I'd like to begin by also thanking the committee for the opportunity to testify today on what has probably become the single most important and pressing issue facing our members today, and I don't take that lightly given that we are also in a crucial round of collective bargaining as we speak.
I'm here representing the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada. We have over 50,000 public service professionals working in departments and agencies across the public service. These are doctors, nurses, scientists, researchers, and those in informatics, etc.
As you are all aware, serious problems persist within the government's Phoenix pay system, and many PIPSC members continue to go without pay or are missing significant parts of their pay. Despite recognition of the problem by senior officials and an apology from the government, we remain without a solution and with no clear timeline for individual and collective remedies.
PIPSC has been sounding the alarm. You asked that question earlier. PIPSC has been sounding the alarm since early in April, which is some months after PSAC started sounding the alarm. We met with Ms. Lemay prior to the second wave, and we did also request that this transformation be delayed until at least, at a minimum, the problems that arose out of the first wave were rectified. We were told at that time that this was not in the cards. They were unwilling not to flip the switch on the second wave, and it was imminent. They had assured us that they had gone through the problems that were raised in wave one, and almost all of those had been resolved. That, unfortunately, was not the case.
We have some 400 cases that are formal cases. That means people who contacted their union to file a complaint because they no longer took it on good will that they were going to be paid. Many of those are still from phase one, that is, dating from February. We are now seeing in the last couple of weeks new pay issues arising, which is of particular concern. Now we're not just talking about the ones that existed when we first implemented the system, but as we are fixing the system in some areas, it is creating new problems in other areas.
The problems continue to add up. We've had northern nurses, where recruitment and retention is already an issue, quit over their pay problems. They're a particularly hard-hit group because they work their regular hour shift work and rely on overtime for a significant portion of their pay. This is in an area already suffering from lack of good health care services in the north.
We've heard many stories of new parents returning to work and going without pay for months as they struggle to cover child care and housing costs; and students so hard hit that managers are pooling money together to help them with their groceries.
I was at a meeting recently in Alberta, and a spouse of one of my members asked why employees were still going to work without pay. He noted that as a small business owner, his employees would not show up if they weren't paid. With passion, another one of my members, a nurse practitioner, got up and explained that they continued to do their work regardless of the pay because they believed in the work and were loyal to Canadians and to the service they provided to them.
The federal government shouldn't be taking advantage of the dedication and the hard work of federal public servants. We need to fix this problem.
For members who have contacted our national union, we currently have 360 cases, 138 of which are critical. What's a critical case? It's a person who receives zero pay or doesn't receive enough pay to make ends meet. This doesn't always capture all the individuals who are facing this problem. This is just the number of people we know about. And we know from the government's own numbers that tens of thousands are affected.
As a first step, we need to see immediate action to get emergency pay directly from departments and agencies. If this is the only way to help those employees who are going for multiple pay periods without pay, then departments really have to get better and quicker at it. It seems to be a workable solution except, it's not working.
Because of the continued problems with Phoenix and our desire to do something to help our members, the PIPSC board of directors has instituted a loans program for our hardest hit members. We are offering loans to our members, which is way outside of our mandate, to ensure that they can make ends meet. We hope this will alleviate some of the genuine stress and harm being done to our members by this poorly executed transition to the new pay system.
We've also written to the President of the Treasury Board and to the Minister of Public Services and Procurement. So when you asked did she know about this, well, she ought to have known about it. My union and the other 17 federal public sector unions have been very vocal about describing not just that there are issues but also what those issues are, and even offering up solutions.
We're now working with the Treasury Board to establish concrete steps to ensure that our members are paid and are compensated for additional financial penalties; and yet people from February are still not being paid. We're sending these urgent cases directly to the Treasury Board Secretariat, but we have yet to see very many of them resolved—and certainly not in the timely and effective way that Ms. Lemay seemed to characterize as the way they would now be taken care of.
Many questions need to be asked and answered, when it comes to solving this mess. My top questions, for starters, which I'd like to put to the committee, because I believe my role here is more to ask questions than to answer them for you, are the following.
A commercial product, a so-called off-the-shelf product, appears not to have been adequately tested. I understand from reports that perhaps up to 16,000 records were tested. This is more than likely way too low a number for a system that has been said in the past to have more than 70,000 rules it may need to apply.
What were the testing protocols and timelines? Can we see reports and evidence of the testing processes? Clearly, the results are not reflective of what's actually going on. Is it possible to test 70,000 rules with only 16,000 records? Wouldn't it be difficult to test the interaction of all of those rules with each other with only 16,000 records?
Was there a contingency in place, if Phoenix failed? I think we could say that it's failing.
It seems doubtful right now, but can we go back to the old system, or are there other answers that we need, to ensure that going forward we have a system that works?
Our union has been raising concerns with outsourcing and contracting out as well of many public services. We've seen the use of outside contractors balloon, especially in the IT sector. We have evidence of other projects that are over budget and late, such as the government's email transformation, which was outsourced to Bell and CGI. To what extent was the testing and implementation of this transition outsourced to IBM or other companies, when our members stand ready to do it?
We would like to see this committee look seriously at these questions and to continue to strive to find a solution, so that our trusted, hardworking public servants can be paid. I'm sure you can all agree that public servants should not be paying the price for the failures of the pay system.
We at PIPSC remain at your disposal—both the government's and this committee's—to help in identifying the issues and the accompanying solutions. Anything we can do to get money into our members' pockets for their loyal service is not too much work for us, including bringing me off my vacation to come to report to this committee. I remain available to you.
Thank you so much for this opportunity.