Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm happy to be here with Raman Srivastava, who is our acting VP of audit and data. Raman has the knowledge to be able to answer a lot of the data questions that the committee may have.
Thank you for having us. The commission is really pleased to be here. We were here not too long ago to talk to this committee about the mandate of the commission, so I will not expand on that, but as you know, we're an organization that has been up and running for over 100 years. The purpose of the commission is definitely to ensure the integrity of the staffing system and the non-partisanship of the public service.
We deposited our annual report with Parliament on February 24. You will notice in our annual report that the staffing system is very healthy and doing well.
For 10 years, we have been operating under the new legislation, which is the Public Service Employment Act, which is what changed in 2005. After 10 years of practice under this act, and verification with our audit powers on entity audits of organizations, we are pleased to say that the system in staffing is doing very well and is pretty mature.
On that basis, we have started a modernization of our policies to ensure that we are more nimble in order to allow departments to reflect their operational realities.
On April 1, we launched “New Direction in Staffing”, which is a modernization of 12 pieces of legislation that we've put forward into one piece of legislation, but we've also strengthened the delegation to deputy heads, so that as delegated authorities under the act they have more flexibility to be able to attract and draw the talent they need in order to meet their operational needs. What we do is ensure that merit is met in these processes and that they're done on a non-partisan basis.
This modernization is critical for the commission in order to build the public service of tomorrow. We start building it today. That's the vision we've given ourselves at the commission, in order to be a strong employer and assist departments in ensuring that we have the right talent and the skill sets to meet the needs of government and service in the context of the future and where programs and priorities are taking government.
Deputy heads are now responsible for monitoring their staffing action, which is also allowing them to detect and correct the issues as they arise. We have simplified that delegation instrument, and they're held accountable in that instrument so that they can exercise discretion but also better serve Canadians.
We are committed to working with all stakeholders to support them in implementing these changes.
Since we are here to talk to you about our report on plans and priorities, the commission's priority is to work in close collaboration with deputy heads to promote and safeguard the non-partisan nature of the federal public service. For instance, we will continue to promote public servants' awareness, not only of their responsibilities, but also of their rights with respect to political activities.
A second very important priority for us is to ensure the integrity of the staffing system through clear policy direction and support, as well as ongoing oversight. We have created a team of staffing support advisors who will work closely with organizations to ensure that integrity.
We are also adapting our oversight capacity, with the objective of supporting continuous improvement and in-time corrections across the public service. Audit is but one tool that we use, and working more collaboratively and more directly with departments allows for this in-time correction.
Over the past 10 years we have audited over 90% of every organization in the system. As I said earlier, we saw that the system is in fact mature, so we are now shifting to an audit or a verification system, an oversight system, that will allow us to examine system-wide issues, and to be able to pay attention on the greater focus of system integrity—