Government Operations Committee on Oct. 4th, 2018

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Is it a fixable procedure issue? It's not a cultural issue, I hope. Is it more of a fixable procedure issue?

[Chris Aylward]

No, I think it's a bit of both, to be quite honest with you. When we say that the governments, the administrations, present or past, have done a good job, yes, but we're meeting the minimum. Here's where we're supposed to be and we are there or just above it. What's wrong with going even a little bit more above that?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

We are above.

[Chris Aylward]

Barely.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I'm worried about new hires.

You talked about the selection issue, of favouritism. Do you see it as well on new hires? Ms. Ratansi talked about it and, of course, Mr. Richard talked about it as well. It's 200 days on average. When you consider there's a lot of people getting hired in 50 days, that means there's a lot probably taking 250 days to bring aboard. Are we having the same issues of favouritism on new hires or is it more of an internal thing once they're aboard?

[Chris Aylward]

Unfortunately, if you look at Public Service Commission annual reports, and this is very easily seen over the last several years, the majority of new hires are precarious workers. They're terms. They're casuals. Therefore, once they're in, then, as we talked about, it becomes who you know. It's not a significant issue around new hires. The thing about new hires is that when you look at the number of employees hired in the federal public service just last year compared to indeterminate people who were hired versus casuals, term employees, you see that number is a lot higher. That's a significant issue as well.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

A lot of the hiring ability, the responsibility, has been pushed down to lower-level managers, which is supposed to speed things up. As it gets pushed down to front-line managers, why is it still taking so long? As you've stated, how much of it is favouritism if it's getting pushed down to lower-level managers?

[Chris Aylward]

It comes down to the human resources capacity within the individual departments and agencies. They simply don't have the resources to do the processes in a timely manner.

I was at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt out in Victoria just a few weeks ago. I was told by the admiral, the base commander, basically, that he has no other choice but to hire contract workers because he can't hire public service fast enough. They have a brand new building out there that needs to be maintained which are our members' jobs. He said he can't hire the public service to maintain that building. He has to hire contractors because of the hiring processes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

We know the system is broken.

I want to get back to another question. We had a witness last summer chatting about this with Mr. Borbey. The comment was about a written test they had and the question, “You're meeting with the business line client who does not understand the role of national communication services”, and the question goes on. The candidate didn't answer correctly because she did not know what a business line client was, and the government later admitted that actually it's an internal term, and so that person flunked out.

I wonder if this gets back to what you say about favouritism. Are we designing stuff to exclude new hires, or is this just blatant—I don't want to call it stupidity—ignorance about how to go about hiring people?

[Chris Aylward]

That is definitely a problem. Not only is it a human resources capacity, but it's a capacity to do what has been now downloaded to that particular manager. They just don't have the capacity to be able to do hiring processes in a fair and equitable manner. It comes down to, basically, training. They're not trained to hire people. They were trained to do this job, whatever this job may be, but it wasn't to hire people. Now you're asking them to hire people. They're going to ask the wrong questions. They're going to ask questions that only certain people will have the answer to, and that's certainly demonstrative of favouritism as well.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Great.

I have about a minute left. I can't remember, Mr. Richard, if you brought it up, but I'll certainly come back to you in the next round.

How do people speak up against this? The reason I ask is Mr. Chamberlain, when he deemed to show up to help us—I hope he's watching now—joined us when we were discussing the whistle-blower act. This committee put together a very strong whistle-blower recommendation, unanimously, which the government has acted upon. How do people speak up, or are they completely afraid to speak up? How much is because we don't have a strong whistle-blower set-up to protect public servants and contractors?

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

You have 30 seconds for a quick response. Please go ahead.

[Dany Richard]

It's definitely correlated. When our members get weeded out of competitions or processes and they ask what's their recourse, sometimes you have to tell them not to bark too much because the next time a competition comes around, it's going to be the same people assessing the same committees.

We need a stronger whistle-blower protection act that actually allows people to speak up and say that this was an unfair treatment of their candidacy and they want someone to fix it. Right now we don't have the mechanism in play to allow people who have been affected by bias—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I'm out of time. I'll come back to both of you on that if that's okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Next up is Mr. Angus.

Welcome to our committee. You have seven minutes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be at your committee.

In my region of Timmins—James Bay, we are fortunate to have excellent civil servants in the public service in Timmins and in the veterans building in Kirkland Lake.

We've been here for half an hour, and my colleagues across the table haven't mentioned the words “middle class” yet. I just want to put that on the record, because they never get up in the morning without saying “middle class and those wanting to join it”.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

These are good middle-class jobs, but one of the problems with good middle-class jobs under the federal government is that they're being undermined by precarious work.

Mr. Aylward, I really noticed your talk about precarious work.

We have people who go to university and train up and who want to be civil servants, and yet they're in this perpetual pool of contract or temp work without benefits.

Have you seen an increase in the use of precarious work in the federal civil service? How has it grown, and how has it changed?

[Chris Aylward]

As I've said, you can see in the Public Service Commission's annual reports on staffing that this number, unfortunately, incrementally increases every year.

What does that do? That puts somebody into a precarious job. They can't really plan, because they have a job for eight months and they don't know what's going to happen at the end of that eight months. Oftentimes, they don't even know what's going to happen to them when the seventh month hits. They pretty much have to wait until the final week to find out they've been extended, which is another issue as well. It just gets extended and extended. There's a saying that one of the most permanent things in the federal government is a term job, because you just keep getting extended.

Absolutely, precarious work has increased. There's no doubt about it. The Minister of Finance, Mr. Morneau, last year basically said that young workers coming into the public service have to be trained in several disciplines because they're going to be changing jobs. How do you attract good talent with that kind of statement?

Precarious work has absolutely increased, and it continues to increase. We don't see it as topping off somewhere and then slowly going down. It continuously increases, and it's a concern.

There is a need sometimes within the federal public service to bring in term or casual workers for a specified time—that's what a term is, a specified time limit—but when an individual continues to get extended again and again, how can they plan? How do you plan for a family for six months out? How do you plan to make a major purchase? You simply can't.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Richard, I want to continue on this line of questioning.

Mr. Morneau, our Minister of Finance, did tell younger generation workers that precarious work is the new normal, as though it were a perfectly natural happening of economics, as opposed to the direct result of internal policies that favour hiring out and keeping people in a perpetual pool of uncertainty.

You said at one point in your testimony that it was easier to contract the work out than to hire.

Could you give us a sense of what you're seeing in terms of its effect systemically, and also how we're burning through and losing really good talent that should be within the federal civil service?

[Dany Richard]

It's a great question.

I'll give you an example. If a deputy minister has a new program objective and needs to get the job done and needs resources to do so, we could find and hire the right people, but we don't, because it takes too much time: “I cannot wait six months to get this project going; I need to start today because I have deliverables and I need to reach my objectives.”

When this happens, of course we're going to go down the path of least resistance. How can I get a resource in next week or tomorrow? It's not going to be through a six-month staffing process. We have the people with the experience and know-how, as I said, but we're not tapping into that.

The worst part is that we're starting to lose that expertise as we're outsourcing everywhere. We're trying to raise the bar in terms of making sure that people have access to CFO jobs, where they can actually go in their career and add value, but we're not exposing them to the tools they need to progress in their careers.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Certainly you need to hire short term and to contract out at times, to bring people in when you need to get a job done. If they're put into a pool where they have a path to permanency, there's definitely a benefit. However, if we have a perpetual pool of temporary workers who work full time for the federal government and are always being rehired on temp contracts, we're going to have people who burn out and quit.

Is that the experience you're having with your workers, Mr. Richard?

[Dany Richard]

We have fewer temporary contracts. For us, it's more consultant work.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Consultant work, yes.

[Dany Richard]

Chris, can you speak to that?