Thank you, Madam Chair.
I am the Chief Human Resources Officer. With me is the Assistant Deputy Minister, Compensation and Labour Relations, Hélène Laurendeau.
I am pleased to have this opportunity to talk about the public service, which is such a vitally important part of life in this country. The public service provides thousands of individual programs and services to Canadians in 1,600 points of service across Canada and in 180 countries. Public service employees work in dozens of different occupations. We have space explorers, Arctic explorers and almost everything in between. This includes food inspectors from Health Canada, volcanologists with Natural Resources Canada, and forensic scientists with Canada Border Services.
The range of jobs is incredibly vast, and we employ some of the most highly skilled people in the country. Many are internationally recognized for their expertise and their accomplishments. This makes us a key to Canada's competitiveness in a global economy.
This afternoon I would like to give you an overview of the size and composition of the public service, but first I'll start with my role and responsibilities.
As the chief human resources officer, my role is to represent the Government of Canada as the employer on human resources issues. I also provide strategic, enterprise-wide leadership on human resources management. In my employer role I am responsible for negotiating 27 collective agreements for the core public service, the largest single workplace in Canada.
My office also manages the largest pension and benefit programs in the country. In terms of enterprise leadership on human resources management, my office tracks and assesses overall performance in people management and promotes excellence in this field. We also establish common processes and policies for human resources management in the Government of Canada.
My office was created just over a year ago as part of the new regime announced by the Prime Minister to improve and streamline the management of human resources. This new regime is putting accountability for the management of human resources back in the hands of deputy ministers, where it belongs. My office plays a key role in ensuring that deputies have the flexibility to do this.
Parliament may be aware of our work through our extensive reporting. In fact we table eight reports annually, covering a number of topics, including employment equity, official languages, and human resources management.
I would now like to talk about trends in the federal public service. As indicated in the chart we distributed, the federal public service has about 523,000 employees. But for the purposes of our discussion today, I will be focusing on the roughly 274,000 employees who work in the federal public service.
The federal public service includes line departments like Health Canada, for which Treasury Board is the employer. It also includes separate agencies like the Canada Revenue Agency, which conduct their own negotiations with unionized employees. All these organizations are subject to similar human resources rules.
When we look at the 274,000 employees of the federal public service, we see that the vast majority of them—approximately 60%—work outside the National Capital Region or even outside Canada. Contrary to what many believe, the majority of public servants do not work in the National Capital Region.
As well, the vast majority of our employees are full-time. These employees are also called indeterminate and they make up about 86% of the workforce. However, this workforce is aging. On average, federal public service employees are 5.3 years older than workers in the general labour force. Despite these statistics, we expect that the number of public servants leaving government will stabilize at about 5% per year, which is 13,000 people.
Madam Chair, a well-planned and well-structured public service has great value. It is crucial to the success of our country in an increasingly complex world.
I am confident that the human resources changes we have made over the past few months will ensure that we continue advancing our commitment to renewing the public service and developing the next generation of employees.
I'll be happy to take your questions.