Chair, honourable members, and committee staff, good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Dany Richard. I am both a public servant and the president of the union representing more than 4,600 financial professionals in the public service across Canada, members who work every day to ensure the integrity of the public purse.
The goals of the public service staffing system are to ensure that jobs in the public service are open to any qualified candidate and to ensure that appointments are made in a fair, transparent and unbiased way. However, as PSAC has rightfully pointed out in their opening remarks, a 2018 survey of public servants by StatsCan revealed that a mere 46% of public servants believe that staffing activities within their work units are carried out in a fair manner. In other words, more than half of the respondents indicated that appointments for positions in our organizations “depend on who you know”.
Having dealt with many staffing complaints ourselves, we can certainly understand why public servants would think that. Not only is the system not delivering the results it's supposed to, but it also takes far too long to deliver these unsatisfactory results, which means higher costs. Staffing processes routinely take months at a time to complete, when the competition for talent has never been higher. If we want to continue to recruit the best and brightest into our public service, 12-month turnaround times simply won't do. We've confused process with rigour. The end result is an inefficient and ineffective system. It's not working. It's not working for us. It's not working for managers. It's certainly not working for Canadians.
I want to use my time today to highlight some of the less obvious impacts of our broken staffing system. First, I want to talk about the overreliance on contractors and consultants. We know from first-hand experience that one reason managers contract out work is that they don't have the time it takes to staff positions. We hear this from our members and we hear it from executives. The truth is that it's easier to tender a contract than to hire an employee even when the work is part of the core mandate. Our members have the competencies, knowledge, experience and eagerness to do the job, but the staffing process takes too long.
The cost of this abuse of the contracting system goes far beyond the exorbitant day rates that many of these contractors charge. Contractors and consultants aren't bound by the same ethics code that public servants must adhere to. Their work isn't always subject to access to information laws. People working in these contract roles aren't given the same protection under our whistle-blower protection regime. The public sector integrity commissioner isn't able to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by contractors the same way he can investigate public servants. In short, contract work lacks the accountability standards that are critical to ensuring that the public good is being served. It also inhibits the ability of members of Parliament like you to exercise your vital oversight role.
The overuse of contractors also means that we aren't investing in our internal capacity and developing the public servants who have committed their careers to serving Canadians. Instead, money is spent building the experience and capabilities of private corporations and individuals. We not only don't develop institutional knowledge, but we also outsource it. This leads to longer-term dependencies on these very consultants, feeding into the vicious cycle of outsourcing. I want to be clear that there are good reasons to use consultants from time to time, but using them as a workaround to inefficient staffing processes is not one of them.
Another impact is the rise in the use of unadvertised job competitions. This is where the staffing process is bypassed by bringing in someone who is deemed “best fit”. This undermines the very goals of the staffing system and reinforces the belief that public sector hiring is about who you know, not what you know. As with contracting out, there are times when unadvertised competitions are necessary. They are a useful tool for exceptional circumstances. However, they should not be used to circumvent a broken staffing system.
These are just a few of the impacts of our current staffing system. I know that my colleagues at this table and other witnesses you'll hear from will have many more to share as well. In my remaining time, I'd like to offer two suggestions that we believe will go a long way to making things better.
First, the staffing system should be moved into the collective bargaining process, as it is in almost every other jurisdiction in Canada. Staffing is excluded by legislation that likely violates the charter right to collective bargaining, yet you would be hard pressed to find a less efficient or more costly staffing regime in this country. Making staffing part of collective bargaining would give the employees, through their unions, an ownership stake in the process. It would also allow the government to tap into the collective knowledge of the groups using a process that already exists and serves our needs well.
Second, contractors and consultants should be made to abide by the same ethics and accountability rules as public servants. This wouldn't just level the playing field between staffing and contracting out. It would ensure you can carry out your oversight role and help ensure public trust in the system.
I realize this committee has many witnesses to hear from so I'll end my remarks there, but I look forward to any questions you might have. I'd like to finish by saying on behalf of ACFO, thank you for carrying out this important study.
Thank you.