Evidence of meeting #83 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 young.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
Again, that's not really within my responsibility.
I do know that at the Public Service Commission, we are looking at ways of better using technology to help with language assessment, to give candidates or employees a better chance of quickly being able to assess their level of language proficiency. Technology is part of the solution.
Conservative
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Borbey, for being with us this morning. We appreciate your time.
I want to take a more macro approach to this process. What do you think are the three biggest challenges facing the public service right now? We've heard a lot about recruiting, and I presume that is one of them. What are perhaps the other two?
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
Mr. Chair, that's a good question.
It does go back to some of my priorities. Also, there's no doubt in my mind that one of those priorities has to be recruiting and renewing the public service by bringing in new blood and finding ways to efficiently and effectively attract young Canadians to make a choice of a career in the public service.
I also want to make sure that, in doing so, we also continue all the good, strong traditions of the public service and maintain our commitment to the merit system and to a non-political, non-partisan public service. In that context, the role of the commission is something that's going to be relatively new for me in terms of overseeing that particular part of maintaining the integrity of the public service, and something I'm going to want to spend some time on. I think it's very important to find the right balance between the political rights of public servants and ensuring that the exercise of those political rights does not lead to the impression that the public service is politicized or that individuals are making decisions based on something other than the public good.
In that context, young people coming into the public service need to understand that, and understand that there are ways of expressing views and opinions that perhaps sometimes can lead to impressions that there is a political bias, i.e., the use of social media—something I didn't face in my formative years—which is a reality now. I think that's another important challenge.
I would also come back to the official languages and the fact that this is such a fundamental value, but it also creates some barriers, particularly with certain equity groups. As you know, the commission has a role to play in promoting employment equity and ensuring that our systems are fair and provide access to all. How can we continue that strong tradition of official languages and bilingualism, but do it in a way that ensures there is room for all, and that it's not seen as a barrier for important parts of our Canadian society?
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
Elaborating a bit on the official languages, what are the challenges right now with the official languages? What are some of the obstacles that are being faced? What are the shortcomings in the programs as we see them now?
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
There are many.
I talked about language of work, the use of French in particular, and the fact that, as leaders, we need to be able to demonstrate that commitment. I think that, in a world where we're more interconnected, this also applies to the public service. We are increasingly doing work in a way that connects regions, sectors, and different departments. We're working horizontally. Inevitably that does present a language challenge, because if you are including regional folks from the west coast and the east coast, you may not have people who have a certain capacity to work in both official languages, or if you're including people in some regions of Quebec, again, there are barriers there. How do we work in our organization using technology, tools, or whatever they may be, to be able to face that challenge?
One concept I like is passive bilingualism. This basically means that you can participate in a discussion in a meeting as long you're understanding what is being said by the other person in the other language. Then you speak in the language you're comfortable with. If we had more passive bilingualism, I think that would help in dealing with some of those challenges.
I think we still have issues where employees feel they're not being supervised in the language of their choice, or they're afraid to ask to be supervised in the language of their choice because their supervisors do not meet high enough levels of bilingualism. I think we need to examine this and ensure that this is not a barrier.
Access to training is a big issue. We've gone from a situation where there used to be central resources available for training. There no longer are, so it's dependent on each department and agency. Some departments are richer, and some have very innovative ways of providing access to training, but it's not uniform across the public service. I think, again, that we want to make sure this does not become a barrier.
The good news is that with technology, some of those tools that are available now didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago, so people can make a lot of progress on their own with respect to either achieving a certain proficiency or maintaining it. To me, maintaining it is probably the bigger question, because we pay a lot of money to get people to the levels, whether it's C-B-C or B-B-B, and then, if it's not actively used in the workplace, it deteriorates. Then the next time they are tested, all of a sudden they no longer meet....
I think those are some of the challenges. Again, some of that is within the Public Service Commission's mandates. Some of it is in the mandate of the Treasury Board, and a lot of it is within individual departments and agencies. I would like to work with all of these people to deal with some of those challenges.
I'm sorry. That's a long answer, Mr. Chair, but it's a very important question.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
No, the answer merited the time you spent on it.
These are big challenges. There's no doubt about it. Even one of these on their own would be a daunting task. Are you confident and comfortable that you have the experience to address these challenges if and when you move forward into this role?
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
Yes, I am. I'm not alone. I've been working with colleagues across the public service on these issues over the last number of months at the request of the Clerk of the Privy Council. We're looking forward to finalizing that work and being able to put forward ideas and solutions. Some of them are going to be very difficult and will take some time to implement, and some may require additional resources that departments will have to identify, but I'm confident we can come up with some really good solutions.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
We'll now go to our second round with five-minute interventions.
Mr. McCauley.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Welcome. I'm glad you could join us. There's a lot of great information. I appreciate it.
I want to get back to the official languages. I appreciate the need to have both languages, but you mentioned that you hear about people not being supervised in the language of their choice. Is that anecdotal or is that an actual measured response or measured feedback?
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
Yes, Mr. Chair, the Commissioner of Official Languages has investigated cases and made reports on these, so they're not isolated cases. Again, I am talking about bilingual regions, so I'm not talking about everywhere across the country.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
That's good.
I look at Alberta. We need to do more to get people speaking French, but only 6% are bilingual, so we're excluding possibly 94% of extremely qualified people, university graduates, from a lot of the roles in the public service. I'm sure it's the same for Manitoba and, Mr. Weir excluded, for Saskatchewan. How do we work that so we're not excluding a huge number of our population from the public service?
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
Well, the majority of the positions in the public service do not require bilingual status. We're talking about those positions that are in bilingual regions, or that are playing roles where bilingualism is required.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
We exclude them from any promotion into DM or ADM roles in Ottawa, mostly, I would assume.
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
Well, the track record shows that we have lots of great Canadians from everywhere in the country that have found themselves into those leadership positions. Yes, we probably need to invest maybe earlier on.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
You mentioned a couple of the training programs for French. Were you saying they were underfunded? Did I hear that right, that we don't have enough resources?
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
We went from a more centralized system to provide language training for French or English to individual departments deciding how to do it. Some departments do a great job and have in-house language trainers.
Conservative
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
We should be looking at whether, in some cases, we should perhaps have a bit of money available centrally, but again, that's something we're going to discuss with other departments and—
Conservative
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
—provide advice.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
One mandate you talked about is non-partisanship among the public service. How do we measure that? I looked through the Public Service Commission departmental plan, and their goal is to have 75% mildly aware of the rules. Do you find that acceptable, 75% partially aware of the rules? That's been for several years.
Nominee for the position of President of the Public Service Commission, As an Individual
I'd have to look at that, yes.