Government Operations Committee on March 4th, 2022

[Paul Thompson]

Thank you for the question.

I would like to provide some clarifications.

First of all, there are two kinds of contracts, those for the department itself, for PSPC, and those for the other departments. For PSPC contracts, we use the services of the Translation Bureau. This guarantees the quality of the translations. It is important for the other departments to have good translations too. We encourage all our colleagues in other departments to use the same services. We provide the other departments with the tools they need to translate their own contracts.

In addition, the solution I have just mentioned, the electronic procurement system, will greatly improve the situation with translation, because more standard texts and fewer specific texts will be used in contracts.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

How will you measure the effects of those strategies in order to ensure that francophone entrepreneurs are no longer disadvantaged and discriminated against.

[Paul Thompson]

We intend to gather feedback from all the companies with whom we work, in order to improve services and to answer questions about the quality of the translation. It is basically a feedback system. We work closely with our colleagues in other departments if one of their contracts is involved.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Yes, the problem came from certain departments.

Is it your impression that some departments are beginning to open up to the fact that it's important for francophone entrepreneurs to be no longer discriminated against, just as indigenous peoples, First Nations and other minorities must not be? Are they aware that everyone must have exactly the same opportunity? Do you see any openness from departments in that regard?

[Paul Thompson]

That is precisely the goal of these new practices.

Perhaps my colleague Mr. Zielonka would like to add a comment.

[Wojciech Zielonka, Chief Financial Officer, Finance and Administration Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services]

I would just like to say that one of the major objectives of our electronic procurement system is to provide well translated contracts. With the use of good terminological dictionaries and standard contracts that are well translated, we can guarantee the quality of the translation.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Perron, in your remarks, you mentioned ProGen, a next-generation pay system. Where are we with that project?

We have been hearing about the Phoenix pay system for months. The system has been improved, it is working better, yet there is still a backlog of 141,000 pay transactions to process. That is in addition to the other transactions that the system normally has to process. I know that this does not represent the number of people affected because the same person can have, say, 20 transactions pending. Nevertheless, the number is outrageous.

Where are we with the tests of the ProGen system? To this point, are we encountering the same problems or are we managing to do better than—and I will tell it like it is—the Phoenix disaster?

[Sony Perron]

In 2020, when we started the ProGen initiative, the objective was to test existing commercial solutions, as already used by many large companies, public organizations and governments around the world. We wanted to see whether they could be a good fit for an organization like ours.

So we launched the process in 2020. We found three qualified suppliers, with international reputations, that provide the services around the world. Now, we are conducting trials to see whether the tools they provide meet our operational requirements.

We launched a first phase, an exploratory phase, with the Department of Canadian Heritage. We examined the needs of that group of employees to see how the solutions could respond. That first step showed us that there was a fit.

We are now in the second stage, an experimentation phase, where we are looking at discrepancies. In other words, we are trying to determine which parts of those systems do not fit with the way in which the Government of Canada pays its employees across the country. We want to know what the issues are. We call them discrepancies. That is the stage we have reached currently. We are working on ways of resolving the discrepancies.

We will also be doing a series of tests in the coming weeks or months. We are going to test the capacity of one of the systems to produce a payroll similar to the same payroll in Phoenix in order to see whether the results are satisfactory and what the error rate is. Normally, these systems should produce the pay correctly. However, we have complicated rules for pay, given the large number of collective agreements. So we have to see whether the results we achieve are conclusive.

We also have a plan—

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

We are going to have to continue this discussion in my next round.

[Sony Perron]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you.

We will now go to Mr. Johns, for six minutes.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you.

I apologize in advance, because my questions are very much targeted toward the minister. Hopefully you can address them, though.

Following Mrs. Vignola, it's been six years since the Phoenix pay system debacle. How many more years will it take before this colossal mistake is fixed by the department?

[Paul Thompson]

Mr. Chair, I can respond to that.

Pay operations for the current system are within the responsibilities of PSPC, and my colleague is working on the NextGen pay model. We're working in very close collaboration, but this is an ongoing project, as members know. We are pleased with the progress we have been making. The backlog for pay transactions peaked in 2018, and we're at a point now that is 63% below that peak, so progress is being made. The service standards on new intake are being met 80% of the time. We want to do even better than that. We want to get above 90%, so that we are on top of the new intake of pay transactions as they come in.

Thankfully, the number of transactions with significant financial implications for employees has dropped dramatically. That was once at 13% of our caseload, the urgent escalations. That's now down to about 1%, so there is definite progress being made. Over the course of the next couple of years, we want to drive that backload right down to what would be a normal load of work on the shelf. That is certainly the objective, and to have a better client experience as part of that.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

We had the President of the Treasury Board here earlier this week, and I talked to her about contracting out and the privatization of public services. It increases costs and risks to taxpayers, reduces quality of services, erodes the internal capacity of the public service, and creates precarious work. It also undermines initiatives that address pay equity and systemic racism.

With this government right now, we've seen the increase. McKinsey & Company.... We saw the threefold increase, a 465% increase. We're seeing an increase in outsourcing that is skyrocketing.

The President of the Treasury Board said that the government is committed to providing high-quality services to Canadians while ensuring the best value for taxpayers. Does the government not agree that the best value for taxpayers is investing in the public service?

[Paul Thompson]

Mr. Chair, I can speak to the member's question with respect to pay operations. There were indeed some outside services that were obtained to help with the operations at the pay centre. One of the challenges is maintaining the workforce of experienced pay advisers. We wanted to make sure that they're deployed on the actual processing of employees' pay, as that's what their skill set is, so—

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Can't you do that in the public service? Do you have to outsource it?

[Paul Thompson]

We hired 120 more compensation advisers in the last number of months to help with the load. The outside help was with respect to re-engineering the business process, helping with some efficiency gains, and streamlining better management practices to improve our chances of dealing with the backlog.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

How has this debacle with Phoenix changed internal mechanisms and protocols in the department to prevent another Phoenix scandal, pay scandal, happening in other areas?

[Paul Thompson]

There were a lot of lessons learned that have been documented with the Phoenix project, many of which are being applied in the case of NextGen, but there's also a lot of ongoing work to gradually reduce and stabilize the current system. We are very much on track to doing that. It's a system we now understand a lot better than we did when it was initially launched, so the ability to work within the Phoenix system has improved.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I'm going to just keep beating this thing down forever, and hopefully the government will see that outsourcing isn't working.

With Canada Post, the Privy Council did their poll, and the minister had just started. They include shutting down rural post offices, ending home delivery in favour of mailboxes, and cutting back services and delivery—things that in 2015 the government had promised it wouldn't do.

Can you tell me how much money was spent on the poll, and how much money has been spent overall by the government on research regarding cutting services and privatizing in Canada Post?

[Paul Thompson]

Mr. Chair, unfortunately I'm not in a position to answer those questions. Canada Post is within the portfolio of the minister, but it's an arm's-length Crown corporation, so I'm not in a position—

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

The government did the poll, though. The Privy Council Office actually did the poll, so that's my concern.

[Paul Thompson]

There is no PSPC funding, to my knowledge, provided for a poll. I'm getting a nod from my CFO.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Okay.

I'd like to ask about vote 10. My Conservative colleague from Edmonton West has done a lot of work on this. He's brought it up in previous committee sessions that vote 10 previously had around $2 million to $3 million a year, and then it jumped to almost $400 million. Now we see in the estimates for 2022-23 that there's approximately $150 million.

Can you tell me exactly what that money will be spent on?

[Wojciech Zielonka]

Mr. Chair, I'm not quite sure.

We at PSPC have two votes, which are vote 1 and vote 5. I'm not sure about vote 10. I think vote 10 may be something that pertains to the Treasury Board Secretariat.