Government Operations Committee on March 31st, 2009

[Maria Barrados]

That includes everything we do to ensure oversight of the delegation system: checks, reviews and monitoring of the existing system. It was in this area that I tried to gather some figures, to try to estimate some numbers, so we might have an overall idea of how the system operates, and we could determine if any changes should be made to it and give more information. Sometimes we find that more conditions must be included in the delegation system. If we find problems in an organization, we make changes to the delegation system.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC]

Thank you.

Your third priority is to, “enable organizations to manage their delegated responsibilities”.

[Maria Barrados]

That relates to the first priority. It is not enough for us to say, “here is the delegation system; now go ahead”. In the end, if there is a serious problem in the public service, I am responsible for it.

We want to work with the deputy ministers and the departments to ensure that they fully understand and that they have the tools needed to do so. We provide them with the support they need to make the system work.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC]

Alright.

Your fourth priority is to, “provide integrated and modernized staffing and assessment services”.

[Maria Barrados]

There are two main aspects here: the staffing services that help people, and our assessment system. We have a psychology centre that prepares all the language tests and all the skills evaluations. We are doing more work on cost recovery in this area. We also count on all the systems and tools used for staffing, including the computer system and the Jobs website.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC]

Your fifth and final objective is to “build on the model organization”.

[Maria Barrados]

This objective can be partly attributed to the fact that I worked at the OAG for 18 years. I want to have a well-managed organization. As the chair said earlier, as an organization, we are not subject to the same kind of monitoring as other departments under a given minister. It is very important that our organization meet the highest management standards.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC]

As a final point, I think you have your five priorities under control. Will your vision for 2009-10 continue along the same path in the longer term, or do you plan to set other specific priorities for the next five years?

[Maria Barrados]

A legislative review of our organization's progress under the PSEA must be completed. We will continue down the same path for the next two years, because of the changes that have been made to the public service management system under the new legislation. This takes time, but there will be some more changes after that legislative review is completed.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Mr. Martin, for eight minutes.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Chair.

Madam Barrados, I have every confidence that things are going well with the Public Service Commission in terms of the estimates and the spending. I'm sympathetic that you're coping with a reduction in your budget, but from the briefing you've given us today, you have that under control and you're coping with that, etc.

I'm more concerned about a larger problem that we have in terms of managing the public service, and an article in today's Ottawa Citizen spells it out: that fully 42% of Canada's core public service was on the move last year. Your own report to us suggests there were 67,000 moves within the public service. This journalist calls this “the federal nomads”. At that rate, you'd have a complete turnover of the whole public service every two and a half years. I think this is a symptom of a much deeper and more serious problem of morale and possibly even malaise within the public service caused by a number of fairly predictable causes.

The low morale I think can be traced back to the period when we had seven years of wage freezes in a row, plus slashing, cutting, and hacking of the public service by 30%. Then to add insult to injury, Marcel Masse's last move as the President of the Treasury Board was to scoop the $30-billion surplus out of the pension plan and put it into the government's general revenue fund. The public service pension plan got robbed. Somebody should have called the cops.

With all of these things combined, the public service had to watch one-third of their workforce disappear, and then the government hired back the same people to do the same work at $1,500 a day as highly paid consultants. Their own work was devalued and even vilified by the government of the day, which was scapegoating the public service for the budgetary deficits that they were running. I mean, trying to put all that back together into a well-functioning, satisfied workforce is a super challenge.

With that sort of opening comment, there is a practical problem too. One of the core functions of the Public Service Commission when it was struck almost a century ago was to get rid of nepotism in the hiring process. Seeing as a lot of the staffing issues you're dealing with are actually within the public service, how do you avoid the type of nepotism that gives an unfair competitive advantage? There will be an advantage to the internal applicant, but is it not a fear of nepotism at a different level, or maybe expanding the meaning of that kind of insider advantage? Obviously, through the collective agreements there are opportunities afforded for the internal applicants, but are you not faced with the whole idea of advantage or even missed opportunities in terms of people moving to that extensive degree?

There is one last thing I'll ask you. We were on the road to dealing with classification issues. Treasury Board was in the midst of bargaining when the Harper regime came down and essentially put on a wage freeze and controls, and froze collective bargaining for three years. Do you anticipate any kind of impact on morale associated with what we believe to be a very heavy-handed approach?

[Maria Barrados]

Perhaps I could just offer a few comments.

The 67,000 moves that I referred to in the opening statement were the transactions that you see inside the public service. A mixture of things would be in that. I share preoccupations about the mobility and movement in the public service. I talked about that at some length the last time I was here.

The whole idea behind having a Public Service Commission was to avoid nepotism, to have a merit-based public service, and to have a non-partisan public service. Hence we have this structure of a Public Service Commission that doesn't take direction from a minister.

We continue in that mode with that same kind of mission and mandate. I continue always to be concerned that we have a merit-based public service, that we're fair, that we're transparent, and that we provide fair access to all Canadians, particularly as we go through an economically difficult time. At the commission we try to support a system whereby we let managers manage while making sure they're on that path. Is the system perfect? I don't think so. Do we still need a strong commission? I absolutely believe we do. I think we function as a deterrent as well as somebody who is policing the system, in some respects.

One of the elements the clerk raises in his report, an element that I feel is absolutely the right direction to go, is this whole area of being concerned about employee engagement. As managers in the public service, we have to be concerned about engagement of the employees so that they feel part of a very important mission. It is a special calling to be a public servant; you have to have a commitment and an interest in working for the public interest and the public good, and we must engage these people to the best of our ability. A series of surveys are going on now to try to measure that. I think that would be a good way to assess how the whole current environment has an impact on employees.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

One of your own comments in this article, Madam Barrados, is that you're finding work that was done by somebody at level three is now being done by a level four. When the managers are asked why, they'll say they couldn't get anybody at the pay scale of level three. If you're unable to invite the people qualified to do the job at a certain scale, moving them up.... It seems we're coming at the problem from the wrong way. If we're not offering adequate compensation to attract and retain the people we need, maybe it's a lack of direction overall.

For public servants to feel engaged and satisfied in their work, I think they have to feel that they're part of a vision. That has to be articulated. When we built up our public service in the post-war years, there was that national vision, a vision that we were building a great nation and building great things, but after ten years of, as I say, vilifying the public service and having certain sectors of our culture blaming public servants for the deficits or the messes that governments got themselves into....

I'll just finish where I started. I think we have a much bigger morale and malaise problem than the reclassification problems. The mobility within the public service that you spoke about last time is a symptom of a much larger problem.

[Maria Barrados]

I should add as part of the picture, though, that there are a lot of people who want to work in the public service. I don't have a lot of patience with my own staff when they tell me that they can't find somebody and therefore have to promote somebody. Because of this wide interest in public service jobs, I think there has to be an effort to look a little more broadly. The commitment that individual public servants have to make is that when you hire people, you have to train them and give them the opportunity to grow and develop in their positions.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

They're not going to develop if the entire workforce is shifting over to a new task every two and a half years. Sometimes it takes ten years to really learn how to do your job well. This rate of turnover would be a managerial problem for any private or public sector enterprise.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

We'll have to stop there.

[Maria Barrados]

I agree with that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you.

Mr. Dryden, five minutes.

[Ken Dryden, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Along the line of what Mr. Martin was asking, one of the things we've been hearing out of the U.S. in the last number of months is that there seems to be a greater attraction toward the public service now than there would have been in the last number of years. A message is being delivered and understood that valuable work is to be done, not just in the private sector but also in government. In fact, very important transformational work is being done out of the public sector. All that generates an atmosphere of importance, excitement, and possibility. These kinds of things attract not only more people but people who in recent years would have decided not to look to the public sector as a place of employment and for a career.

You mention an increasing rate of departure due to retirements and you expect a greater level of interest in terms of the number of applications for the job openings. Are you seeing any of that same effect that we read about in the U.S.?

[Maria Barrados]

We have had and continue to have a high interest in public service jobs. One of the things we have done, and this was at the behest of Parliament, is broaden the area of selection for jobs nationally. What I mean is, the legislation gives the provision to the Public Service Commission to limit you to the geographic area you live in to apply for a certain job. That was done to manage volumes.

Parliamentarians have been pretty clear with me that they don't really like that. Everyone feels their own constituents should be able to access any job in the federal government. So we have removed that, step by step. Now anyone in the country can apply for all the permanent jobs. I have seen an increase in applications because of this policy change. I think that's what's going on there. I've always had an interest, and now I have more interest because of this policy change.

With the current economic environment, I'm expecting some of the types of positions we've had difficulty getting will be easier and we will have more volume. We've always had difficulties for some specialty areas.

[Ken Dryden, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

My question goes to the nature of the applicant. I think in the last 10 to 15 years or so there has been a general message that government work is not that important and why would one do it, that the really important work to be done in society is the work in the private sector.

So you, as a 22- or 23-year-old leaving university and deciding in what direction to go, not only have to persuade yourself but also your parents and friends. Why would you decide you want to go into the public sector, given all the qualifications you have and that you are one of the best and brightest of your generation?

That kind of understanding has got to hurt in terms of the work that is done and how well that work is done, as well as a general feeling of excitement within an environment. I think we're starting to see a difference in the United States now.

How does that same difference in feeling get generated in Canada, where not only do you receive that many more applications but from the sort that otherwise would not have considered the public service in the past?

[Maria Barrados]

We've run some surveys, and those surveys have always found that continuing interest. But you make a good point in wondering whether we are really getting the best and brightest and getting the right people to go into public service to provide public service leadership. Having committed my own entire career to the public service, of course, I tend to think there's a continuing interest. But that's a bit self-serving, obviously.

The government, but particularly the Clerk of the Privy Council, has taken a lot of leadership on his renewal agenda and has put some effort into branding the public service. Part of that branding exercise is actually an effort to clearly articulate what public service is about, the range of jobs—we are the biggest employer, with a huge diversity in jobs—and the pride that people have in doing that work. A very interesting video has been done, and we carry it on our website.

The other thing we are trying to do with that website is make sure that it is more interactive and is giving people a taste of the different kinds of jobs. We're doing a lot using, as much as we possibly can, new media to communicate.

I think too that the current economic situation shows how important public service is and how important good delivery of programs and activities to the Canadian public is.

My reading of this literature—and I may not have the same depth of understanding of this as you have—is that Canadians generally have always expected more of government than have Americans. They've had a view of government different from that of Americans, and I think that's reflected in the interest in working in government.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you.

I hope colleagues didn't mind the extension of time for that quite good answer. Thank you.

Monsieur Roy, you have five minutes.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Barrados, I have three questions for you, including one very technical question. On page 5 of your presentation, you say that operating on a cost-recovery basis for counselling services has its risks. Last year, your revenues rose to $11 million. I would describe that revenue as variable, since it can be as low as $5 million in a given year. Perhaps that is what you are trying to tell us.

What I am more interested in is the quality of labour relations in the public service. Does the commission look at the quality of labour relations on a regular basis? I have some serious doubts about the quality of labour relations in certain sectors. I have dealings with certain offices where about 100 to 150 public servants work, most of whom wish to leave because of poor labour relations. I could give concrete examples.

Does the Public Service Commission ask public servants to complete anonymous questionnaires, to find out how they feel and what is going on in the various sectors, and to monitor the quality of labour relations?