Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for that spot-on speech based on facts and the real-life experiences of the men and women who work for our country but get no respect from this Liberal government.
I would like to begin by saying we can all agree that the government's and the state's primary purpose is to ensure public safety. As the people responsible for the common good and communal harmony, the most important thing we can do is ensure that our fellow citizens live in safe communities, can send their children to school, can go to work, and can be safe, at work and on the street. I think we can all agree on that.
A government's second responsibility is delivering public services. What do people in our cities, towns, and villages need? They need doctors and nurses, schools, universities, and professional training. They also need people to ensure public safety, including police officers, military personnel, public servants who inspect food to make sure we do not get sick, and scientists who conduct research to make sure our medications are safe. All such people who provide these public services are part of the civil service.
Public service employees are of course at the core of our actions and our mission as a government. Once the objectives of that mission are set and we have determined how we want to live as a society, what kind of justice system and equality we want, and how we can tackle poverty, we adjust our taxes accordingly to figure out how much we need to meet those objectives. I would say that this is one of the fundamental differences between the left and the right. On the left, we set social goals and then we make sure we have sufficient tax revenues to meet those needs, not the other way around, as people on the right tend to do.
Once the objectives have been set and public services have been put in place, the government needs to treat those who are working for society as a whole, its public servants, properly. Right now, those workers are not getting the respect they deserve. The rights of those that the government put on the front lines to make sure that it is taking positive action and moving society forward are currently being violated. These people are dealing with horrible situations. They have been under stress for years because of the incompetence of government officials, the incompetence of successive governments, and today because of the incompetence of the Liberal government. It is important to recognize the scope of the problem caused by the Phoenix pay system.
I thank my colleague from Jonquière for putting this issue on the agenda in an NDP opposition motion in order to remind the government of the urgent need to act. This situation has been going on for far too long. A total of 193,000 people across the country are affected. Nearly 200,000 people are not being paid properly for the work that they do. In some cases they are not being paid enough, while in others they are being paid too much. It may seem strange to say that it is a problem that people are being paid too much, but I will come back to that. The fact that this issue has not been resolved is a real problem, and it is getting worse as time goes on. It is extremely problematic, particularly at tax time, which is coming up soon. This can lead to a lot of extremely problematic situations.
Nearly 75% of members of the federal public service are victims of the Phoenix pay system. I say “victims” because these people are actual victims. They serve us all. They are following the orders of this government to carry out work that is important to us and we are incapable of paying them correctly. Canada is a G7 nation, but we are coming across as a banana republic. There are people who have to remortgage their home because they are not getting paid. There are people who have to max out their credit cards because they do not know when their next paycheque will come or whether they will get paid enough or paid properly for the number of hours worked. Collective agreements are being breached even though the federal government has a legal obligation to pay its employees on time and for the hours and work that were completed.
What will happen to all those people who have taken out bank loans to pay their rent and buy food and who must repay them and pay interest on their loans and credit cards? Why should they have to pay for the government's mismanagement and incompetence? Why are we asking the men and women who serve us to continue dealing with these absolutely appalling situations? This has been going on for two years. The government continues to tell us that things are coming along.
Last June, $520 million in remuneration was not paid out because of Phoenix pay system errors. Last June, we owed public servants $520 million, and this amount keeps growing. The problem is not being fixed. The ministers have changed, but there is still no solution. This is a monumental farce. We were supposed to save $70 million a year with the Phoenix pay system, but we have wasted $1 billion trying to solve the problem. Everyone agrees that it will take years to fix. The Auditor General himself said so.
How much will this cost Canadian taxpayers? How much will this cost Quebec taxpayers? Some people are saying $4 billion to $5 billion.
How can we calculate that figure? We can calculate it because there is a precedent. Surprisingly, this precedent comes from another Commonwealth country. In 2010, the health department of the state of Queensland in Australia decided to use a pay system invented and run by IBM to pay its 80,000 health workers. It was an instant catastrophe. They ran into the same problems we are seeing here with the Phoenix pay system, including pay errors, missing pay, incorrect amounts, underpayments, and overpayments.
It is mind-boggling that before implementing and launching the Phoenix pay system, the Canadian government never contacted Queensland state officials in Australia to find out what happened and what problems they encountered. This was reported by CBC/Radio-Canada this week. The people of Queensland are utterly stunned and bewildered to hear that the Canadian government forged ahead blindly, without performing any checks or calling the Australian government or the Queensland government. The head of the Queensland nurses' union said she could not believe that a Google search was not done on “IBM” and “payroll”. She is shocked to see virtually the same fiasco playing out a few years later in Canada.
In Australia, there was a public inquiry into this disaster, which threw the lives of public servants and their families into turmoil. The public inquiry was led by Richard Chesterman, who made a similar observation. He said, “[I did a] quick Google search before you came this afternoon and [in] 30 seconds the search turned up a reference to my inquiry.” This means that the Canadian government did not even think to see whether this had been done elsewhere and whether it had affected public servants before it decided to launch the Phoenix pay system. I would call this gross incompetence.
I would call this gross incompetence because the Phoenix pay system was launched in February 2016, which is four months after the Liberal government was elected. The Liberals are the ones who hit the start button. The Liberals are the ones who launched the system, so they are responsible for ensuring that public servants are properly paid.
The NDP is calling for action and compensation. I hope that the Liberal government is familiar with the words “responsibility”, “respect”, and “accountability”.