Government Operations Committee on Oct. 4th, 2018

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[Debi Daviau]

Good afternoon. Thanks so much for inviting me to speak at this important hearing.

My name is Debi Daviau, and I am the president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada. PIPSC is Canada's largest union of professionals, working predominantly for the federal government.

Mr. Chair, that includes the fine gentleman to your left. We're just pointing out our members in the room today. Collectively, we represent all your staff, so....

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[Debi Daviau]

We welcome the opportunity to participate, along with my colleagues from other unions, as part of this panel to discuss the current state of the public service hiring process. Canadians rely on public services every day to make their lives safer, healthier and more prosperous. Our members are the ones who provide those services.

What we see and hear from our members is that the staffing process simply takes too long. As a result, resources can't meet the demands. Services suffer and managers turn to short-term solutions that often increase the government's overreliance on outsourcing. We want staffing to be merit-based, but we also need it to be timely.

The federal government's staffing recruitment process is lengthy and cumbersome, often taking six months to a year, and even longer sometimes. It is slow due to administrative delays over sequential security clearances and bottlenecks when it comes to screening and interviewing processes, with delays and time wasted. While there have been some attempts to solve these issues through the use of new platforms, e-recruitment and increased flexibility, from talking to anyone who has gone through the process on the ground lately, it doesn't appear that much has changed.

As you may know, the government often uses what are referred to as pools for staffing. Candidates have to go through a hiring process to be included in a pool that qualifies them for a position at that classification and level. Then, when the department needs to fill a position at that level, they can draw from the pool. Getting your name in a pool can be a long and burdensome process, and may not even result in a job in your near future. Kevin Lynch, the former clerk of the Privy Council, noted that the federal government will not be successful in recruiting Canada's best talent if we cling to slow and bureaucratic hiring processes—and it's been a while since Kevin was there.

Access to timely recourse is also a major sticking point in staffing, with most federal Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board hearings—even the name is too long—taking in excess of 24 months to be heard, with decisions taking an additional six months to a year to be rendered. By then, revocation of the appointment may already be moot. Some findings may have no more than a symbolic effect if they are not precedent setting.

I say this not just for the sake of the individual enduring the staffing process—if they stick around long enough—but for the government and the country as a whole. When staffing processes are too long and cumbersome, departments and managers will look elsewhere. They may very well opt instead to use their operations and maintenance budget to staff temporarily.

Staffing, amongst other reasons, is why we are seeing an overreliance on outsourcing and contracting out. We represent close to 60,000 public service professionals. One of the main issues our members have been facing is the government's overreliance on outsourcing. Outsourcing is costing the federal government money, jobs, morale, accountability and productivity. Just look at the failed Phoenix pay system.

Okay, I went there too.

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[Debi Daviau]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

We'll go directly into our seven-minute interventions, starting with Mr. Peterson.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Mr. Chair, I'm going to give some of my seven minutes to my colleague Mr. Drouin, so if you would let me know when I have about three minutes left, that would be appreciated.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I will.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you to our witnesses for being here. It's very informative, if nothing else. Some of it's daunting, to be honest, but it's informative, for sure.

I see a theme from the previous witnesses and the panel here. Outsourcing is clearly a problem. The length of time for staffing is clearly a problem. Those two problems are intertwined, without much doubt there.

Ms. Daviau, I'm going to start with you. You had some good recommendations.

I find it concerning that there isn't something already such as a skills inventory. Your recommendation is very general. I don't need you to necessarily give the details, but how would you see this working? Would it just be for the members of your association or across the entire public service?

[Debi Daviau]

I see that as creating an inventory of all skills in the public service, not just for our members.

There are some examples out there. ESDC maintains a skills inventory. It has since I've been there, so for over 10 years. It's fairly up to date, but of course the system is only as good as the information that is put into it.

We need some sort of standardized way to have government-wide inventories of aptitudes, so that when shorter-term projects or projects that need to occur immediately require additional resources, it's easy to tap into the skills you already have.

Not to go back to Phoenix again, but we just can't get around it these days, certainly, had they tapped into the skills they had to build the new pay system, we would have averted a lot of the issues we had with it being done by an outsider, not to mention the billions of dollars that were wasted.

It costs two to 10 times more to contract out a position than it does to staff it internally, and that's including all the benefits and additional costs toward permanent staffing. It just makes sense to create mechanisms so that you can insource the work as opposed to outsource it. Use the skills you already have. There are a number of public servants who have time available to commit to additional projects, but nobody knows who they are or what they have to offer.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Right. In that sense, outsourcing would be even more expensive. You would have to outlay no new resources at all to use someone who is internal and has the capacity.

[Debi Daviau]

Correct. It's unfortunate because sometimes you get the skills from somebody outside, but they very rarely have the context or understanding of how government operations work. Although they bring in a new aptitude, they're missing the context of where that aptitude is going to be used.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Exactly. I appreciate that.

Mr. Phillips, there are a couple of things you brought up.

On this notion of geography, and with the technology, why do we need people to necessarily work in the interior? Are there things we can do now without having to have new policies? What's limiting you in the framework you have from doing that already?

[Greg Phillips]

It's just government practices and policies. I know some departments are already moving that way. They're calling it workplace modernization in the government sphere now, to allow people to work from anywhere, but it's not government-wide yet.

I can think of Montreal, for example. There are regional offices there with telecommunications, and if you have to have a team meeting, you can go into the office that day.

I'm a staunch believer.... We were talking a little bit about millennials earlier. I think it's the expectation nowadays: "Why can't I work from home? Why can't I work from somewhere else? Why do I have to work in the national capital?"

The competitions are still being run and the limiting factor—I touched on it in my presentation, why they haven't been doing it up until now—is that if they open it up to a wider market they have more candidates to interview and evaluate. Because of the length of the staffing process, they want to minimize the number of people who can apply, to reduce the amount of work they have to do in the competitive process. It speeds it up.

There is no...with the technological advances...that's Debi's group. She can answer that. I don't think that in this day and age there should be any technological limitations to allowing someone to work from anywhere.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

I think every member here would like more federal jobs in their riding. That's a way of doing it for sure.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Mr. Peterson.

Mr. Drouin for two minutes.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

I'm going to build on what Mr. Peterson said, but I want to take another angle. The average age of people we hire in the public service is 37 years. I know there was a pilot project done with the Public Service Commission where they essentially hired on the spot, because one year.... Being a member from the national capital region, I've heard so many stories of, “I got the call a year and a half later. Well, thanks. I've already got a job, but thanks for calling.”

Ms. Daviau, you're clearly competing against the Googles and the like that will go into Ottawa U or any schools, and offer new graduates jobs on the spot.

Have you learned about the Public Service Commission pilot and would you support that?

[Debi Daviau]

You know what? I'm not sure yet.

For sure, as I said, we want to see processes speeded up, but we also want to see merit continue to exist. I am concerned about the trend of putting all our apples in the basket of recruiting new people when the vast majority of your workforce are not new recruits. They are people who have been there for some years.

I think a big part of the problem is that there have been many years of training lacking, not enough identification of where the skills of the future will be. Certainly, my members who are IT members, because our environment is constantly changing, have a really strong ability to teach themselves the skills that are coming out tomorrow but they really need to know what the government's direction is.

There has not been enough training. There has not been enough identification of the future direction for existing public servants to really shore themselves up for the jobs of the future. That leaves you with a deficit and you automatically think we need to recruit new people to fill that gap. In fact, where you really need to expend some effort is with the vast majority of your workforce, training them, doing the career development and the professional development required to ensure that you have the skills when you need them.

Don't get me wrong. I still believe you need to do recruitment of new employees, but I don't think that you should throw out all the criteria that you've been applying to your existing employees in order to do that. I think that's inherently unfair.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much. I know you could have gone much longer.

[Debi Daviau]

I have nothing to say on this topic, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I understand that. I understand your passion.

Mr. McCauley, you have seven minutes, please.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Welcome back. I will do my best not to mention the city from Arizona.

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[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Phillips, you touched on hiring vets and language issues. Could you expand a bit on that?