Government Operations Committee on July 28th, 2016

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

You've answered my question perfectly, by the way.

[Debi Daviau]

We have put all of our critical cases forward, yes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Weir.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I really want to express my appreciation to our two witnesses for appearing before this committee on short notice.

I first found out about problems with the Phoenix pay system when employees of the RCMP Depot in Regina contacted my constituency office about not being paid properly. It's extremely important that we're hearing from representatives of the Canadians who are delivering different types of public services all across the country, so thanks for coming out.

Someone else who is in Ottawa, but not appearing today, is the Minister of Public Services and Procurement herself, and while it's certainly a good thing that she went to meet with employees at the Miramichi pay centre, presumably it would also be important for her to address the 80,000 federal employees who have not been paid correctly.

I wonder if you have any comment on that.

[Debi Daviau]

I have written to Minister Foote on a number of occasions now, not just about pay, but at least two times specifically related to pay, and that has produced meetings with other officials, including Minister Brison, the President of the Treasury Board. But I've yet to have an opportunity to meet directly with Minister Foote about these issues.

[Donna Lackie]

I have the same situation. I have written to the minister and have been forced to meet with other departmental heads as well, but we would like an opportunity to speak with her, to talk about those 80,000 people and the reasons and the explanations we can possibly give these people for not being paid. I agree with you.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Okay, it sounds like we're not alone in having difficulty meeting with the minister, then.

I wonder if you could comment, perhaps, on the argument that we heard from the deputy minister that it made sense to go ahead with phase two of Phoenix and that the risks of doing it were less than the risks of not doing it.

[Debi Daviau]

I don't know if you heard me. I very impolitely snickered out loud when they said that, because I couldn't understand how.... There we were saying that we know today of x number of problems that exist as a result of wave one. Can we get a commitment from you to at least correct those x number of problems before you put another 170,000 people back into the system? And they said no. They just were unwilling to slow down or take their time, or rethink it, and that's unfortunate because we thought there was a perfect opportunity there to take a step back and to make sure it was being done right. I just think it's ridiculous to say that you're doing it in order to ensure the sustainability of people's pay when in fact the problem they created through this transformation was the very problem they claimed to want correct.

To be frank, the old pay system was not perfect. That's for sure. That's why we were working to try to modernize it, but people were being paid. Most people were being paid regularly and could expect the right amount of pay and could access that information through their pay stubs and would have all the appropriate employment information they needed at their fingertips, and that's not the case today.

[Donna Lackie]

I met with the deputy minister about the last wave of transfers, 170,000 files, and I asked her to ease up. We weren't asking them to stop the process but just to extend it another six months to allow our compensation advisers and the new ones who were hired in January an opportunity to become much better versed in the system to be able to address the pay anomalies and allow Phoenix and IBM an opportunity to fix the system.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

You mentioned that your members are still working, despite not being paid for months in some cases. I think all members of this committee would really salute the dedication of public servants to continue delivering these important services despite not being paid, but I did want to ask whether in your judgment the Phoenix boondoggle has negatively affected the delivery of public services.

[Debi Daviau]

How could it not have an impact on employees' morale? Really, I mentioned at the outset of my testimony that we're also in the middle of a difficult round of collective bargaining, but we were ready to sit with this government and work our way through it. But now you have this large number of people who feel so disrespected that nobody even cares if they get paid, and yet, as I say, they go to work every day. I don't know of a single person who doesn't show up to work as a result of this problem, except for the two I know of who have resigned from their jobs in the public service because they could no longer afford to keep those jobs.

[Donna Lackie]

I'm not aware of any members who have resigned either, and who would blame them, but there are other things tied to this. Their pensions are tied to this. Their health care benefits are tied to this. So this isn't just about a paycheque. It's not as simple as walking away and going down the street and getting another job. They have invested a lot of their career and their time, and they're also very proud to be working for the Government of Canada. So every day they hope they're going to go to work or they're going to log into their bank account and find a cheque there. So they're optimistic, and I respect them for what they've done.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Ms. Daviau, you asked some very pertinent questions about the lack of testing of the Phoenix system. I wonder, though, if you have any more general observations about the advisability of trying to use off-the-shelf software as a replacement for what is a very complex set of federal payroll systems.

[Debi Daviau]

I'm not opposed to the choice to use an off-the-shelf product. I'm definitely opposed to the lack of time and planning and appropriate consideration that went into whether or not it was actually a value-for-money exercise, whether or not it was actually going to fix the problems that they were hoping to fix. And, most specifically, if they came to the conclusion that it was, they needed to ensure that that system was going to work, or at the very least, that as new issues arose they would be in a position to triage and correct them overnight, so you wouldn't have people in this predicament.

But, as I say, I now have members who have gone about six months without pay, and of course nobody can survive six months without pay. They're passing the hat at the office. As Donna said, they're at the food bank. They're maxing out their lines of credit, they're taking second mortgages, and all of these things are going to have an impact on their future ability to access credit.

So this is a problem that's going to keep compounding itself the longer it goes on. Quite frankly, I'm just hoping that the Prime Minister pulls out his chequebook and starts paying these people so that we can get on with the work we need to do for the Canadian public.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Whalen.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you both for coming. This situation is completely unacceptable. I agree with my colleagues on the other side that some of the information surrounding the rollout seems to be conflicting. I have received almost 70 complaints in my office. They weren't formal complaints through some formal system, but were by union members reaching out to try to get help with back pay—back pay that was substantial.

I think I have a better understanding today what the plan is to try to resolve some of the issues. We have three working days for people who aren't receiving any pay. We'll see whether that pans out at the next pay period, on the 10th. We have priority two, meaning employees with pay at risk of disruption because of maternity leave; that's four to six weeks.

I'm not sure how that compares with what the timelines were under the prior system. We were hearing that it was eight to twelve weeks for those types of extraneous pay, so this seems to be a slight improvement.

Then I look at the priority three, and this is where I perhaps share some of Mr. McCauley's and Ms. Daviau's concerns. Many of the people on this list, it seems to me, would be perhaps in the same precarious situation as the people who are in priority one.

Is there a working group that you're part of regarding the management of the system that could help identify some of these?

[Debi Daviau]

I think we're all hoping that the government stands up a committee of sorts so that there is an opportunity for us to work together to both identify and resolve the problems. So far, other than a few meetings between the PSAC and Marie Lemay, we're really not doing that.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

I think that would be a helpful suggestion, that union and management sit down at the table and work more proactively. Maybe others will have questions on that.

I want to get back to one of the mechanisms that the minister announced that didn't get a lot of time in the discussion today, that being the appropriate process for emergency pay. Right at the outset of this crisis, the minister announced that departments should cut cheques for emergency pay to employees, and that they could then sort out the back pay or too much pay or not enough pay later, as the system was fixed.

What has happened with what was meant to be the immediate fix? It was announced back in April. Has it not worked? Have you tried to use it? You talked about loans, and I'm saying no, if somebody doesn't get their pay, this idea was to go to their department—not to Treasury Board, not to PSC, but to their department—and say, give me my emergency pay. The minister told you to do it.

What happened there?

[Debi Daviau]

There are mechanisms for giving emergency pay. There's both emergency pay and priority pay, both of which should produce a paycheque within 48 hours. Your guess is as good as mine as to why exactly that system doesn't work, but what we saw was people jumping through all the fiery hoops and filling out the forms and talking to their management, right up to their director. Then this would be sent off to the Treasury Board and the whole thing would be approved, and they would get cut an emergency paycheque. And in the very next pay cycle, Phoenix would take it back from them, and now the person would owe the government that emergency paycheque—

[An hon. member]

How did they manage?

[Debi Daviau]

—so they didn't find themselves any better off.

In some cases we also heard that departments such as Health Canada had widespread issues. We heard cases in which the bureaucracy was telling us they just didn't have the resources to process emergency and priority pays anymore; that they didn't have enough people to determine who was missing what and therefore could not remedy the problem.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Maybe this is a bit of a leading question, but based on the feedback you're hearing from your members, is it clear to them what they need to do when they're not being paid, or is there a communications problem here as well?

[Donna Lackie]

There's a communications problem. You also have to remember that there are many people who won't surface. There are people who are concerned about their jobs and traditionally keep quiet and will endure the situation, so the number of could in fact be higher than 80,000.

What's happening is that people are cautious and concerned and are embarrassed to go to their manager or supervisor to ask for a salary advance. Many times, when they get these salary advances—going to what Debi is saying—two or three days later Phoenix pays them and they are then in an overpaid status, and at the next pay cycle Phoenix takes 100% recovery off their pay, so they get no pay on the next pay. Paying them actually creates a new problem.

[Debi Daviau]

They really needed a way to triage the new issues as they arose and to be able to get pay into people's pockets faster. We asked for that notice to go out. Marie respected that and sent it out because we, the unions, asked for it.

But again, the notices that go out to employees are long, convoluted, and complex, with a number of links to a number of different sites, so you have to fill out this form and you have to contact that person and then you have to be in contact with Miramichi.

In all of that, nowhere does it say that you might want to contact your union rep, who can help walk you through this. Nonetheless, as people realize that they've been waiting patiently and that now we're this many months into it and they're still not being paid, we are starting to see a big influx of people filing formal cases because they don't see any other solution.