Evidence of meeting #30 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was test.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Judy Foote Liberal Random—Burin—St. George's, NL
Was that across the board in the departments that we'd talked about earlier, or was that just throughout the public service?
Acting Vice-President, Audit, Evaluations and Studies Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada
This was from our sampling that we used for the audit, which was across the board.
Liberal
Judy Foote Liberal Random—Burin—St. George's, NL
Did you find that some departments were worse than others?
Acting Vice-President, Audit, Evaluations and Studies Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada
Yes.
Acting Vice-President, Audit, Evaluations and Studies Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada
I don't have the list here, I'm sorry.
Liberal
Judy Foote Liberal Random—Burin—St. George's, NL
Is that information you could provide to the committee for us, please?
President, Public Service Commission of Canada
Yes, we can. We can break it down by the department.
What we have tended to do in these audits is to certainly go after departments where we see a concentration of problems. In this particular audit we did not see that, so we would say that there is a department that is particularly poor at this. In other audits where we do that, we do have departments that are particularly poor. Here we found that there was a scattering that didn't show a pattern of problems in running this program, but it was on the bridging part of the program. In the other part of the program we were satisfied that issues we had found as we started the work had been addressed.
Liberal
Judy Foote Liberal Random—Burin—St. George's, NL
Back to the language training and the issue with the school and having access to your actual test, did I understand you correctly when you said that employees who had taken that test will have to be retested?
Liberal
Judy Foote Liberal Random—Burin—St. George's, NL
So those individuals will be penalized because of an error made by someone else.
President, Public Service Commission of Canada
These employees are currently not penalized, so what we have said is that we have no confidence in the results of this test. Whenever we have any testing process, if we have a problem with the test and the test results, we retest. We're not penalizing employees, because we're giving them two years to be retested.
I'll make an absolute statement here. Some employees might be under greater pressure, because we say it's two years if you stay in the same job you're in today. If you're going to be promoted, you must be retested before you go for a promotion.
Liberal
Judy Foote Liberal Random—Burin—St. George's, NL
That would make sense, but if they are staying in the same job, they have two years.
President, Public Service Commission of Canada
They have two years, and if you truly are exempted, if you got 99% or 100% on these tests because of your level of language skill, it should not really be that hard to write it again.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
That would complete our questioning.
Before we leave, with reference to the fact that Public Service Week is June 13 to June 20, Madam Bourgeois has a motion that, with unanimous consent, could be considered by committee members.
If you wish, you can read it.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
It is a motion in the spirit of the week. It reads as follows:
That National Public Service Week is June 13-20. The members of the committee wish to salute federal public servants and let them know how important they are.
Unanimous. Wow!
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
For the record, there appears to be unanimous support for adoption of that motion. Is that agreed?
(Motion agreed to)
Thank you very much.
Ms. Hall-Findlay on a point of order.
Liberal
Martha Hall Findlay Liberal Willowdale, ON
We're getting along so well that I didn't think it was necessary to have a point of order, but in case we were about to say goodbye to our witnesses, I did actually want to say thank you for coming a number of times and for being patient, certainly with me, with some questions that may have come from a greater level of ignorance than should be the case. But I want to thank you all very much again for coming a number of times and again today.
Thank you very much.
President, Public Service Commission of Canada
I also want to thank the committee for its motion on behalf of the public service. Even though I come here often with criticisms, they work very, very hard. It's the minority we tend to talk about, not the majority.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
We agree with that.
Having completed that business, thank you to our witnesses for appearing today. We hope to see you again in the autumn.
I did want to acknowledge the hard work of members on completing the report that was submitted to the House yesterday on federal government procurement and SMEs. Thank you.
If there is no further business, we will adjourn.
This meeting is adjourned.