Evidence of meeting #152 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was year.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Public Service Commission
For the Public Service Commission, I believe I had 813 in my notes.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Okay.
Based on your experience with the pay pod system, how easy do you think it would be to roll out to other departments? Was this a pretty smooth process? Is it a process that's very specific to each department?
Do you think your success bodes well and you would say that this is the model and it's just a matter of other departments having the funds to be able to implement this system; or would you say this worked great for us, but for larger departments it might not be the model?
What are some of the lessons learned?
President, Canada School of Public Service
In terms of us, as I said, we started in July on the pay pod. The big benefit of the pay pod has been that you have the same people working on your files all the time, and they open a ticket. If you're not in a pod, it's almost a first-come, first-served type of thing and the ticket opens and closes. The pay pod deals with the issues in a consistent manner. People develop an expertise on what the Coast Guard does or what the Canada School of Public Service does. In effect, the pay pod lets the pay advisers at PSPC start learning the particularities of the departments, and therefore they get more efficient.
My understanding of the pay pods in general has been that they've been a dramatic success. Our experience at the Canada school in particular has been in the order of a one-third reduction in the backlog. I think that's why the government is announcing that it's going to continue with the pay pod acceleration.
President, Public Service Commission
At this point, we're not on that system, but we're getting ready. Again, we have two people who were in Miramichi earlier this week as part of the preliminary work to get ready to be on a pay pod arrangement.
We're hoping to be on it by next May. In the meantime, we continue to try to resolve the issues as best we can with the resources that are available to us.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Okay.
For the Canada School of Public Service, I understand that the queue of open cases went down by about 25%. The backlog went down by 35%.
President, Canada School of Public Service
Yes. That's pretty significant in just a few months.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
I suppose that the decrease in the backlog is offset somewhat by new cases.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Despite some progress, which is good and means that we're getting better at dealing with problems once they arise, what about progress in terms of not having problems in the first place?
President, Canada School of Public Service
Yes, that's the key, because you can't break the back of the curve until you stop adding to the problems.
I'll just walk you through a typical month. Right now, we're still experiencing in the order of about 400 questions on pay every month.
President, Canada School of Public Service
We look at all of them. They're not problems.
President, Canada School of Public Service
Right, but I'll walk you through, because there's more.
We get about 400 questions every month on pay, because people now are not very trusting of their pay. We investigate all of them, but about 60 of them on average are more than “No, that's just because the year changed and your pay dropped by $30, so there's no issue.”
Out of the 400 questions, in about 60 of them we call on these eight people, two of whom have come from the $99,000, and we say, “That's a problem.” We fix about two-thirds of those problems ourselves. The last third, about 20, we have to refer to the pod to actually get done.
President, Canada School of Public Service
Every month we add, on average, another 20 problems. At some point, if they're fixing more than 20 problems a month, we're going to end up in a good place, but we're not there yet.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Right. It's better to take two steps forward and one back than one forward and two back.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
All right. Thank you very much for sharing that experience with us.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
We're going now to our final seven-minute intervention.
Go ahead, Mr. Drouin.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
Mr. Chair, I doubt it will be seven minutes. I think we have had plenty of information on $100,000.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
I do want to ask this: Is the reason the amount is so low for supplementary estimates (A) a result of having the main estimates reflect the budget? Just being a small amount.... I mean, this is less than 0.0015% of the budget of your main estimates. Is that a result of the main estimates now reflecting the budget? Do you understand...?
President, Public Service Commission
Well, I think it was based on a formula that was driven by the number of FTEs that you have in your organization.
We're both organizations that have fewer than 1,000, so I suspect the formula drove the answer of $99,000. If a few other organizations about our size were to appear here as well, they probably would have the same amount. Now, for the RCMP or Parks Canada, those amounts are much bigger because they have thousands more employees compared to us.