I'm going to reference some staffing numbers from PSPC's human resource planning summary in the Treasury Board's open data site.
You and I have talked about Phoenix a lot. I'm talking about the four payments and accounting in the PSPC summary, which lists 4,792 FTEs for fiscal year 2022-23. That number drops to 2,438 for 2023-24, which is about half as many employees. Even worse, the Treasury Board lists the number of workers for PSPC federal pay administration as about 2,960 for 2021-22, but the number for planned workers in 2023-24 is only 761. That's about one-quarter of last year's employees.
I'm concerned by this drastic reduction in public servants. This is coming at a time when there are 209,000 transactions right now sitting in the backlog, which our public servants are, wrongfully, waiting for. It's totally unacceptable. The trend is that the number of backlog transactions is rising and not diminishing.
As New Democrats, we are concerned. I can't see how the government will be able to pay its employees with a federal pay administration staff of only 761 full-time workers.
Minister, can you talk about your plan for outsourcing? Are you planning to outsource the contract or go back to the departments for pay delivery? Maybe you can talk about what is being considered.