Government Operations Committee on July 28th, 2016

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

What about shift work and people who are required to put hours into Phoenix and their manager has to approve it?

[Marie Lemay]

It's the same thing.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

It's the same thing?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, and my apologies, Mr. Gerretsen; I didn't welcome you to the committee, so welcome.

Mr. Richards, take seven minutes, please.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

I want to just return to something similar, because it's still quite unclear to me what is being done to fix this issue.

I was reading a CBC article that mentions a government call centre that's been set up in Toronto. I'm just going to quote from it:

...staffed by 100 temp-agency workers, to answer the phones from the thousands of panicked workers calling in looking for answers. These temps, who do not have security clearance, and are largely charged with reading from a script, are in place to reassure bureaucrats and provide updates on their file. They will not be able to resolve pay problems...

Then it goes on to say:

One of those scripts instructs them to tell public servants that if they informed the government of pay problems before June 1, there would be some sort of resolution by October.

It doesn't seem to line up with what we're hearing today, I guess. I'm not accusing anybody. We're hearing from people who are saying they haven't been paid in months. I've heard that from people in my riding, and I know it's being heard all across the country. You have call centres being set up just to tell people, “Well, gee, everything's going to be all right”. I would suspect that for someone who has a mortgage payment to make and doesn't have the money to do so, or who maybe can't afford to feed their kids, or whatever it might be, that little bit of reassurance from someone in a call centre isn't really going to cut it.

We've been here for an hour and a half now, and I still don't have an understanding of what is being done to fix this issue. We're hearing that people are being paid and that there's no one who hasn't gone without pay, but that's not what I'm hearing out there. Something seems to be lost in translation, I guess.

I still don't really understand what's being done to fix this issue. When you're getting thousands of calls at a call centre, it sounds to me like there must be people who still aren't being paid, and it's been months. Can we get a better sense as to what is being done to fix this, because I still don't get it?

[Marie Lemay]

I wish I could give you a simple answer. Again, I go back to the fact that this is not a simple transformation, right?

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Understood.

[Marie Lemay]

It's a system that has many, many components. That's why we're touching all these different components at the same time to make sure that, at the end, all of them are functioning so that the system works perfectly.

That's why you're hearing different things, right? When we're talking about the temporary units, that's the capacity for the backlog, for the transition, and it could be for overflow if we need it a bit for Miramichi. When we talk about education and about a manager and an employee—I say education, but it is change management—it's about the tools that we're going to be producing very shortly for the users themselves to make the transaction easier, because if the transaction is not done properly, the system will reject it and create an issue that will then create a backlog. So getting the first step is actually very important.

On the software side, we're working very closely with IBM to make sure that a lot of the enhancements we're looking at are all done on time or faster. We're going to be looking at every little issue that's raised, because there are issues, and we're addressing them. On the programming, if we thought we should do something one way and now it's another way, we'll address that. So we're working on all fronts.

At Miramichi, we heard a lot of complaints that people weren't getting through. It was taking over 30 minutes at one point to get through.

[Gavin Liddy]

You wouldn't get in. The call would be dropped.

[Marie Lemay]

They couldn't reach the call centre. That's when we decided to create the web form and to push people to communicate with us through that form. It turned out that people were still calling the call centre, and we didn't know how many calls were not actually getting through. So what we have done with the temporary call centre in Toronto is to enable people to go through a first screening and talk to the employee. If it is a category one or category two, or a case that needs to be transmitted to the pay centre, it's done through a form to the pay centre.

You might find this fact interesting. The first day, and we did this on Monday, so Monday there was—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Can you tell me the date the web form was set up?

[Marie Lemay]

I think it was the beginning of June, but I'd have to come back to you.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Okay. And then the call centre...?

[Marie Lemay]

The call centre was Monday.

[Gavin Liddy]

Tuesday.

[Marie Lemay]

Tuesday, sorry.

[Gavin Liddy]

Tuesday morning, 7 a.m.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Can you give me a rough sense of when the web form was set up? Can you give me a rough idea? I know you can't give me an exact date.

[Rosanna Di Paola]

We've always had a form. The one we promoted was recent; it's been for about four weeks now. We had another form on the site but only for pay centre clients, employees who were administered out of the pay centre. We had that form there right from the outset.

[Marie Lemay]

This one was one that we promoted to employees to give us the information.

As for the call centre, the interesting fact to me is that the first day, they received 1,700 calls and only 1,000 needed to have cases transmitted to the Miramichi pay centre. That means, the way I interpret it, is that there were at least 700 people who didn't necessarily need to talk to a compensation adviser within the next 48 hours. That might be a really good thing because it means there's a triage there.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Sorry, could I interrupt you there for a second?

Can you give me a sense as to some of the reasons for that? You're saying that 700 didn't need to talk to an adviser, but what criteria determine that they didn't need to call? Does it mean they were in fact paid? What does it mean?

[Rosanna Di Paola]

We encourage people to call the pay centre even if they are going on maternity leave and want to know what documentation they need to fill out. In that case, we take down their information, we send them their forms to fill out—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

You're saying that those 700 would all be people for whom this wasn't an issue. It wasn't this specific issue, but some other pay issue that they had, or questions.

[Rosanna Di Paola]

Or questions. It's not all pay issues—a lot of them are pay questions. They just don't know how to navigate the complexities of the collective agreement and we can point them to the website.

[Marie Lemay]

The good thing about that is it liberates the people at the Miramichi pay centre to actually get the cases that they need to work on and to go through. We're hoping that's going to be a great addition.