Mr. Speaker, I want to again thank my hon. colleague from Regina—Lewvan, who has once more made this a constructive debate.
However, I would like to correct one of his comments. I do not think he believes that the government has failed to act on the Phoenix pay system, which is certainly not true.
My colleague knows very well that the government has tackled it head-on and established a very clear action plan in order to actually resolve the problems with this pay system, which we inherited from the former government. This pay system was poorly designed and botched from the beginning. Unfortunately, too many of our hard-working public servants are still being affected.
One of the things that has characterized our work, as the member would well know, is our constructive relationship, our proactivity and transparency, and working with our partners in public sector unions, public employee unions, and those who have been most affected. We have worked with them very hard to establish clear priorities with respect to processing some of the backlog. This includes categories of pay transactions such as disability, acting payments, maternity, paternity or parental leaves. We have made great progress on those.
Our emphasis now is on an employee centric approach, where we clean up an entire file or an employee pay situation, which may have two, three, four, or more transactions that are outstanding or are in error and need to be corrected.
With respect to emergency pay, we have worked very hard on that, and I am very proud of this. We have worked very hard, from the Clerk of the Privy Council on down and throughout the government, to ensure that all departments, deputy ministers on down, have no misunderstanding that departments must respond, and respond quickly, to emergency pay situations, situations of hardship or duress. These situations are escalated very quickly. Emergency pay is issued. This emergency pay must be repaid, but only when the employee's pay situation is resolved and he or she is able to essentially do a one-for-one exchange.
We have shown great sensitivity in working with employees along these lines. I stress, as the deputy minister said the other day, that we send out over 300,000 biweekly paycheques in every pay period, and we do so with great precision. The problems associated with the Phoenix pay system often come when employees have other circumstances, such as overtime, shift work, and I will not go through all the categories because my time is expiring.
We take emergency pay and ensuring employees are not left in situations of hardship very seriously. We approach it with great compassion, and are happy to do so.