Public Accounts Committee on June 12th, 2018

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Wernick.

Ms. Raitt is next, and then Ms. Yip.

[Lisa Raitt, Conservative, Milton, ON]

Mr. Wernick, with respect to the government's position on the AG's report, the Treasury Board president indicated that his response to it was that the department will ensure that independent reviews are conducted on all such projects in the future and that deputy ministers and senior executives responsible for them will be made aware of the findings. He acknowledges that there are questions about the culture change and he says some of this needed culture change is simply a matter of unleashing the creativity, energy, and enthusiasm of Canada's world-class public service. He cautioned that making such a shift would not happen overnight, but he is agreeing with the AG that a culture change is needed.

Now, at the very beginning, Mr. Wernick, you indicated that you thought the analysis of the AG was not based on enough evidence and that it was overstated. I can't remember your exact words. If you could tell me your exact words again, that would be really helpful. Do what the minister said and what you're telling the committee today line up?

[Michael Wernick]

I'm in complete agreement with Minister Brison that we need to improve the culture of the public service and promote innovation and creativity. There are specific ways to do that, and there are specific remedies that this committee could recommend.

I'm not saying we don't have a culture problem. We are risk-averse. We are bureaucratic. We do tend to cling to process. We do tend to cling to rules. I have talked about this many times. There are ways that we can change the incentives and the disincentives to be more nimble and more risk-taking and more agile while being extremely responsible for the stewardship of public resources.

[Lisa Raitt, Conservative, Milton, ON]

Do you think it's appropriate to have an independent review of the culture within the federal public service?

[Michael Wernick]

I'm always open to advice.

Prime Minister Harper had an advisory committee on the public service. I commend to you Dominic Barton. I commend to you Michael Sabia, who has run large private corporations and also worked in the public sector. I think it's reasonable for parliamentarians who care about the public service to go and look for advice. I do not agree with the idea of a commission of inquiry that is forensic and entirely looking backwards, and looking for who did what, and when.

If you want to take a serious look at the public service and how to improve it, I'm all in.

[Lisa Raitt, Conservative, Milton, ON]

Mr. Wernick, in trying to get to the bottom of what happened with Phoenix, you wrote to all of your deputies and asked them to write you back and tell you specifically what was going on in each department, and you published the replies on your website. Is that something you would entertain with respect to the culture—for these deputies to analyze the culture in each department so that all Canadians can understand what the public sector is talking about so that they aren't tarred with chapter zero of the Auditor General's report?

[Michael Wernick]

Yes. To be very clear, on the governance point—and I don't want to get too bogged down in this—I do not have any executive authority to tell a deputy minister or any public servant, outside of the Privy Council Office, what to do.

I do recommend promotion, movement, and performance pay to the Prime Minister, and I'm able to do that through an annual cycle of agreements on what their goals are. We review performance, and on that basis I recommend performance pay. I take full responsibility for advising the Prime Minister on the deployment of deputies and whether they stay or whether they move. These commitments do have leverage, and I've used them in specific areas, such as mental health and others.

I don't know how exactly you measure organizational culture. I don't know what they would report back with. On the pay system, I think it was important to make clear to Canadians that departments were taking pay seriously on things that they had some control over—training, emergency pay, and relief. These were things they could make some strides on in their own department. I asked everybody to write in and say what they were doing. I told them in advance that we would put them all on the Internet so that Canadians, including parliamentarians, could take a look at them. That's a technique we can use.

For the best way to get a culture, I think I'll defer to expertise on that. It's a different methodology. You have to do surveys. You have to do deep dives. I just don't think you should be lured into making general statements that there is a certain culture across 300 organizations and all of its subunits spread across all of the geographic locations. There are some very strong and healthy organizational cultures and there are some very troubled ones. The art is going to be knowing which is which and to have the right incentives and feedback loops to correct the ones that need correcting and to emulate and copy the ones that are strong.

[Lisa Raitt, Conservative, Milton, ON]

Thank you for saying that you take advice, that you take suggestions.

My suggestion is that, number one, you can determine what the culture is in each subdepartment and you can ask a deputy minister to quantify, clarify, and report to you what it is, specifically if two outside, independent officials are telling you that there seems to be a culture issue and members of Parliament around this table are telling you that there seems to be a culture issue. I would hope that you listen to the advice the committee has given, or at least that members of the committee are giving, with respect to getting your hands around this issue, because I do think it is a very serious one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Raitt.

We'll now move to Ms. Yip.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Thank you for coming.

In your view, are there enough consequences for poor performance in the public service, and what can be done about it?

[Michael Wernick]

No, there are not.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

The second part of that question, sir, was what can be done about it?

[Michael Wernick]

It's a big topic, and one you might want to spend some time on.

Senior leadership positions basically fall into two categories. There are the heads of crown corporations and specialized agencies, officers of Parliament, and so on. They tend to have fixed terms, employment contracts, and the severance clauses and all the disciplines that go with that.

Deputy ministers, in the sense of ministers who run departments and are close to ministers, have no job security. They do not have formal employment contracts, and they'd have no entitlement to severance. They operate with totally precarious employment.

Below the level of deputy ministers, if you're covered by the Public Service Employment Act, then you have very strong job security. You can only be terminated for cause, which is a legal test. It is extremely difficult to fire people in the public service for poor conduct or poor performance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Go ahead. You still have three or four minutes.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

So there's nothing at all to make it easier to—

[Michael Wernick]

You would have to change the employment law, and that would be a matter the public service unions would have strong views on.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

If there was one thing you could fix about the public service for the future, what would it be?

[Michael Wernick]

I think the time is right—maybe after the next election, not in the last year of a Parliament—for a structural change to the public service. I think that we have made a lot of progress under successive governments on openness and transparency, opening government up to Canadians. These are decisions built up over the years with a lot of pressure from this committee and from others.

This is the bucket I would call glasnost, openness. All grants and contributions are on the Internet. All contracts are on the Internet. All travel and hospitality are on the Internet. Every single performance and measure used by every department is on the Internet. We've moved forward in strengthening the role of the parliamentary budget office and the chief information officer. We've strengthened the role of the chief statistician. This government has worked hard on open government, although it was something that Minister Clement pursued in the previous government, which is why we're ranked number two on open government in the world. We have something called GC InfoBase, which makes all kinds of data available to you and to other Canadians, which is just getting better and better, and so on. We have made some movement on cabinet confidences, access, and those sorts of things.

I think in opening government, we've made an enormous amount of progress, but the basic structures of government are those of the 1980s, and so we have to look at layers; we have to look at occupational groups and categories and how work is organized. That is not going to be an easy task. It's largely a matter of collective bargaining, and it's not going to be easy to change, but I do think it would be worth it. I don't expect to be around to see the end of that process, but I do encourage you to take a serious look at it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have another minute.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Do you think the public service has done enough to embrace digital technologies to streamline their processes?

[Michael Wernick]

I think there are enthusiasts and there are resisters out there, as there are in life. I commend Minister Brison for creating the Canadian Digital Service. My report gives lots of examples of moving things to digital platforms successfully. You probably haven't heard about them, because they were on time, on budget, and fully functional.

The airport kiosks that are operated by the Border Services Agency, the electronic travel authorizations that allow people to apply for alternatives to visas, the installation of Environment Canada's supercomputer, the replacement of the mainframe underneath the employment insurance system, which was completely replaced without dropping a day of work, are all technology success stories, and you probably haven't heard of them. It's not a complaint, but your eyes are drawn through the feedback loops to the things that didn't work as well.

There is a lot of opportunity to move government services to smart phones and the way that Canadians want to get services. We're very good at the external services. I would argue we're one of the best public services in the world, and we are serving Canadians in the way they want to be served. Eighty per cent of the interactions of Canadians with their government are now on the Internet, about 20% are by phone, and maybe the rest are walk-in services. We're good at digital government services. We are not good at internal services like pay, finance, and other things. What we do to each other as public servants needs the same hacking and the same digital approach, and I'm very happy that Minister Brison wants to take that on in the specific area of the pay system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Yip.

Mr. Christopherson is next.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

In turning our minds to where we go from here, my fellow vice-chair and friend, Madam Mendès, has come up with a course of action that certainly I can support. I've had a chance to talk to Conservative colleagues, and if we get enough support, I would suggest that it's a good path forward in terms of next steps for the committee. I don't want to steal her thunder, so with your permission, Chair, through you, I would offer my time to Madam Mendès to put the issue in front of committee with her recommendation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

That's fine. Is this for the committee business portion?

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

It would have been, because it is—