Government Operations Committee on May 18th, 2017

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

No. I don't, but it seemed that Mr. Whalen did, though.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

That may be your practice. It certainly doesn't reflect what I view as a tradition of the New Democrats defending public servants and workers. As a minister, in particular as the employer of the public service, I'm not going to sit here and throw public servants under the bus.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

So you take responsibility for going ahead with phase two of Phoenix.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I have a responsibility as a minister to do my utmost, and I'm driven by advice provided by public servants. The decisions made by ministers ultimately are their decisions, and the advice provided by public servants is the best possible advice they can provide and try to provide.

It's easy sometimes to throw groups such as the public service under the bus, but governing isn't easy.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I'm glad you're not doing that. I'd like to clarify that your government will take responsibility for implementing phase two of Phoenix and getting rid of the legacy system.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

In fairness, the narrative of your question is that you want me to blame the public service for this.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

No, I don't want you to. I want you to take responsibility for your government's decision—

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I take responsibility, very serious responsibility—

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

—to have implemented phase two of Phoenix and that you got rid of the legacy payroll system, which you now acknowledge was a mistake.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Mr. Weir, you've run out of time.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I take responsibility for fixing it.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Either you allow the minister to answer you or you give your questions, but you've run out of time.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Minister.

We will suspend for a couple of minutes and then we'll invite the other witnesses from the Public Service Commission to join us at the table.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Committee members, please take your seats. We don't have much time and I will need 10 minutes for some committee business.

Mr. Borbey has been kind enough to say that he will shorten his remarks. You already have his speech, so he will just give the highlights.

Congratulations, Mr. Borbey, on your appointment.

[Patrick Borbey, President, Public Service Commission]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It's a pleasure to appear before the committee to talk about our main estimates.

We will talk about our main estimates, and about the Public Service Commission's departmental plan.

Allow me to introduce my team. I am joined today by Mr. Tim Pettipas, acting senior vice-president, and Mr. Philip Morton, acting vice-president of corporate affairs, as well as the Public Service Commission's chief financial officer.

I would like to thank the committee.

I appreciate your support. As you know, my appointment was confirmed and effective yesterday, so this is my second day on the job. I'm very pleased to be back here.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Welcome.

[Patrick Borbey]

As the chair has indicated, I have already provided my remarks to you. To save time, I will not address them. I know you're short of time for questions.

Let me begin by reminding you of the components of the Commission's main estimates.

The PSC has $83.5 million in planned spending for the current and next fiscal year. The majority of the organization's spending is on salaries. We have approximately 800 full-time equivalents who work both in the national capital region as well as in regional offices across the country. Our people continue to be our most important resource as we deliver on our priorities to promote and safeguard a merit-based, representative, and non-partisan public service that serves all Canadians on behalf of Parliament.

In my written remarks, you will see that I address some of the priorities that I had started talking about earlier when I appeared about a month ago, and I would be certainly pleased to further expand on those as we take questions.

We will be pleased to answer your questions.

Thank you.

Meegwetch. Qujannamiik.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you so much for being so brief.

We will go to the first round of questions, with Mr. Peterson for seven minutes.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Madam Vice-Chair.

Welcome, Mr. Borbey, and congratulations on your new role. I appreciate the fact that you're only a few hours into it.

I'm going to ask some questions, more general in nature than necessarily having to do with the dollar figures, about some of the priorities of your department, some of the stuff you alluded to when you were before us about a month ago, by way of follow-up. It may be a way for you to elaborate and expand.

I know in the opening statement you provided, you mentioned some priorities: independently safeguarding merit and non-partisanship, building a public service that is representative of Canada's diversity, and flexibility for managers to achieve results for Canadians and ensure fair and transparent employment practices.

These are all important undertakings, but they're also very large undertakings. I want you to expand a little. I know we probably don't have time in my seven minutes for you to give a full expansion, but what sorts of steps do you think we can take to make sure the public service is representative of Canada's diversity? Maybe that's something you can start off with. If you have time, you can elaborate a little on maintaining the non-partisanship of the public service, what gaps there may be now, and how you expect to fill some of those gaps in your mandate.

[Patrick Borbey]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

I'll address the non-partisanship and I'll come back to diversity.

On non-partisanship, there is a very strong tradition within the Public Service of Canada, but we also recognize that public servants have rights to engage in political activities, so we have to find the balance between their exercising that right, and under what conditions, versus maintaining that non-partisan nature and the confidence of the public that decisions made in the public service are not based on political considerations. Finding that balance is tricky, and from time to time we will end up with situations where we have to investigate and have to take action. That is a responsibility we take very seriously.

The other aspect that I talked a bit about before is the need to make sure that public servants across the country understand those responsibilities. For somebody like me who's been in the public service for many years, perhaps I have it ingrained in me, but new public servants perhaps have a very different perspective about engagement and get involved in political activities and social media.

As you know, we have the ability to be able to get involved in political or semi-political causes in an instant. I think we need to sensitize our new public servants to the risks and how to manage those responsibilities. That's certainly something we'll look at. I looked at some survey results that indicated—and you'll see in our departmental report—we're meeting our target. Seventy-five per cent of public servants surveyed indicate that they're familiar with their responsibilities in this area, but when you look at the age bracket, it's more than 80% among the baby boomers like myself, and it's much lower among the new public servants, so we have work to do there.

On diversity, I think there are many different ways and tools that we can use to improve diversity. I'm really thrilled with the pilot that we are leading on name-blind recruitment to see how that is a way to reduce some of the barriers.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how, on the accessibility file, we will be able to, as a government, as an employer.... I talked about being a vanguard employer in the area of accessibility. In other words, we would not be just meeting basic accommodation requirements but actually taking measures to go and find the talent that I think we're not tapping into, particularly with persons with disabilities but I think we can say the same thing for other equity groups.

I also looked at the statistics and I have to say we also have to acknowledge that the public service has done a pretty good job over the last number of years. The statistics show that we have improved. There are still some gaps. There are some areas that we need to invest in, pay some attention to, and look at pilot projects, working on very specific inventories, for example. There is an inventory that was created for aboriginal candidates. How can we use that to be able to improve our performance in that area?

I think there are a lot of different tools at the Public Service Commission, and I know we have a very creative team who is certainly looking at all the different ways that we can improve our diversity.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

I wonder if you could also elaborate a bit on what I think can be referred to as ongoing professional development in the public service. Can you elaborate on your commitment to that, and can you perhaps indicate whether you consider it important? If so, how are you going to implement a program?

[Patrick Borbey]

That's a very important question.

Sometimes we are very focused on how we get people into our organizations. How do we recruit? That's great, but how do we keep them? How do we retain them? That is, quite often, through the richness of the conditions that we provide in the workplace and the investment in professional development. The Public Service Commission has a role to play there, but we need to work with the employer and others in individual departments to see how we can create conditions under which people can come into the public service and then see how there will be investments in their capacity, they will gain the experience to grow, and they will move up in the organization.

There are professional development programs, for example, that help bring somebody in at the starting level, at the entry level, and over a period of years grow them to what we might call the intermediate level. Those are programs that can actually make a big difference in terms of retaining the talent we work so hard to recruit.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you for that.

We'll go to Mr. McCauley for seven minutes.