it leads to conflict. The purpose, the raison d'être, of our board is to do away with the conflict in order to try to have harmonious relations in the public service from one end of the country to the other. That is our raison d'être.
This particular new role that was given to us in 2005 is very much a critical part of that, because we are doing the research of the data through an independent means to provide objective, independent, neutral, impartial data that both parties have at the table, so that they are working from the same
data. So there's no conflict with the data because they come from an agency that is deemed to be independent and impartial.
This particular responsibility is an important one for our board, one that we are happy to do and execute, but we need the funds to do it. For the last few years, ever since the board was given this new responsibility, we have not been funded for it. As a result, we have to keep coming back year after year to ask for something that I would say is elementary.
I'm hoping that as a result of coming here today, we can perhaps avoid having to come back next year, and the year after that and the year after that. When I first started with the board and they explained that to me, I said it made no sense. Ce n'est pas logique.
This is something we're asking for. We have distributed to you a document that explains
in English and in French, our board's purpose in general, as well as its terms and conditions, the way in which we operate, responsibilities such as mediation, conflict resolution, adjudication and so on. I won't take the committee's time explaining what is already in the document.
That is really the reason we're here.