Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech.
We have noted and appreciated the constructive attitude the hon. member and her party have brought to this debate, at times. As the member for Gatineau, there is no one more motivated than I. My riding may not not have the highest concentration of federal public servants in Canada, but it comes close. We have applied that passion and motivation to resolving the Phoenix pay problems.
I can assure my hon. colleague that we have made great progress, which is not to underestimate or minimize the problems associated with the pay system. We are concluding new collective agreements.
The former government made it so that we inherited this Phoenix pay system; we had no choice but to move forward. It is not like we could choose the Phoenix pay system or the old system. The choice we had was between the Phoenix pay system and no pay system. The whole thing has been clearly documented by the Auditor General, as well as his predecessor, who said in her report that the Phoenix pay system was a ticking time bomb. We had no choice.
Furthermore, when we came to office, 300,000 public servants were working without a collective agreement. That is nearly the entire public service. The President of the Treasury Board quickly got to work negotiating new collective agreements with our partners in the public service unions. Naturally, the new agreements applied retroactively to the years when the previous government was in power.
It takes thousands or even hundreds of thousands of transactions to issue retroactive pay to our public servants. As a result, we had to reassign compensation advisors to implement these new collective agreements, even though the number of compensation advisors we had inherited was already not enough for the transition to the Phoenix pay system.
The good news is that we were able to pay nearly all of our public servants. True, we did not always meet our deadlines, but we paid our employees retroactively. We have always been very transparent with the unions in this regard. Every month, we process more transactions than the month before, amounting to hundreds of thousands of transactions.
There has been some progress. We are putting resources towards this. This is the federal government's number one priority. I want to assure my hon. colleague that the problem is not a lack of will. We are allocating all the necessary resources and doing everything in our power to fix the problems with the Phoenix pay system.