Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Ferguson, I'd like to thank you and your team for all your hard work every single day. Your reports are fact-based and objective, with a clear view to ensuring that public funds are properly spent and well managed.
For the most part, I'm going to focus on your Phoenix pay system report. It's a report that worries me, as do the others. I want to say that my thoughts are with all the public servants affected by the Phoenix pay problems. My thoughts are with all the people working in Miramichi, Matane, Ottawa, and elsewhere who are working tirelessly in an effort to fix all these problems.
I have no doubt that, like me, my fellow members of Parliament receive emails and calls from public servants experiencing tremendous difficulty because of this problem. They are in our thoughts.
To put things in context, I would point out that the previous system was 40 years old. In 2010, in fact, your predecessor had this to say in one of his 2010 reports. I'm going to read the quote in English, because that's the version I have:
A breakdown would have had wide and severe consequences. At worst, the government could no longer conduct its business and deliver service to Canadians.
It was therefore clear that it was time for a new system.
Seven years later, here we are, trying to understand the extent of the system and its problems. We can all agree that the system is far from simple. With more than 300,000 public-sector employees, just over 100 departments, and 105 collective agreements to manage, the federal public service pay system has to process nine million transactions a year, which total some $20 billion annually. There is no question, then, as to the system's importance.
The Government of Canada chose the PeopleSoft system produced by IBM. My question is very simple.
Let's say we could wave a magic wand and resolve all of the 494,000 outstanding pay requests today. Given your analyses, reports, and discussions with public servants, do you think it is possible to make the system work? Is it possible to perform transactions? Could pay transactions function properly if all the outstanding pay requests were to disappear today?