Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to applaud you on your French skills, which continue to improve. On that front, we have in you, Mr. Ferguson, someone who is leading by example. I want to say thank you and bravo.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your House of Commons.
I want to begin by echoing what my fellow member Mr. Massé said earlier about the Phoenix pay problems. Our thoughts are, first and foremost, with the tens of thousands of Canadian workers who, regrettably, are waiting to be paid correctly. Like all of our ridings, mine is home to employees of the federal public service, albeit fewer than provincial government employees—which I'm sure you can appreciate since I am from the Quebec City area. Two weeks ago, when I was eating breakfast at a restaurant in Val-Bélair, I met a woman who, with tears in her eyes, shared her ordeal with me. Those are the people we are thinking about today. I imagine you and your team also had those people in mind as you were writing this report.
Mr. Chair, in the first few paragraphs of his report, Mr. Ferguson clearly references the fact that the previous pay system was 40 years old and in need of replacement, and that it has taken seven years to get to this point.
Obviously, launching a new system like this doesn't happen without raising a few red flags. That is why, under the previous government, decision-makers decided to put the implementation of the system on hold, not once, but twice in 2015, because it wasn't adequately ready.
History being what it is, on February 24, 2016, the current government chose to pull the trigger on Phoenix, initiating the trail of devastation we are now all too familiar with. It was relaunched in April, and, even though everything seemed to be going fine, it turned out to be a disaster.
Mr. Ferguson, in paragraph 1.86 of your report, you make a rather scathing observation, and I quote:
We found that for the first 16 months after the pay problems started to surface, there was no comprehensive governance and oversight of efforts to respond….Public Services and Procurement Canada did not work with departments….[T]here was no governance structure to define which committees and working groups were needed and what their roles and responsibilities should be to provide clear direction or to coordinate their work.
In a nutshell, they buried their head in the sand. They did not deal with the problem and opted to work in isolation instead of hand in hand with other departments.
How do you explain such a lax approach, Mr. Ferguson?