Government Operations Committee on Feb. 24th, 2009

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

One last question—

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you. That is well over eight minutes, and Mr. Martin understands the concept of not getting permission.

Someone else who understands the concept of not getting permission is Mr. McTeague: five minutes, for a subsequent round.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Yes, as a former employee of Mr. Lee, I can speak very vividly to that point.

Madam Barrados, guests, colleagues, thank you for being here today. I will go very quickly to my question.

On page 81 you refer to average length of time for internal staffing processes. You cite there some potential for improvement. I'm looking at the average time of about 130 days, or 138 for large organizations. That seems to be out of sync with...I don't want to use “the private sector”, but certainly with what we would have come to expect.

What accounts for this substantial time lag of 130 days to place somebody internally?

[Maria Barrados]

I'm glad you asked me that question, because it allows me to talk about a project that we have started in the Public Service Commission.

Some of my gang have been touring other practices, and we're now into extreme job makeovers. We feel they can be done in 45 days, if there's not a duty to accommodate. But that means a lot of change in how things are run. I'm saying the numbers I have here say that if you plan better, you can bring it down right away; you can get significant savings. Some of these are very large processes, and those will always take longer. By that I mean that if there's a decision that we are going to create a pool of about 35 people we can draw on when we need to, those will be much longer processes. But your single processes take too long in the government.

The reason they take too long is that people don't plan them like a project. You have to plan them like a project. You have to get in the expertise. The commission is there to help you—we're developing the expertise. And then managers have to give it the time. Significant kinds of delays occur because you can't get the board together; you have to get managers to do the interview; you have to get the managers to look at some of the applications, to discuss with their potential candidates. If you can't get them, time drags out. There are some of those really obvious ones.

There are some problems that we have in the system. Security clearance can hold up an appointment, depending upon the security of the job. It's a good question why it sometimes takes so long.

Language testing was a huge problem. We committed a terrific resource, and it brought that right down from many, many weeks to one week. I now get complaints that it's now too fast.

Duty to accommodate is a big problem, and that's one I have to put more effort into.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

You have suggested in your report more innovative ways for managers to address their staffing requirements. I am wondering whether there are any pitfalls or contradictions or perhaps impediments that you might see, particularly from the standpoint of the Public Service Employment Act.

[Maria Barrados]

I take your question in two possible ways. One is that the Public Service Employment Act, in the way it was recast, gives quite a bit of flexibility and discretion.

We are going into a five-year review, which I hope to do before my term is up, actually. This committee, I am sure, is the committee that would be involved in it.

There are some things in the act that don't really work in the way they should—and I am not sure whether this was that kind of question. There is a system in the legislation whereby you have to give multiple notifications, and it is quite detailed. For a piece of legislation that was fairly general, it became quite prescriptive in its system of notification. It was envisioned for a single process; it was not envisioned for what they are now running as large, collective processes. We will run a process in which we are looking to place perhaps 50 clerks, and it is extremely cumbersome. It was not envisioned.

Those are the kinds of things we are identifying in the legislation and would hope to be able to get changed as the review comes up.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you for that.

You've indicated the weight of people looking for work—a million applications for 5,000 jobs. Given the current economic situation, which has happened rather rapidly, I'm wondering whether, on the issues of merit, bonuses, incentives, those incentives have now been recalibrated to take into account that you may not have to cast the net as far as you used to or provide the great incentives to have people apply to fill jobs that are needed within the federal service.

I think, for instance, of the number of engineers who today may not be working—as they were, say, a year ago when this report was compiled. Is that new reality part of your process for modernization?

[Maria Barrados]

The reality is changing very fast in terms of what the labour markets are looking like.

Because of the legislation and the whole role of the commission, we remain very steadfastly committed to making sure we have merit. We want excellence. We want not just anybody; we want really good people. And we want to make those jobs broadly available to all Canadians. There is still going to be that obligation for us, in terms of how we manage the whole system, so that we have a system that is fair and accessible for everyone and that we get the right talent.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

I understand. What I'm saying is just that things have changed, obviously. We used to try to compete with the private sector, and now it would appear that we are ahead of the private sector.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Mr. Roy, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Barrados, I have been listening to you very carefully from the start. I must say that I have some serious issues with your comments. With regard to the new process, you stated in your presentation, among other things, that planning in 50% of departments and organizations had been assessed as less than fully acceptable. So you are telling us that 50% of departments and government organizations are unable to fill positions by themselves, or to do the kind of planning that will help them deal with human resources development.

What worries me is that, on June 15, 2006, you said more or less same thing before this committee, as you did once again on November 19, 2007.

Have things changed at all, or has the situation deteriorated since the process was established? Has the Public Service Commission established a planning process to train and support managers in their recruitment activities, and to provide directions, concrete directions tor departments and organizations in staffing and recruitment?

I did take the time to look at the report, even though it is a very thick and we only received it at the very last minute. However, I saw nothing in your studies on staff training. If we are to retain staff in departments and ensure that they are promoted and paid better, we must have a training plan in place. In your reports, I saw no concrete assessments of individual departmental staff training plans. I don't know if that is one of the roles of the PSC, but I think it most likely is. In my opinion, one key aspect of retaining staff is training. We have to provide training to staff members who want to go further, and give them the opportunity to benefit from a sound training plan that enables them to progress within the system.

[Maria Barrados]

Thank you for your question.

I plan to ask Mr. Lemaire to provide more details about the kind of support that we are now providing to departments.

I should clarify my remarks on planning. I have been critical in the past. As you said, I have had problems on the planning side. But at the time, the problem was not the plans themselves, but rather the lack of plans. Now, although we do have human resources plans, their content is questionable. Having a plan is not enough. The plan must be integrated into the organization's business plan. It must include targets for staffing positions. The work force and the organization have to be analysed. This year, my comments relate to the content of the plans. That is an improvement, because at least now we have some plans. However, we do have to take a closer look at what the plans contain.

The Public Service Commission is not responsible for providing training, but, as my colleague will tell you, we do play a role. I should add that the Clerk is just as concerned with planning and training plans. He has established an advisory committee that has just completed a report that contains many examples of best practices. That could be very useful. He has also set objectives for all departments, in so far as training plans are concerned. Donald might have more information to give you on the kind of support we provide.

[Donald Lemaire, Senior Vice-President, Policy Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada]

The general training policy is the employer's responsibility. We do not play a role in assessing the quality of training plans, whether for departments, or for staff. In terms of planning, we focus on the staffing strategy associated with the business plan. The challenge is to establish human resources plans that are integrated into the business plan. Departments are in the best position to assume and discharge that responsibility.

The support we provide consists in giving examples of good staffing strategies within the context of a plan. When we assess such components of human resources plans, we talk to people and show them basic things that are required, such as demographic analysis, turnover rate assessments and market change analyses, etc.

As part of our follow-up, when we assess their performance, we do not simply tell them that what they're doing is not good enough. We show them what the best practices are, and in fact indicate those to all departments.

Employers provide general training on human resources plans that are integrated into business plans. We also work with them to improve their staffing strategies.

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

I have one more brief question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Well, it has to be très, très courte.

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

If I'm not mistaken, Ms. Barrados said that managers did not have enough time to really put good human resources management planning into practice.

[Maria Barrados]

I'm not ready to say that they don't have enough time. But it's a question of priorities. Under the new legislation, under my directives and those of the clerk and employers, managers have to give more priority to managing human resources.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Merci.

I'll just give notice to colleagues that we'll break no later than 12:45, so we can transact some committee business.

Now we'll go to Mr. Calandra, for five minutes.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Thank you.

I just have a question on the unsatisfactory practices you found.

Do you, then, in subsequent years, go back and double-check or do another audit on the same groups where you found unsatisfactory practices, to see that they've made some changes?

[Maria Barrados]

We do two things with the unsatisfactory practices. We actually follow up each one of the cases. We sent those cases that had absolutely nothing in the file back and said, “You complete the assessment of this and then send it back to us and we'll take a look.”

In the areas where it appeared that merit had not been met and that there was a favoured candidate, we've initiated investigative processes. That means that we use a fairly legal, formal process to look at the case and come to a decision as to what corrective measures should be taken and whether potentially somebody should be removed from their job. That is now going on.

We also intend to re-audit the whole thing in two years.

For the departments that had a lot of unsatisfactory...not the really bad ones, but that were needing improvement—there were some that fell into a lot of needing improvement—we asked for corrective plans, for each one of them. We will follow those up as well.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Thank you.

To clarify with respect to “turnover”, when you talk about turnover you're not necessarily talking about people leaving the public service; you're just talking about mobility within the public service. How large is turnover, in what you've studied? How big is turnover? How many people are actually leaving the public service?

[Maria Barrados]

We did include the departures in turnover, in that we used the pay system. We looked at who was there at the beginning of the year and we looked at whether the same people were in the spots. So our turnover measure was a fairly all-encompassing measure, and we included everyone.

For 2007-08, we talk about “separations”, which are retirements, voluntary departures—people went off to something else—involuntary departures, in which you are strongly encouraged by the system to get yourself another employment, and deaths as well. In total that number was 8,700.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

When somebody is leaving a particular department, is it standard practice for there to be an exit interview to find out whether their leaving had nothing to do with retirement or moving to another department? Is there a standard practice that there is an exit interview with the person who's leaving?