Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses for being present. I'm sorry I'm not there with you, and I hope our conversation today is not diminished by that.
I want to begin by talking about something that perhaps the Auditor General and others could have guessed I was going to bring up. It's something that's been a recurring theme in many audits, in particular related to questions I've posed to Treasury Board in the past on the Phoenix pay system. There is no question that disaster is affecting regular folks. It's affecting people in my community. It's affecting people right across the country.
I want to share with my fellow committee members and with the witnesses here a story of someone named Tristan, a gentleman who works here in Edmonton for Parks Canada. He began working for Parks Canada in 2015. During that experience, in 2016 and 2018, he found that he was underpaid by $7 per hour. That's a massive amount of money to go without, particularly with the cost of living crisis we're having now.
He thought it might have been fixed when he received a $3,000 payment one month. He thought he was being compensated for what had been a really terrible underfunding of his paycheque. What he received next, however, was a bill to reclaim that money. He had thought for a while that the system had fixed itself, but he found quickly that it wasn't the case, and he was being asked to pay money back while also being underpaid by $7 an hour.
This has real-life consequences. This person, Tristan, is a real person, a member of PSAC who has advocated within his rights as a worker to try to resolve this system on behalf of so many workers.
This is a real issue affecting Canadians, and it affects them on regular decisions like whether or not they're going to buy a house. Can I afford to buy a house? Can I have children? Can I get married? These are the questions Tristan is asking himself and his family members. It breaks my heart to know this is the case, not just for Tristan but thousands of people across the country.
I looked at the Auditor General's report, and I want to thank the Auditor General for her commentary, which is a supplement to the audited statements in relation to her comments on the Phoenix pay system. It's true that the percentage of errors is concerning to the Auditor General and to me, and I believe there is a significant issue. I point to evidence suggesting that the supplement on point 35 and point 36 demonstrates that there is a total increase in the number of pay requests needing to be resolved.
I'd like to begin by asking representatives of the Treasury Board Secretariat some very important questions, and I hope to get some good answers.
Is it acceptable that the level of outstanding pay requests is still continuing to rise, six years after this Phoenix catastrophe began?