Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to expand on my question of February 15 to the President of the Treasury Board concerning contracting in the public service.
Our second budget was a strong signal that we are determined to constrain government spending. One area that has not been constrained is contracting.
In the five years before we took office the cost of contracting rose at twice the rate of the cost of our own personnel; 7.5 per cent per year, increasing from $2.9 billion to over $5 billion. Under the previous government we were told these figures were simply not available. Our government has collected them and has made them public so they can be scrutinized.
These figures are only part of the story. Public Works and Government Services Canada reported it contracted $9.4 billion of goods and services for departments, and this does not include contracting done directly by the departments. Nor does it include the hidden costs of contracting: the preparation, the evaluation and awarding, supervision and exercising of quality control, the contractors' use of government space and equipment or the expertise of government employees provided at no cost, or the lost productivity of employees who spend much of their professional time dealing with contractors at the expense of their own professional work.
Since the budget this has become a particularly urgent question. Our budget projects reducing the size of the public service by 45,000 positions. We have pledged the utmost fairness and to reduce involuntary departures to the absolute minimum. We will pay $1 billion in early departure incentives to employees.
Training and out placement early retirement incentives will cost millions of dollars more.
The real cost in addition to dollars is the horrendous anxiety for employees, turmoil for the organizations and disruption of services to Canadians.
It is only fair that every effort be made to retain and retrain current employees for available work in the public service. We cannot justify continuing and expanding the use of outside sources to do work that could be done by an employee who would otherwise become another one of the 1.5 million unemployed.
Contracting is an essential tool for good management to meet temporary requirements for peak periods of activity, for one time projects, for specialized skills temporarily required, to provide government services or programs at reduced costs. However, Parliament has no assurance that contracting is being used only where it is cost effective and appropriate. Nearly half the contracting is done with no competition. In one year 17,000 contracts were awarded to single suppliers without a competitive bid.
In many cases contractors are working side by side with government employees doing the same work but for substantially higher fees. While employees are subject to a rigorous merit process to ensure the best qualified are appointed, contractors face no such screening.
There is concern about employees who have been compensated to leave the public service and then return often within days on contract either as individuals or through a company, sometimes while continuing to receive a government pension. This double dipping must be controlled.
I urge the President of the Treasury Board to accept the recommendation of the auditor general to require all departments to account in next year's estimates for full time equivalent personnel on contract. Only then will Parliament know whether the sacrifices being imposed on government employees are not rendered pointless by a growing shadow public service of contractors. I ask him to ensure in the short term that we are not taking jobs, income and hope from people only to have someone else take over their work and income through the back door.
We have people's lives in our hands, their future, their families, their homes, their careers, their children's education, their prospects for a decent standard of living in their old age. That is a serious responsibility and I believe constraining contracting is one important element of carrying out that responsibility responsibly.