Government Operations Committee on Oct. 7th, 2010

[Maria Barrados]

I followed that case fairly closely.

Back to my comments, we don't have an affirmative action plan, but we do have a statute that is called the Employment Equity Act. That charges the government to have employment of the four equity groups—women, visible minorities, aboriginal people, and the disabled—at their workforce availability. So the objective is for managers to manage their workforce to get it to workforce availability. We have provisions in our act that say managers can restrict a particular process to a member of those groups if they have done their planning and they determine that for their department, their organization, for the kind of work they do, they are not sufficiently representative.

I have made statements a number of times that I feel, given the representativity of women, it really isn't appropriate to be using those special mechanisms to get women into the public service. But for the other three groups, we do have issues of representativity. And it's representative of the Canadian population: it's extremely important that the public service reflect the people it serves.

So what we have, then, is a department in this particular case that said, “I am short, and look at our whole workforce: we are short of visible minorities and aboriginal people”. Now, there are two ways that this can go. The department can say right up front, “We are going to try, if we can...”. It has to be meritorious. They have to meet the merit tests. You cannot come in, regardless of who you are, if you don't make the merit test. You--

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Okay. Given that, when it comes to merit testing, are the merit levels equal across the board depending on the colour of your skin? Because I applied to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police back in the 1990s, and the merits I had to achieve for my standards of hiring were different than others, so I guess I'm wondering, from a merit-based approach....

And I agree with you. A merit-based approach should be the way it is as long as the merits are applied to all people equally, except for maybe in the situation of people with disabilities if it's a physical requirement to do a job. You could bring some comfort to me in letting me know that the merit-based approach is fair merits for all.

[Maria Barrados]

It is. The process we go through is that we have a statement of merit: merit must be met. Now, the issue is, what if everybody meets merit? Then who do you choose? I feel it's important to tell Canadians up front what their chances are of getting a job.

If you are looking.... This particular case was an AS-1. AS-1s are paid over $50,000 and they don't require post-secondary education. This is administrative support. We have no problem getting people to do this. I think it's fairer to say up front that we are trying to get visible minorities and aboriginal people.

They must meet that merit test. If I have a pool of people, why should I make people apply and then have them, at the end, not be chosen? Because we can go two ways. We can say you meet this merit test, and it's in two parts: what you must meet or what would be nice to have, what we'd like to have. So you can put “you must meet”, and it could be a member of the group, or you could put it in “nice to have”. If you put it in “nice to have”, you're going to have a whole bunch of people applying, and they're not going to get the job anyway because you'll go to the “nice to have”. So I think it's important that we tell people, all Canadians, up front.

Now, having said that, there are still a lot of jobs and a lot of hiring, but we get many more applications. We get hundreds and hundreds of applications for jobs.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Chris Warkentin]

Sorry, but we are out of time on that.

I'm going to give Ms. Coady a little bit of extra time as well. If you want to share that time, that would be fine.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Okay. If we're going to get extra time, I'm going to throw in a third question.

I heard from you that temporary workers are hired through temporary agencies. Could you provide this committee with a list of those temporary agencies and the amounts of these contracts?

[Maria Barrados]

If I have that information, I'd be happy to provide it. If I don't have it, I would send that to Public Works and Government Services to respond to the committee.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

That would be great. Thank you very much.

How are these temporary agencies determined?

[Maria Barrados]

That is a process run by Public Works and Government Services. They are the—

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Through tender?

[Maria Barrados]

Yes.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Okay. So it's a tendered process.

[Maria Barrados]

Yes.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you.

I want to go back to the political impartiality monitoring approach, because I didn't get a chance to finish that earlier. I think the Privacy Commissioner indicated that the Public Service Commission was going to narrow PIMA, and that the commissioner's office would receive a new privacy impact assessment on the modified approach before the end of 2010. The indication from the Privacy Commissioner was that they would still specifically consider the necessity, proportionality, and effectiveness of the initiative of the revised project.

Could you please inform the committee where you are on the modified approach? Will we have it by the end of 2010? And will it reflect the concerns of the Privacy Commissioner?

[Maria Barrados]

The Privacy Commissioner's test of necessity, proportionality, and effectiveness is a standard test. They apply that to anyplace where there might be a privacy issue.

My view is that the risks here are extremely low, despite the words, just because of how limited we are in what we do. We're looking at public information. We're taking public information and we're matching it with public servants themselves, where they work, which is basically in the telephone directory of the public service.

So there is a matching going on, which is where the Privacy Commissioner always asks questions, but it's with public information. We will have that done this year. We're in constant discussions with the Privacy Commissioner, so they are aware of what we're doing.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you.

I have a final question before I hand it over to Madame Bourgeois. Between 2001 and 2010, the federal civil service grew by, I believe, roughly 27% or 28%. Yet the executive branch grew by 56% or 57%. I even note in your report you talk about, for example, an increase of 4.7% in the executive group.

Could you comment on that? Is there an excessive amount going to the executive group? And is that shared across the country, or is it focused here in the capital region?

[Maria Barrados]

I believe that's a trend for the whole public service. There are more executives in the national capital region than there are in the rest of the country. You have more of the senior positions. You have the headquarters of the departments in the national capital region. They're located where their ministers are, so that's not surprising.

There could be a number of things going on, and I'm not sure exactly what all is going on. Without a doubt, we have work becoming more complicated. We have a government that is changing, that is moving from a lot of the clerical, routine kind of work. We're automating more of that work. We're farming more of that out. We're looking for more higher-educated, strategic-thinking kinds of individuals. You would be paying those people more, and hence it's not surprising you have them in the executive group.

The other thing we have going on is that the executive group is the group that has the greatest amount of retirement. The retirements departure in the public service tends to run around 4%. The executive group is 9%. Most of the growth that you see in the executive group, the big growth, is at the junior level, that EX-1 level. There has to be replacement and development. We paid a terrible price for the freezes we had in the nineties. There are some gaps in that executive group, so we have to bring those people up.

Those are two quite possible explanations. There could be some great inflation as well. But I'm not really in a position to say what exactly we've got going on there.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

I'd now like to turn it over to Madame Bourgeois.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Chris Warkentin]

Absolutely.

You have a couple of minutes.

[Diane Bourgeois, Bloc, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Barrados, I want to pick up on the desire for change you talked about earlier. You said that your group of managers, with whom you were in contact, had shown a willingness to change to improve hiring and staffing practices. You said they should be encouraged.

First of all, I want to know who should be encouraging them and how; what approach should be taken?

Second, the committee has always supported your work. We are happy to support you, to help you, if need be. If possible, we would like for you to give the committee an update—say every three months—on the work you are doing or the progress you are making with the group of managers you are going to be meeting with, the group where you will discuss change, improvements you want to make to this staffing process for better transparency and compliance with the government's financial requirements.

[Maria Barrados]

Thank you very much.

We have begun discussions on the report itself, and I have met with the Treasury Board Secretariat, the deputy minister of Public Works and the clerk. We have started those discussions, and I will continue with those efforts.

I have a meeting with the deputy ministers next week to discuss the annual report, and obviously we will talk a lot about this issue, as will be the case with the other deputy minister committees. I would be very pleased to follow up with you in three months, to talk about the kinds of meetings that were held and the progress we have made.

[Diane Bourgeois, Bloc, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

Thank you very much.

That is all, Mr. Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Chris Warkentin]

Thank you.

We thank you again for coming to our committee. We appreciate your testimony every time you come before us. There are always things for us to learn and areas that we know will occupy our time and our discussions at forthcoming committees. Thank you so much. We now want to invite you, or free you up, to leave. We do appreciate your attendance.

Committee members, we do have just a little bit of a tentative schedule. Before the chair left, he and I talked over the possibilities for the week we come back.

I think it's important for you to know that on the nineteenth we will not discuss Bill C-429, because Mr. Asselin cannot be here until the twenty-first. On the twenty-first, we will plan for it to be the first day of hearings on Bill C-429. The first hour will be given to the private member who is proposing the bill, as well as any of his proponents for the bill, if he wants to bring additional business people or whomever for the discussions.

For the second hour, what we are suggesting is that if every party wants to propose two different witnesses as possibilities for that second hour, we will then begin this discussion. Then, at the end of that meeting, we can determine as committee members if we want to extend the hearings or if we've heard enough. That seems to me to maybe be a way in which we can begin the process.

In terms of the meeting of the nineteenth, right now we have two different options that we've conceived. One is having Correctional Services here and hearing from them. We did hear from the PBO on theirs, but they are the last witness we need for the one study. The other is to get a high-level briefing on G-8 and G-20. It seems like committee members are excited in regard to getting onto that. There is a possibility that if Correctional Services are not available we could maybe get a high-level briefing on G-8 and G-20 from PCO or some other organization, if there's a willingness.

Again, by tomorrow we do need suggestions from the parties with regard to witnesses for Bill C-429. We'll ask the clerk to inform Mr. Asselin that we expect to do that on the twenty-first, to just confirm it with him, and then, I guess, work with his colleagues in the Bloc to bring witnesses who are in support of his bill, for that first hour.

[An hon. member]

C'est beau.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Chris Warkentin]

Very good. Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.