Thank you.
Mr. Chair and honourable members, I am pleased to have this opportunity to meet with you to discuss issues and concerns that have been raised by your committee. I am here today with Donald Lemaire, senior vice-president of policy; Jean Ste-Marie, acting vice-president of the audit, evaluation and studies branch; and Denis Bilodeau, director general, investigations.
This committee was recently provided with information on key issues with respect to your motion of April 2, which I hope will be a useful reference for you. I will be focusing my remarks on the actions taken by the Public Service Commission that address your key concerns. I will also speak briefly about two special reports that were tabled in Parliament on May 14.
Let me begin with the issue of temporary, casual, and term hiring under the Public Service Employment Act. We've done a great deal of work in this area because we continue to be concerned about permanent recruitment through a temporary workforce. When managers recruit from a temporary workforce, the long-term needs of the organization are not necessarily being taken into account, and the values enshrined in the preamble of the PSEA, including access, transparency, fairness, and representativeness, may not always be respected.
We have updated our data on indeterminate, term, and casual hiring, and this information was shared with this committee. We found that there has been some improvement in the area of indeterminate hires, with more public servants having entered directly into the permanent workforce. For 2008-09, 35% of all indeterminate hires had no prior experience in the federal public service, as compared to 16% in 2000-01. However, we also observed a new trend of concern: the increasing proportion of casual workers who move directly into the public service. This rate has increased from 4% to 15% during the same time period.
We will continue to monitor these trends. We will be providing additional information in our 2008-09 annual report.
This brings me to the concerns expressed by members of the committee with respect to the use of private firms for the hiring of temporary help. We share the committee's concerns and feel that there is a potential risk to the integrity of the staffing system. Our challenge is to develop a robust methodology to assess this situation.
I now turn to the issue of employment equity hiring, EE. Our 2007-2008 annual report did not include statistics on the appointment of visible minorities because we were concerned about the validity of the available data.
We have been working with the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer to have a better understanding of the differences between EE recruitment rates derived from using self-declaration information collected through the Public Service Resourcing System, and those derived from employee self-identification processes.
First, we looked at how EE is gathered through self-identification, and compared approaches and practices across several departments. The findings have been shared with you. There is a clear need to improve the way in which the self-identification process is managed. We have identified areas where improvements can be made, ranging from more systematic tracking and follow-up to more timely and focused communications in promoting EE and self-identification.
We will continue to work with the Chief Human Resources Officer. We will also be addressing the results of the drop-off study and providing assessment of the recruitment rates of all EE groups for the past three fiscal years in our 2008-2009 annual report.
Another issue of concern to the committee is classification. The PSC has updated some of the data used in the report Expenditure Review of Federal Public Service Compensation Policy and Comparability to determine if shifts in classification are continuing to take place, particularly in those organizations governed by the PSEA. We found that the trends identified in Jim Lahey's report continue to apply to these organizations.
We found that the earlier trend towards more knowledge-intensive workers is continuing, with various aspects on the occupational structure. As well, some select occupations groups continue to have shifts to higher occupational levels. We also found that the AS, PM and ES groups are continuing to grow while the CR group continues to shrink. We have also provided this information to the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer, as classification falls within their mandate.
Committee members also wanted to know more about the process that had been put in place to delegate appointment authority to deputy heads and to hold them accountable for the staffing decisions made through their delegations. We have provided detailed information on this process to your committee. We've also outlined areas where the PSC has not delegated specific authority, for instance, with respect to priority administration.
I now turn to the two special reports tabled in Parliament on May 14. The first report concerned the unauthorized possession and use of the PSC second language evaluation tests. PSC is responsible for developing the tests that are used to determine the level of proficiency of public service employees. We have delegated language testing to more than 1,200 language assessors. During 2007-08, more than 69,000 tests were administered to evaluate reading and writing expression.
We initiated the audit after a public service employee who attended the Nec Plus Ultra Language School noticed that practice tests applied by the school were similar to the government tests. Our audit concluded that the NPU Language School was in possession of and used the PSC's SLE reading and writing tests without the authorization of the PSC. The evidence showed that the language school students had much higher success rates on these two tests than the general population. The evidence also showed that NPU gave its students practice tests that were practically identical to the PSC tests.
We take this matter very seriously and are committed to taking the necessary steps to maintain the integrity of our tests. As a result of the audit, the PSC is replacing the two tests that have been affected. We estimate that it costs about a million dollars to develop a totally new test with four different versions. The 114 NPU students who took the tests while on their training over the period audited will be retested by the PSC within the next two years. We are implementing the recommendations of this audit and have undertaken measures to tighten test security.
The second audit looked at how departments have been using the federal student work experience program. It is the primary vehicle through which federal departments and agencies recruit students for temporary jobs. In 2008-09, 80,000 applications were received from students. We received 13,000 requests for student referrals--this includes re-employment--from federal departments across Canada. From those requests, 10,031 students received temporary jobs through the program. The audit concluded that overall, the program is operating reasonably well as a staffing tool. It identified a small proportion of unsatisfactory appointments, including a 6% rate of pre-matching, a significant improvement over a 2003 PSC study which found a 19% rate of pre-matching.
Under this program, students can be bridged into the public service. The bridging mechanisms allow managers to hire recent post-secondary graduates who participated in the federal student work experience program or other student employment programs. The audit also found that one in three student bridging appointment processes were unsatisfactory. Improvements need to be made in how these appointments are made.
Mr. Chair, I trust that the information provided to the committee responds to the concerns that have been raised. The Public Service Commission has been entrusted with a very special mandate by the Parliament of Canada. I would like to thank you and committee members for taking a strong interest in the work of the PSC.
We are now happy to answer your questions.