My colleague talked about a culture of fear. Considering all the information that was brought forward on the issues of Phoenix.... We heard testimony in this committee that in January 2016 the unions were bringing it forward. We've seen documents from all the heads of HR and the heads of finance for all departments. They all brought the issues forward. I would suggest that it's more a culture of non-accountability than a culture of fear that we're suffering through right now.
Ms. Lemay, I want to read a quote from you from the previous report. This is paragraph 1.78 of the fall 2017 report. It says:
We found that 16 months after the pay problems first arose, there was still no comprehensive governance structure to resolve the underlying causes of the problems. In contrast, Queensland Health, a government department in the Australian State of Queensland, which had similar problems with a pay system, put in place a comprehensive governance structure within four months of pay problems arising.
I want to get back to why it took us so long.
We talked about capacity. We have an Order Paper response from the government, signed by Mr. MacKinnon, saying that there were no capacity issues. Was that just part of this internal problem of not accepting that there was an issue?
I also want to bring up the bit about hiring and addressing the staffing ramp-up. We did another Order Paper question that showed that we had one job posting for 10 days between January and July for pay advisers. We said that we were trying to find some, but the information provided to us from the bureaucracy shows only one posting for 10 days. When that expired, we did not post any other.
We also have the report showing that capacity was not an issue at Miramichi. Obviously it was an issue, but the government says in writing that it wasn't an issue. Is this again part of the whole problem of the culture, whereby people are just putting forward wrong information to cover up?