Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to rise in the House today, the 150th anniversary of the first-ever sitting of our federal Parliament. For most of those 150 years, the Government of Canada had no great difficulty paying its employees.
The Phoenix payroll system is a huge embarrassment not only in terms of the Government of Canada's history, but also in comparison to other countries and to provincial and municipal governments that have no great difficulty paying their employees correctly and on time.
A lot has already been said in this place about the problems with Phoenix, so I do not want to focus on repeating those stories this evening. What I would like to do is put forward three concrete solutions to the Phoenix boondoggle, and I would be very interested in hearing the government's responses to these proposals.
The first solution is to develop and make use of the expertise that exists within our federal public service. A big part of the problem with Phoenix was the notion of contracting out quite complex federal government payrolls. I fear the other chamber of Parliament, the Senate, is going even further down the road of contracting out by trying to find an alternative supplier for its payroll system. Certainly, I understand the Senate's frustration with Phoenix, but yet more contracting out is not the way to go. We need to rebuild a publicly administered system, and that includes better utilizing a lot of the competence that already exists. For example, at Shared Service Canada, there are a huge number of employees with a lot of expertise in PeopleSoft, which is essentially the Phoenix program. Yet these workers have not been directed to focus on solving the Phoenix problem. They are doing other things. Let us recognize the urgency of the problem and make use of employees in the federal public service who already have expertise that is quite relevant to solving that problem.
The second solution to the Phoenix boondoggle I would like to present is empowering managers in departments and agencies to write cheques to employees whom they know are not being paid. Every employee's first paycheque is a paper cheque, because it is recognized that it takes time to incorporate people into an automated system, so the Government of Canada obviously has the capacity to write cheques. Managers know how much their employees should be getting paid. If someone is not getting paid, rather than allowing them to miss mortgage payments and lose their home, why are we not empowering managers to simply cut them a cheque?
The third solution is creating a hotline for our MP offices so our staff are able to contact the Phoenix pay centre and help constituents who come to us with these pay problems.