Instead of looking to the government's own workforce, to those who built and maintained a pay system that worked for 40 years, the government left the project in the hands of a multinational corporation. Public service employees have now endured over two and half years of being underpaid, overpaid and not paid at all due to this wrong-headed decision.
The federal government currently spends an estimated $12 billion a year on outsourced services, more than the budgets of Statistics Canada, Health Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, the National Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission combined.
No official—or public, at least—estimate exists of the total number of outsourced federal government workers who constitute what has been styled a “shadow” public service. Nearly half of all PIPSC members who were surveyed in 2015 said they were aware of contractors in their team or work unit, and 59% said contracts in their team or work unit are routinely renewed. That means folks continue to go from contract to contract as opposed to being hired as employees. Forty-one per cent reported contractors present for periods between one to five years, and 17% reported contractors being present for over 10 years.
We've identified a number of sources at the root of the government's outsourcing problem. One of them is staffing. The Public Service Commission carried out a survey of staffing: 63.4% of managers surveyed believed staffing is not quick enough; 25% of managers indicated staffing options don't allow them to staff quickly; 85% of managers indicated that the administrative process to staff positions is burdensome; and 55% indicated that this process was burdensome to a great extent.
Over a prolonged decade of government restraint and growing demand for government services, overreliance on contractors to do the work of public service professionals has taken its toll on employees and on the government's own employment requirements. Many of the downsides have been known for years. A 2010 study by the Public Service Commission provided telling evidence that the government's managers were misusing outsourcing provisions and circumventing the hiring practices set out in the Public Service Employment Act. The PSEA exists to ensure staffing in government agencies is guided by principles such as merit, integrity, transparency, regional and ethnic diversity, and bilingualism.
As a result of contracting out, a separate workforce now exists within the public service. Thousands of jobs are contracted out for long, continuous periods of time, but those performing them are neither subject to nor protected by the PSEA. The delays in the staffing process become an excuse for outsourcing. Outsourcing ends up undermining the principles that the PSEA is designed to uphold. We need to reverse this trend and invest in HR processes to speed up hiring without compromising PSEA standards
As I said at the beginning of my presentation, the process takes too long. We want to have a merit-based system, and we want it to be a lot faster. That's why we propose the following recommendations to the committee:
One, we need to enforce the requirement that new government projects and initiatives consider their staffing and human resource needs right from the start. Training, staffing and recruiting for a new project needs to happen at the beginning of project development. These processes can take time if existing staff need to be trained, subject-matter experts drawn from other parts of the public service, and new employees brought in to tackle new workloads. Taking these steps early on in the process will ultimately save the government money down the road. Managers will not be forced to go outside to contractors and temporary help agencies because they need people quickly. We cannot start the assessment of staffing and human resource needs after procurement and project scoping is complete. We need to start these processes early if we don't want to continue to rely on costly outside contractors to do the work that could have been done by in-house, highly trained public service professionals.
Two, we'd like to ensure that there's access to the skills already on deck in departments and agencies. The government needs to create skills inventories and a mechanism for departments to access them even in the short term. The government has, for example, over 13,000 IT workers in their employment, making them the largest IT employer in the country. The government needs to be doing a better job at getting all it can from this highly skilled and highly motivated workforce. Again, relying on in-house resources will ultimately save the government a lot of money in the long run.
Three, create government-wide hiring pools of public service employees for all departments to draw from. If pools are departmental-specific, individual departments feel ownership over their pool as they have invested time and resources into its creation. They're understandably often unwilling to share, and sadly, pools sometimes expire before being fully drawn from. Government-wide hiring pools would also help to create a standardized hiring process that doesn't vary from department to department. This is a recommendation we have already raised with the Treasury Board.
I thank the members of this committee for the opportunity to discuss with you the public service hiring process and share with you our recommendations for an improved system that we believe will work better for all Canadians.
Thank you.