Government Operations Committee on April 28th, 2015

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Donoghue, in terms of recruitment, you mostly talked about skills, but it is my feeling that the integrity of the individuals you recruit is also very important.

From your presentation, I gathered that you have to ensure that public service employees, as representatives of the state, do not participate in activities that are inconsistent with their position. Moreover, when someone from the outside joins the public service, you must ensure that their appointment was not unduly influenced by a political process.

In practice, what tools do you use to ensure that a candidate from the outside—even if their resumé and their background are very good—did not get an opportunity to apply for a job at the highest level thanks to political influence?

[Christine Donoghue]

Thank you very much.

One of the office's fundamental principles is to ensure the non-partisanship of public servants. We use our oversight systems to ensure the absence of political influence. All departments have a representative within their organization who has the information and works very closely with our office to monitor political activities.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

I will interrupt you for a moment. I would like a clarification. When you say “all departments”, does that include organizations like the Canada Revenue Agency?

[Christine Donoghue]

It includes the departments covered by the Public Service Employment Act.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Okay.

[Christine Donoghue]

However, we work with other organizations that need guidance and advice. Their regimes are still relatively similar to what we apply in the departments covered by the legislation.

As I was saying, we provide a lot of information on employees' rights and obligations. When concerns or doubts arise regarding potential political influence, our office is the only body that can investigate. We generally launch an investigation based on a complaint submitted by an individual involved in the process, an employee who has noticed something or the deputy minister himself, who felt some sort of pressure in the context. Under those conditions, and based on the complaint submitted, we can get involved, do audits and conduct a formal investigation.

Our audits are another way to proceed when doubts are raised regarding activities deemed to be inappropriate. We conduct audits within departments, be it concerning an entity or based on information provided to us. We have the authority to carry out an audit, and when we do so, we sometimes receive information through cases. We can then investigate the retained information.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

You talked about deputy ministers and various senior officials, but do you include in the process employee representatives—bargaining agents, the Public Service Alliance, and so on?

[Christine Donoghue]

When we investigate, we include the parties the investigation concerns. For instance, if the union has not been called upon, it will generally not be included in the investigation process. It is a different matter when the employee concerned gets their union involved.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

There is a little bit of time left there.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

I would like to know what the difference is between the oversight of integrity in staffing and of non-partisanship program and the staffing system integrity and political impartiality program.

[Christine Donoghue]

I'm not sure I understand.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Those are two terms I saw. They are expressed differently. I wanted to know what distinguishes one from the other. I will come back to that.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Maybe some clarity will come to that in subsequent questions, Mr. Brahmi. Thank you.

Brad Butt for five minutes, please.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here today.

From time to time, I will have a constituent who has applied for a job within the public service come into my office. They often are very frustrated with the process. I realize that we have to have a formalized, systematic approach to these things not only to maintain fairness, but also because we are getting thousands of applications a year from people applying to work in various departments and ministries. The constituents will often say to me that they find the process very frustrating. They find that the status of their application is not communicated to them. They are not informed that the job has been filled by somebody else, and they are waiting, or they go onto the website and see that the job is still open and yet they have heard nothing.

What process are we using to improve our level of communication with people who are applying for work? They want to work for the Government of Canada. That's wonderful; we need good people. Can you explain how the system works, from the time I go to apply to the time I either get the job or I am informed that I didn't get it? Then, what happens to my file? Does it stay in the system because something else might come up? How is all of that handled?

[Christine Donoghue]

One of the improvements that we made very recently, as of April 1, was to create a single window for all applicants, which is the PSRS. There used to be dual systems. That is one of the improvements that we've put forward very recently so that you have a single window and can follow everything that's happening.

We share a lot of the frustration that you've mentioned as well, recognizing that not all of the processes are within the control of the commission. The time it takes to staff positions is probably one of the biggest irritants for everybody: for hiring managers, for HR advisors, and for candidates and applicants. That is part of what we're trying to address in the context of better integrating our policies and basically asking hiring managers to start embracing their accountability when it comes to people management in order to reduce the time to staff, so that it can actually be a better experience for candidates.

We are doing more and more training as well and trying to create and bring forward the flexibilities that are provided in the PSEA so that there are better means to do assessments.

One of the things the commission is doing is working on a number of different assessment tools. We have a psychology centre that generates a whole bunch of new tools to try to help in the pre-selection and pre-qualification. Sometimes in these new processes, it leads to the creation of pools. Instead of going on a one-by-one job process, we try to create pre-qualified pools so that staffing time would be reduced because a hiring manager can go to a pool. That pool has been pre-qualified based on essential qualifications, and then what they have to measure is the right fit and whatever else they need for the purpose of their own operations.

Those tools are intended to accelerate the hiring process, and hopefully we will continue to look at being creative and more modern in the way we do that, but also considering that it's important as well that we continue to provide access. There are some processes that are longer because of the number of applicants. We do not want to lose the important side of being able to measure the merit criteria for applicants. We are looking at every means that we can to increase....

I don't know, Gerry, if you saw anything that you wanted to add, but it is definitely a preoccupation beyond candidates.

[Gerry Thom]

I'll just add one thing, if I may.

When you go back to when people actually apply, it's a shared responsibility when it comes to staffing, so all the 80-some departments have to use our system. The system is cumbersome, and we get the same kind of feedback. We do have a budget and we do make enhancements to the system on a regular basis, continuously, to make it more user-friendly and all that. Once we get all those applications—it doesn't matter if there are ten applications or a thousand—they are sent to the department, and that's where they take on the responsibility for the competition. That's where there might be some issues with communicating back to their candidates and so on, and we do not have control of that. We control the front end where people apply. While that's within our system, we're trying to make the communications a lot more user-friendly. We're getting there.

One thing that we've put in place is to get feedback from all those users. We're talking over 200,000 applications a year. We've got a kind of automatic survey when people apply for jobs. They can write back, and we try to take that feedback and do something with it.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

I'm afraid that burns up your time, but thank you, Brad.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Oh, well. Those were good answers, though.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

They were—quality.

We're going then to the Liberal party. Five minutes for Gerry Byrne.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

I believe the federal public service has always been deemed and considered to be an employer of choice amongst Canadians. I understand there is empirical evidence to back up that statement. Is that still the case? Do we have evidence that suggests that the federal public service is a priority employer of choice or has that ranking diminished?

[Christine Donoghue]

I can't tell you at this point that I have that evidence in hand, but when we talk across the system, there is definitely a sense that we may have had an impact on that latter statement. A lot of it has been because of program reviews, and the fact that the public service wasn't hiring as much as it was, and so maybe people turned their attention elsewhere. There is a lot of competition for talent in the overall hiring system. We have recognized, as we said earlier, that we need to reposition ourselves to start attracting that talent.

As I was saying, the problem is not necessarily attracting the talent; it's actually delivering on the people who are interested. That's probably one of the biggest concerns we have right now. Why are we not reaching out to this talent that is coming, that is applying?

We are continuing to look at it, and we recognize that we need to be conscious about the brand we're putting out there, and delivering on the brand we're putting out there. If we put out a lot of advertisements, attract a lot of people, and yet we don't hire—especially youth—we may be hurting ourselves. We've been putting a lot of time in and paying a lot of attention to this. We've been talking to deputy heads. We've been seizing the senior public service to this effect, in order to try to think about how we strategically do this so that we can continue to attract the talent but also deliver on some of the job promises we have.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Has the Public Service Commission of Canada conducted any analysis or sought out evidence that issues of remuneration and, more specifically within that package, benefits are an issue in whether or not we can attract some of the best talent available? Specifically I'll refer to the ongoing situation of public negotiation about sick benefits within the public service. Do you have any evidence available to you that suggests those kinds of discussions, those public discussions, may be having a negative impact upon recruitment to the public service?

[Christine Donoghue]

Actually, at this point in time, the evidence, if there were such evidence, would be lying within the Treasury Board Secretariat. It would not be within the compounds of the commission.

There are a lot of anecdotes to that effect. Whether or not that has been proven or demonstrated, it has not to my awareness.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Could you elaborate on the anecdotes?

[Christine Donoghue]

Well, we always saw the public service as being able to attract people because of a lot of the benefits and because it provides a longer term perspective for people in their careers, because the private sector can fire somebody more easily than the public service can. Although the pay may sometimes not be completely comparable to that in the private sector, the benefits provided actually compensate people as well. A lot of it is basically just that sometimes, as an employer, these are things that we think are being used to attract. However, at this point, we don't necessarily use this in the context of advertising, so I can't say that is fundamentally why people would want to come to the public service.