Mr. Speaker, earlier this month, the Auditor General reported that the Phoenix pay system would continue to plague our public servants for years to come. Earlier this week, the Minister of Public Services and Procurement told the government operations committee that the government should mostly have fixed the Phoenix pay system by the end of 2018. Therefore, our public servants are going to have to rely on emergency pay for months, if not years, to come.
The Liberal government has also come to rely on emergency pay as a political explanation for its inaction on Phoenix. For about a year and a half, I have been asking the government why it does not empower managers in departments and agencies to write cheques to employees whom they know are not being paid. The government's answer is that those employees can apply for emergency pay.
For about eight months, I have been asking the government to establish a hotline for MP offices so we can assist constituents who are having problems with Phoenix. The government's answer is that those people who are under stress can apply for emergency pay.
Therefore, I would like to focus this evening's adjournment debate on the question of emergency pay, how it works, what the problems are, and what a solution could be.
At the outset, we need to recognize that the existing emergency pay system is not working. When we hear about federal public servants who lose their homes because of Phoenix, or federal public servants who are applying for provincial social assistance because of Phoenix, it is obvious those people were not able to access emergency pay. One of the reasons for that is glitches within the Phoenix system itself. For example, individuals who are identified within Phoenix as having received an overpayment, whether or not they actually got the money, are automatically ineligible to apply for emergency pay.
Even public servants who might qualify for emergency pay are very reluctant to seek it, because they know it is just a loan that has to be repaid, and often public servants are asked to repay the gross amount of that emergency pay, rather than the net amount that they were actually advanced. Therefore, a consequence of receiving emergency pay is often being trapped in a cycle of having to apply for more emergency pay in order to repay the initial emergency payment. Public servants should not be locked into that cycle, and it is quite understandable that they do not want to be.
It strikes me that a very simple solution is, instead of treating emergency pay as a loan that needs to be repaid, to start treating it as an advance on the pay that public servants are owed, so rather than expecting public servants to write the government a cheque to repay those emergency amounts, we should simply debit emergency pay from the future salary that our public servants are owed. I believe this would actually make emergency pay a far more effective safety net for public servants caught up in the Phoenix boondoggle.