Government Operations Committee on May 2nd, 2013

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll convene our meeting.

Welcome to the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, as we continue our examination of the main estimates. We apologize for the delay. The votes in the House of Commons prevented us from opening right at 11 o'clock as we had hoped.

In our examination of the main estimates, we have invited the Public Service Commission of Canada. Welcome, Madam Robinson, and also the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, Mr. Mario Dion. Welcome, Mr. Dion.

Because of the truncated time, we're going to ask both of you to give your opening remarks, and we should have time for one full round of questioning from the committee members. We need to reserve a bit of time at the end of the meeting for some planning business. We're good until 11:45.

We invite Ms. Robinson, please, to begin with your opening remarks.

[Anne-Marie Robinson, President, Public Service Commission of Canada]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm accompanied today by Hélène Laurendeau, senior vice-president of policy; Gerry Thom, vice-president of staffing and assessment services; and Gisèle Côté, director general, finance and administration.

I would like to thank you for this opportunity to meet with you today to discuss our main estimates and our report on plans and priorities for 2013-14. The PSC is responsible for promoting and safeguarding merit-based appointments that are free from political influence, and in collaboration with other stakeholders, for protecting the non-partisan nature of the public service. We report independently to Parliament on our mandate. We also administer programs on behalf of departments and agencies that recruit qualified Canadians from across the country.

Under the delegated staffing system set out in the Public Service Employment Act, the PSC fulfills its mandate by providing policy guidance and expertise, conducting effective oversight, and delivering innovative staffing and assessment services. In our main estimates for 2013-14, the PSC is authorized to spend $89.9 million, and in addition, it has the authority to recover up to $14 million of the cost of our counselling and assessment services and products provided to federal organizations.

As a result of the spending review of 2012, our budget is being reduced by $8.9 million, to be implemented over three years. Last year, our reductions were $2.2 million, with another $2.2 million to be reduced this year, and $4.5 million to be reduced next year.

Of the 88 positions that were to be eliminated, 38 were achieved through vacancy management and attrition. Of the 50 employees affected, 27 have been placed in other positions, 18 have opted to leave the public service with the assistance of transitional support measures and education allowances, and we are still working on the placement of the other five employees. As a result of these reductions, in 2014-15, the PSC will have the equivalent of 874 employees, as compared to 922 for this year.

Mr. Chair, during the past year, the Public Service Commission devoted considerable attention and effort to provide policy guidance and supporting tools to departments and agencies as they implement workforce adjustment. We will continue to provide this support, in collaboration with the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Canada School of Public Service as well as other stakeholders.

Today, the staffing system is adapting to a changing environment, most notably, a smaller public service and a reduced level of staffing activity. In 2011-2012, just prior to Budget 2012, we found that the number of employees who come under the Public Service Employment Act had fallen by 2.4%. We also reported that overall hiring to the public service had fallen by 10.3%, although student hiring has declined the least. We are now reviewing the data for the past fiscal year and we will be providing a full assessment in our 2012-2013 annual report, to be tabled this fall. We look forward to discussing those results with your committee.

Now, I would like to turn to our strategic priorities for this year.

Our first priority is to provide ongoing independent assurance to Parliament in relation to the performance of the staffing system under the Public Service Employment Act. In doing so, we continue to focus on and further improve our core activities. We have had seven years of experience in implementing our responsibilities under the revised Public Service Employment Act.

Our outreach and interaction, along with our monitoring, audits, investigations, and studies—all of these activities provide opportunities for us to examine lessons learned and to identify areas for improvement and to take concrete action. We now have a unique opportunity to take advantage of our expertise to improve our processes, with the goal of developing a more efficient and integrated approach to our oversight and delivery functions.

We will continue to adapt our oversight activities, policies, and services, in line with a maturing staffing system, and to meet the evolving needs of departments and agencies. We will continue to work closely and collaboratively with organizations to help them build a stronger culture of prevention and compliance, while we continue to deliver on our fundamental responsibility to provide independent oversight and assurance to Parliament.

Our second priority is to continue to enhance the priority administration program, which allows the public service to redeploy skilled and experienced employees. The implementation of workforce adjustment has resulted in an increased number of surplus employees and laid-off individuals who are eligible to be appointed ahead of all others to vacant positions in the public service, provided they meet the essential qualifications of the positions.

We have made policy, program and service improvements to provide greater access, fairness and transparency, with the objective of placing as many priority persons as quickly as possible.

Mr. Chair, there are currently about 2,900 priority persons, an increase of 60% since last April when 1,800 persons had priority rights. Since April 2012, 956 priority persons have been redeployed into new positions. Most of them, around 70%, were employees affected by workforce adjustment.

At the same time, we've also seen a drop in the placement of other priority persons, including a significant decline in the placement of Canadian veterans who have been medically released. We have been monitoring the situation very closely, along with Veterans Affairs, which has overall responsibility for policy and programs for Canada's veterans. At its request, the PSC provided technical advice regarding this priority entitlement to Veterans Affairs for its consideration. We are ready to support the implementation of any additional measures.

Our third priority is to work with stakeholders to foster increased awareness regarding political activities and to help public servants better understand their legal rights and responsibilities under the PSEA. We will continue to collaborate with organizations, communicate regularly and improve our tools. We must increase awareness of non-partisanship as a core value of the public service.

We have recently launched a revised self-assessment tool, to help public servants make informed decisions about engaging in a political activity. Employees will be able to better assess whether their participation in a political activity could impair, or be perceived as impairing, their ability to perform their duties in a politically impartial manner. This comprehensive tool provides public servants with a detailed assessment including a more realistic rating with respect to their participation in certain political activities. The revised tool was launched as a one-year pilot and we will use this experience to identify further improvements.

I would like now to turn to our responsibilities under the Employment Equity Act. The PSC is responsible for identifying and eliminating barriers in recruitment and staffing, and for developing policies and practices that promote a more representative public service. Overall we found that members of three of the four designated employment equity groups continue to apply and be appointed to the public service at proportions exceeding their respective workforce availability. The exception is for the recruitment of persons with disabilities who continue to be under-represented in terms of applications and appointments.

To continue our work, we are conducting a study on the rate of promotions from the employment equity perspective and on how members of the designated groups perceive the appointment process. We are nearing completion of this study, and its findings will be published in our annual report in the fall. This should help inform future discussions in this area.

We also have important responsibilities to support official languages. Our staffing policies clearly stipulate that all communications with candidates in appointment processes must be done in the official language of their choice. In our oversight we also verify that individuals meet the official language requirements for public service jobs. We are also responsible for developing language tests to assess second language proficiency against the standards set out by Treasury Board. These tests ensure that the second language requirements for bilingual positions are assessed fairly and consistently.

The PSC is committed to enabling departments and agencies in building a workforce to meet the current and future needs of the public service.

We will continue to foster strong relationships with all stakeholders, including parliamentarians, departments and agencies as well as bargaining agents, so that Canadians will continue to benefit from a professional and non-partisan public service.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My colleagues and I would be pleased to respond to your questions.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you very much, Ms. Robinson. I'm sure there will be questions from committee members, but first we will hear from the public sector integrity commissioner, Monsieur Mario Dion.

You have the floor, sir.

[Mario Dion, Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada]

Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I am very pleased to be here on your invitation to discuss our main estimates for 2013-14 as well as our recent achievements. I am accompanied by our Executive Director, Ms. France Duquette.

You may recall that my first involvement with the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner dates back almost two and a half years ago, first as Interim Commissioner and then as Commissioner on a seven-year appointment approved in Parliament in December 2011. The office was created in April 2007 as part of the Accountability Act and I am only the second person to hold this position.

Our dual role under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act is to receive and deal with disclosures of wrongdoing allegedly taking place within the federal public sector and to handle complaints of reprisals sustained as a result of having made a protected disclosure. While public servants may blow the whistle within their own organization, they often come to us as we are independent. However, we are the only ones responsible to investigate allegations of reprisals.

The number of disclosures made to my office has doubled in the last three fiscal years, and I believe that this is attributable to our increased profile, as well as to the growing sense of confidence within the public service—and, hopefully, the public sector at large—as to our professionalism, discretion, and efficiency.

The office currently employs 28 public servants, and we also retain private sector resources from time to time to supplement our expertise. As of now, since the inception of the office, we have received close to 450 disclosures of wrongdoing and over 150 complaints of reprisal. Our current budget is sufficient to meet our workload, but based on intake trends it is quite possible we will one day have to ask for additional resources.

When we receive a disclosure or a complaint of reprisal, my role as commissioner is to first decide whether the case warrants a full-fledged investigation, and after one has been launched and concluded, whether on the balance of probabilities a wrongdoing has been committed, or in the case of an allegation of reprisal, whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that reprisal action has taken place.

In the last 13 months, we have tabled five cases before Parliament following a finding of wrongdoing involving staff at HRSDC, the Laurentian Pilotage Authority, CIDA, CBSA, as well as the former chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. We have also referred three cases of reprisals to the special tribunal created by our governing legislation. As of March 31, 2013, we were actively investigating 22 allegations of wrongdoing and seven complaints of reprisals, and I aim to complete all of these investigations by the end of the year.

Since my appointment, we have focused on recruiting a sufficient number of competent employees to fulfill our mandate. Our positions are currently staffed with highly skilled individuals, and last year we experienced a perfectly normal rate of attrition. This explains why we were able to complete 38 investigations in 2012-13, as opposed to a total of 22 in the first five years of the existence of the office.

We have recently adopted formal service standards guaranteeing—barring exceptional circumstances having to do with complexity or scope—that we will make decisions whether to launch an investigation within 90 days and no more than 90 days, and that all investigations will be completed within one year of being launched.

It's important that people who come to us, as well as those against whom allegations are made, find out in a reasonable period of time the outcome of our work. I'm sure you can appreciate that blowing the whistle requires a lot of courage, and that being the subject of an investigation is often a stressful experience; hence, the need to act expeditiously but with rigour.

I am proud to have been chosen as leader of a dedicated group of employees who are committed to the implementation of the will of Parliament and to the contribution of the enhancement of public confidence in the integrity of the public sector. I believe we are starting to demonstrate—in conjunction with senior officials across the system—that the act can work. We are dealing with a complex piece of legislation and often with sensitive situations requiring a lot of skills and attention. I hope you share my sense that things have improved significantly over the last two years, as well as my confidence in the future of the office.

Seven provinces have now adopted similar legislation. This is also a recent trend across many nations in the world. The full potential of whistleblowing regimes will only be achieved over time and after several cultural, legal and organizational obstacles have been resolved.

I look forward to your questions and comments.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you very much, Monsieur Dion.

We will begin, then, with the NDP and Mr. Mathieu Ravignat.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses for being here today.

My first question is for the commissioner.

It would have been no doubt useful to you, with regard to your budget, to know how your law may or may not change in the future. It's been more than a year since the government was supposed to take a look at the law dealing with whistle-blowers.

I wonder if you have a confirmation now that the law will indeed be reviewed?

[Mario Dion]

I have received no indication from the President of the Treasury Board that the law will be reviewed in the current fiscal year. We therefore operate on the assumption that we have the statute we have until a review takes place. We'll have to adapt when it does take place.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you for that very clear answer.

In addition, you have taken upon yourself to make certain backroom operational savings. One could argue that of all the things and all the budgets that should be maintained, a budget dealing with the transparency and accountability of the public service is something that should be maintained. Your resources in the grand scheme of things are pretty minor compared with those of other commissioners or other departments in the public service.

Has this request to lower your expenses put into question your ability to treat cases of wrongdoing in the public service?

[Mario Dion]

As I pointed out during my opening remarks, we currently have enough resources. We did contribute a 5% reduction. It will kick in during 2014-15 and it will amount to $286,000. But there is still flexibility. We are able to cope with the caseload as it exists today. We have no control over the quantity or the quality of what comes our way. We receive disclosures, we receive complaints, but at the present time I am very confident that we will be able to cope in 2014-15, even with a slight reduction of 5%.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

If you had more resources accessible to you, could you deal with more cases?

[Mario Dion]

We could probably do things in a slightly more timely fashion if we had more resources, obviously.

It's the availability of what I call knowledge workers. If you have more knowledge workers, it will take less time to produce an equally high-quality product. But we have adopted new standards—no more than 90 days to decide whether to investigate, and no more than one year once we launch an investigation. I'm confident we will meet those standards with existing resources. If Parliament wanted us to change that to six months, then of course I would need additional resources to conduct within six months as opposed to one year. But we have enough at this point.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

My next question is for Ms. Robinson.

In your report on plans and priorities, the table entitled “Human Resources (Full-time Equivalents)” says 874 for 2014-15 and 871 for 2015-16. So there is a drop.

Could you tell me what types of jobs we are talking about exactly? Have those people been laid off or are they retiring? What level will be affected? Will managers be affected or not?

[Anne-Marie Robinson]

Thank you very much for your questions.

First, as we decided to change the way we implement our deficit reduction plans, right at the outset, we decided to continue to inform Parliament as we have always done and to support the department in implementing the delegated staffing system. We also want to make sure that we are able to provide adequate oversight.

Finally, in terms of the eliminated positions, we are going to close two regional offices in Edmonton and Winnipeg. The closures will take place in April 2014. Those offices provide internal services to the government, and services to the public will not be compromised in any way. We also chose the offices that had the lowest service demand in our regions.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Will you be eliminating executive and managerial positions?

[Anne-Marie Robinson]

I do not have the breakdown with me on the number of officials and managers. I could forward the information to the committee. This number includes both.

To answer your question about the 50 people affected, I can tell you that 27 people were connected with jobs for which they are qualified and 18 others decided to leave the public service and take the severance pay. We have five employees left and we are working very closely with them to find them other jobs.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Mr. Ravignat.

Thank you, Madam Robinson.

Next, for the Conservatives, is Dan Albas.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to follow up with the Public Service Commission on some of the same themes as my colleague.

According to the 2013-14 main estimates, the PSC's main estimates include a decrease of $4.5 million resulting from savings identified as part of the budget 2012 spending review. In which areas and under which specific program activities were reductions achieved or planned?

[Anne-Marie Robinson]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question.

We reduced across most of the program areas. I'll go to the RPP itself, because I have it by branch, and I'll do it by program activity architecture.

On staffing integrity and political impartiality, we reduced the management structure of our policy branch. We reduced and streamlined our research resources. We streamlined our legal service. Also, we closed our library and will use library services from other organizations in Ottawa. In our staffing and assessment services, there we reduced in the range of $5 million over the period of three years. I just mentioned the closure of our two regional offices. We also streamlined our staffing advisory services.

On oversight of integrity in staffing and non-partisanship, this was the area that was reduced the least. Those are our core oversight functions in the area of investigations and audits. There we preserved our capacity to investigate and to audit; rather, we reduced on our data side by amalgamating two surveys. We have a survey of managers and a survey of employees that we do annually. By fusing those into one survey, we're able to save resources.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

It seems to me that the reductions that either have gone into effect or are planned are non-core mandate functions and are being done through efficiencies, by outsourcing the library service, and in regard to the survey, by combining. Is that correct?

[Anne-Marie Robinson]

That's correct. We amalgamated two surveys rather than outsource.

I should also add, if I have a minute, that we also did a corresponding decrease in our internal services functions, because we have a smaller organization to support.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

What proportion of the decrease will be attributed to a reduced number of full-time equivalents? I know that you mentioned specific numbers for particular closures, but can you just put that in an overall number?

[Anne-Marie Robinson]

Sure. The reduction of $9 million, or $8.99 million, results in a decrease of 88 full-time positions. Thirty-eight of those were achieved through attrition. That left 50 persons who were affected. Twenty-seven of those were placed within the public service. The rest either left voluntarily...and there are five that we're still looking to place.

My colleague is just giving me the answer to a previously asked question. Of those persons affected, nine of them were executives.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

Okay, so it's nine out of the total. Those are managerial positions, then?

[Anne-Marie Robinson]

Yes, that's correct. Those would be executive positions: EX-1, EX-2, and above.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

It seems to me that it was really on non-core activities, and you took a particular interest in making sure that you had resources for the areas that you were particularly responsible for. Is that correct?