Government Operations Committee on Sept. 19th, 2016

[Marie Lemay]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We'll move on.

We have one three-minute intervention left, and it will be Mr. Weir.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I would just like to reinforce the point that it would be great if you could report back to the committee on what this number of new cases since July is. I tried to ask about that as well.

I suppose, related to that, I'm wondering if somebody gets to December 31 and has still been paid the wrong amount, either because the backlog isn't fixed by October 31 or because of these new problems cropping up, what the solution is to ensure that they're not paying the wrong amount of income tax.

[Marie Lemay]

Well, that is something that we're turning our minds to. Our objective is really to try to solve as much as we can, but people will need to have interactions with employees too, because if they do not want us to do the recovery of taxes in a certain time, then we'll have to look at what the implications are at that point.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

You've characterized the Phoenix pay system as part of this modernization of the public service. I wonder if you could give us a heads-up about any other modernization efforts that the government has in the works.

[Marie Lemay]

One of the things that we've been working on is actually the HR component of the system, because Phoenix is an integration of HR and pay. Now, in our new world, HR equals pay, really. There's one project to slowly implement the initiative called “My GCHR” and that is one of the projects that we've been, and are still, working on. We actually delayed it a little bit because of Phoenix and to be mindful of everything that's happening.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I appreciate your delay with that one.

I did want to ask a little bit about the pay centre in Miramichi. Before a labour tribunal this past week, the government seemed to be arguing that a big part of the problem was that Miramichi wasn't processing things quickly enough. I think that's unfair to the people who are working there under really tough conditions. It does raise a broader question about why the government decided to situate the pay centre in Miramichi in the first place. Do you believe that was the right decision? Is that really the best place for it?

[Marie Lemay]

I will tell you that the employees that we have there are really good employees. I have visited the place. Mr. Liddy was there recently. The minister was there. Those employees are working very hard, and if at any time there was some miscommunication and anybody thought we were blaming them, that's not the case at all. They are hard-working employees. They're good employees and they've been very successful.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

You've had to set up pay centres in all these other areas, so is Miramichi the right place to have the national pay centre going forward?

[Marie Lemay]

Yes. I would say that the satellite units that we had to set up had nothing to do with location. It had to do with adding people to be able to process.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

So it's just coincidental that you set up one of the centres in the national capital region to try to rehire the experts in this area who were laid off.

[Marie Lemay]

That's where there was availability of people. We were in an emergency situation wanting to set up a satellite unit so that we could help and pay employees as fast as possible. It seemed very natural to do it here because there were people here.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Might this not be a more—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I'm afraid we're going to have to cut it off there, Mr. Weir.

Madam Lemay and Monsieur Liddy and Madam Fortin, thank you once again for being here.

I have one question from the chair, if you wouldn't mind. You can submit this; you don't have to answer it today. Monsieur Grewal raised the question that there are perhaps 67,500 employees still on this backlog list, but that doesn't necessarily tell us how many cases there are. In fact, you were starting to say there's probably more than two or three cases per person. I'd be interested to know exactly how many cases are on the backlog section.

[Marie Lemay]

Absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Could you provide that information to the committee in a response?

[Marie Lemay]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

We will suspend now for about two minutes and go directly into committee business, which will be in camera.

[Proceedings continue in camera]