If you'll allow me, I can give you a bit of background on this.
The project was actually two projects that were happening at the same time. Phoenix is the technology—the modernization. All departments have access to Phoenix, and the pay is paid through Phoenix.
There was a concurrent project called “consolidation of pay”. The idea was to be able to service, through compensation advisers, a number of departments together. In this project, 46 departments were originally targeted to have all their compensation advisers in one pay centre under PSPC at Miramichi. For those 46 departments there is actually a diminution of the equivalent of 700 compensation staff, from about 1,250 to 550.
The 55 other departments that are not serviced by the pay centre, but are using Phoenix, kept their compensation advisers. The consolidation was a further phase that did not take place, so they still have the same number of compensation advisers. That's important because, as you know and we know, it's a major transformation. What you're hearing from your constituents, we're hearing, and it is unacceptable.
It is a unique—and probably the most complex—transformation. There were expectations that with technology like that you would have some things that would happen in getting used to it, and you would need some transition time. The problem is that we had absolutely no resiliency in the system to be able to manage or compensate for some of these things as we were doing the transition, so if we had had those 700 people and kept them maybe another year, for example, I'm convinced that you wouldn't be hearing what you're hearing today. We would be able to service the employees, and we'd be able to process more transactions.
We would still be working through some issues as we implement the system. That would happen, and I'm not saying that all the issues the employees are facing are due to the capacity, but I think the reason you're hearing about the majority of these issues is that we're not able to process fast enough what I'll call the change orders.
Every two weeks we run the pay for 300,000 people, but on any day an employee in the public service has either an acting or a termination, they're going on leave, or they're hired. All of these change orders need a compensation adviser to work on them. That's the capacity we don't have right now. It's taking so long and it's creating a ripple effect, which is absolutely unacceptable.