Government Operations Committee on Nov. 9th, 2017

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you.

Sadly, I think our time is at an end.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

It is.

Mr. Whalen, you have seven minutes, please.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks for coming, Minister Brison. It's always great to have you here.

I'll follow up on something Ms. Shanahan was asking about earlier.

In the breakdown of the retroactive pay adjustments with respect to union agreements that weren't negotiated and weren't signed over the past years, about how much of this $650 million relates to retroactive pay from the previous government?

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

It goes back. These are significant numbers, because as I said, we went from no public servant having a collective agreement to 90% now in a fairly short period of time. All of them had some level of retroactivity, some going back four years.

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

Compensation benefits is $1.3 billion. That's $655 million for pay increases for the federal public service, $333 million for DND, again pay increases for the forces, and $65 million for the RCMP.

The rest of it, $253 million, is the employer's share of the insurance, so that's not collective bargaining. It's what we owe.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

What percentage of that would be for the period of time, say, preceding November 2015? Is it broken down that way?

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

Do you have it?

[Brian Pagan]

Mr. Whalen, we'll get you precise numbers, but approximately 40% is the retroactive component. There was a similar question with respect to the Canadian Forces, where they're seeing pay increases this year of $331 million. Of that, $131 million was the retro portion, and $201 million is for 2017-18.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Speaking of $200-million problems that we're left to correct, another one is obviously Phoenix. When we look at Phoenix, something that's been raised to me is that with respect to retroactive pay, there are certain types of government retroactive pay.... It's either acting pay or retroactive duty pay, or some of these things. It's difficult for me to understand, as someone coming from the private sector, how this relates to bonuses, whether or not the types of ways in which federal civil servants are compensated after the fact are really transparent, and how that plays into the way Phoenix needs to be customized to address these sorts of unique government-type pay situations that I don't understand.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

That's a very good point, Nick. When you negotiate with the public sector unions, you have your economic increase component, which is fairly simple. It's a percentage. But then there are other areas where there are agreements, sometimes there's a signing bonus, particularly if there's been a retroactivity issue, or there may be some other form of compensation. Every one of those changes involves a financial cost, but also a transaction. In some cases we would have, with a collective bargaining agreement, five or six individual transactions in addition to the pay increase.

Keep in mind, when we formed government there were 27 collective bargaining agreements that had expired, with 15 bargaining units. When you take 27 of those, with every one of those involving multiple transactions, it does put a lot of burden on the pay system. There's no way around it. The public sector pay system, public sector negotiations, are complex, and the pay system as it is working now doesn't handle complexities well. We're working on this.

I must say, Minister Qualtrough is working very hard on this, as are her officials, and across government.

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

Just for Mr. Whalen, I think your point is well taken. When it becomes so many years of retroactivity, the transparency for the employees goes out, and as well for parliamentarians and for the government overall. It would be ideal if we could actually negotiate these things before they expire, so that employees can start seamlessly from one collective agreement to another.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Going forward, we look forward to your being successful in that endeavour.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

As we do that, it's a good point, because there would be less burden, as we renegotiate or negotiate new collective bargaining agreements, imposed on the pay system as a result, because there would be less retroactivity. We'll get there.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Just moving on, then, to sort of the overall estimates process, it has been really interesting for us, as new members of the committee, seeing the evolution of the estimates process. We know that your ultimate goal isn't simply to have the estimates tabled two weeks after the budget. In the past, you mentioned having them tabled simultaneously. Is that still a goal?

Is this something we're looking forward to in the timeline of this parliament, or a future one? Or is that no longer a goal?

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

The idea is that we want as high a percentage of the budget initiatives in the main estimates as possible. That's good from an operational efficiency perspective, but it's also good from a transparency perspective. In the past, your committee would study the main estimates, then the budget would come out, and all your work on the main estimates would be rendered basically irrelevant. Aligning them time-wise.... The first thing is getting the sequencing right. After that the departments, particularly TBS and Finance as agencies, work very closely together.

I really like the Australian system. They basically do it simultaneously.

Over time, I really believe that the level of co-operation between Finance, Treasury Board, and departments, will mean it will get closer and closer—

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Is it the departments that are going to provide the initial cost estimates, or is it Finance and Treasury Board doing the heavy lifting on their estimate of how budget changes are going to affect their future expenditures?

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I think it's all three. You have departments with their responsibility. I think in the future you're going to see greater granularity built into budget asks so that departments will think through their whole system of developing budget asks in advance, building into them some of the work that Treasury Board and Finance do subsequently in the current system. I think you're going to see a far greater amount of granularity built into the system and the process—

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you very much.

We've seen from the new members in the committee today how important this is and how they want to see project-specific funding, because it goes to the heart of their questions. We look forward to that. Thank you very much.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

It also speaks to the heart of Parliament and your responsibility to scrutinize but also to your authority over the purse strings. It's a good thing for any government, and it's a great thing for Parliament to have more clarity and transparency.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Minister.

If I may, I have a quick extraneous comment before I go to our five-minutes rounds here. It was sparked by Mr. McCauley's comments on the impact of climate change. My frustration has always been...because you're talking about the frustrations within government.

A fire chief was in my office yesterday talking about the problems that occurred with the flooding of the Ottawa Valley. He pointed out to me that they ran out of 70,000 sandbags within a day. Of his own volition, he started contacting various provincial governments in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to try to get other sandbags, because they had experienced their own flooding problems.

Lo and behold, he found out we can't do that because we have to go through requisition processes through each provincial government and back to the feds. One of the provincial bureaucrats gave him the number of a private manufacturer of sandbags. He made a phone call and the sandbags were on a plane within the hour.

If your government can do anything to speed up the process that avoids this type of thing, I think we'd all be better off. That's my comment, and I'll stick by it.

Mr. Blaikie, your time's been ceded to you by Mr. McCauley, I understand. You have five minutes.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you very much,

Thanks to Mr. McCauley.

I want to come back to some issues related to the RCMP, and thank you again for your commitment not to transfer civilian members of the RCMP on to Phoenix before the system has been fixed.

In the estimates, and we touched on this briefly, there is money, just under $400,000, for the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada to support the implementation of a new labour relations regime within the RCMP. Of course, that funding is for what we could call back-end issues, or it's funding for when things go wrong and they need to be resolved between management and labour.

I wonder if you could comment on the efficiency.... I don't see money allocated to help train RCMP management on how to successfully implement a new labour relations regime in terms of learning how to deal with a union in the workplace and trying to have good labour relations. I wonder if some of the money that's allocated here for the back-end problems perhaps wouldn't need to be spent if RCMP management had training from outside the organization on how to do labour relations right.

This is an evaluative judgment that I don't particularly expect you to endorse, but my experience through the process on Bill C-7 and seeing the attitude of RCMP management in terms of how they treated RCMP members trying to organize was that this is not a management that understands what it means to have a union in the workplace, and they are not really ready to work constructively with a union. It seems to me that some upfront investment in training would be appropriate and would hopefully mean that we would see fewer line items in estimates related to resolving disputes.

I wonder if you could comment on the lack of money for that upfront bit.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Bill C-7 was groundbreaking in that it provided for the first time an opportunity for the RCMP to unionize, and of course, whether it's in the RCMP or any department or agency of the Government of Canada, we want to see respectful, progressive labour relations. Bill C-7, as I said, is a significant step forward, and it will most definitely have an impact, as you're now building a labour management regime wherein there will be union representation.

I believe that in the last two years we've made progress writ large in terms of our relations with the public sector unions as a government and—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

What I see in these estimates is planning for when things go wrong. In estimates, when can we expect to see planning for how to make things go right so that you don't need money on the back end?

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I'm going to ask Yaprak to intervene. One thing is that Bill C-7 is quite recent, so there are going to be a lot of changes in the coming months and even years as this shift occurs.

Yaprak might have some thoughts on this.

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

You're totally right. It's better to invest in good labour relations before you end up in a dispute.

We will provide the RCMP with support from Treasury Board Secretariat. We have a good labour relations group and we're the ones who actually negotiate all the major agreements, so we will be supporting the RCMP. It's a culture change. It is a systems change. They're going to have to go through that, but it's not asking for new money. They have human resource capacity. It's how they use that human resource capacity so that they can actually deal with a unionized workforce. We're going to help them.