Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on Bill C-25, an act to modernize the federal public service.
This bill will revamp the 35-year-old legislation and its rather obsolete provisions. It is the result of over thirty reports and studies on the need to renew the management of recruiting and staffing procedures in the public service.
These reports and studies all came to the same conclusion, that a change in culture is needed in the public service. After examining the many reports recommending a change in culture in the federal public service, the Presidentof the Treasury Board took a stand and set the goals she wanted to reach, based on her own perception of the situation.
In order to deal with the persistent personnel reductions within the public service and the increasing competitiveness of the private labour market, the President of the Treasury Board has come up with the following objectives: the inclusion of the merit principle; the implementation of a more flexible staffing system; the enhancement of labour-management relations; and the integration of a development and learning framework for the public service.
The government also intends to address demographic problems within the public service. The government believes that, with this bill, it will be able to resolve the deficiencies relating to representativeness and the aging of the public service. We must add to this the shortage of those with the right job skills. The government has identified this as a critical issue.
Finally, the bill aims to improve the public's perception. Due to the bad reputation of the public service, it would seem that few people are interested in pursuing a career there, so recruitment has been difficult. This last point, in particular, must be addressed by a change in culture.
This is a lengthy, and particularly ambitious bill. It would amend technical aspects related to public service administration, as well as the entire approach to the public service's vision.
I would first like to say that the Bloc Quebecois is opposed to this bill, since no amendments were put forward, especially with respect to protecting public servants who expose dubious, immoral or fraudulent practices or policies, but also with regard to the active promotion of linguistic duality. No significant amendments were made with regard to the contentious notion of merit.
During our work in committee, we put forward no fewer than 120 amendments that were rejected by the government members. When this bill was announced, it raised many hopes. In its current form, the bill is unfortunately very disappointing, contrary to what the government member has just said; there is great disappointment.
I am thinking here about the public servants who blow the whistle on abuse. They deserve protection, and they had hoped that the proposed modernization would provide it, but the Public Service of Canada is hardly rushing to their aid.
The minister should have provided federal public servants with mechanisms so they could raise problematic issues, without fear of reprisals. This is the position expressed by the former Auditor General of Canada, Denis Desautels, before the parliamentary committee. He admitted that his former office could not protect the anonymity of individuals all the way through to the end of the investigation.
The government must stop procrastinating when it comes to implementing provisions to protect public servants who want to blow the whistle on scams, waste and misconduct.
To this end, in addition to the investigative power of the Office of the Auditor General, the minister must offer protection to the informer, who out of good faith and with evidence, is relieving his conscience and fulfilling his duty to serve the state, because he feels he cannot live in silence and go along with the lie that has become systemic.
The government can say it is walking on eggshells on this issue, but the prudence it claims to be using should not prevent it from taking action. Sooner or later, such rules will have to be adopted.
This government has often been mired in scandals that have called its management abilities into question. We are entitled to wonder about the fate of a public servant who decided to denounce the attitude of his bosses.
Take for example the sponsorship scandal that continues to embarrass the Liberal government. Would the informer have been believed? What lengths would they have gone to, to undermine his credibility? Would he have been transferred, demoted or fired?
This clearly illustrates why public servants who denounce abuse should be protected against harassment. Modernization, as proposed, does not provide for such protection.
Moreover, a survey commissioned by the government and conducted in December 2002 showed that 21% of public servants say they fear being victims of harassment and discrimination.
There is no improvement on the horizon, since this bill essentially grants more power to senior officials for managing their employees. They will have more latitude for firing public servants.
This was denounced by the vice-president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, Michelle Demers, during a radio interview on Radio-Canada. The second largest union of public servants is worried about the increased powers given to departmental managers under the reform. Ms. Demers said:
It is as though the employer had all the latitude to fire employees it finds unsuitable and employees were on probation, because there is nothing to protect them from being fired.
In addition, the institute fears that the new rules will allow managers to set hiring criteria, which leaves room for abuse of power.
The vice-president of the union added:
It is leeway that would ultimately allow the employer to choose whomever he wants for position x. This would open the door to abuse and bureaucratic patronage.
The same note was sounded by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, whose President appeared before the committee to express his reservations and request amendments to the bill. According to Steve Hindle, Bill C-25 is not only a ominous threat to the merit principle as it affects hiring, but the changes proposed by the minister would have the effect of placing the employees on permanent probation. Mr. Hindle said that the flexibility provided to Deputy Ministers under the new provisions, could “increase the incidence of bureaucratic patronage”.
I shall quote his exact words:
Section 30 grants wide discretion to senior management to abuse the merit principle. Once the basic qualifications are set, the deputy head has the legislated authority under subsection (2)(b) to use his or her discretion to narrow down the choice of candidates to one individual. In short, if the deputy head were intent on hiring his brother-in-law and as long as his brother-in-law possessed the basic qualifications, there is ample opportunity to construct additional criteria specific to one candidate to conceal what otherwise would be a deviation from merit and an abuse of authority.
People watching this debate might be surprised to learn that at present, some 40% of all appointments are made without competition. I think it is completely justified to wonder how high that percentage might rise once this bill is passed.
What the representatives of public servants came to tell the minister—and she remained generally inflexible—was that they wanted the new regime proposed in the bill to create a structure that would make it possible for all parties to establish a positive working environment in which employees could have satisfying careers.
The largest federal government union, The Public Service Alliance of Canada, PSAC, believes Bill C-25, the Public Service Modernization Act, is not likely to help the Government reach its goal of more constructive, cooperative labour-management relations in support of a healthy, productive workplace, and may well have the opposite effect.
The union expressed its views clearly in a press release on March 26, 2003. The President, Nycole Turmel, said:
The PSAC fears that the new PSEA has the potential to usher in a new era of patronage, favouritism and a lack of accountability that is inconsistent with the Government’s stated objectives.
Reservations expressed by the Alliance are similar to the ones of the Bloc Quebecois and, with the 120 amendments that we proposed in committee, we tried to convince the government, but we were unsuccessful. These reservations were related to the exclusion of staffing and classification from collective bargaining, the dilution of the merit principle, as well as the provisions on essential services and picket lines.
What workers are concerned about is that, with this new legislation, directors will now only have to examine the application of a single candidate meeting the minimum requirements of a position. Moreover, Bill C-25 limits appointment challenges to cases of abuse of power and cases relating to the language of choice of the applicant.
Another significant effect of the bill concerns the right to strike. The right to strike is threatened, because the definition of essential services is too broad. The bill gives the employer the exclusive power to determine the level of essential services required during a strike. Employees do not agree with this, as they said once again in response to the bill, and I quote:
If the government is serious about wanting to modernize the public service, the first changes must be made by the employer. It is counterproductive to present the union with a bill that is already in its final form. We would have appreciated a really consultative approach, where we could have talked about the problems and tried to find mutually agreeable solutions.
Once those directly concerned, that is the public servants, expressed their disappointment with this bill, we in the Bloc Quebecois learned to our chagrin that most of our recommendations were set aside when Bill C-25 was drafted, and all but one of our 120 amendments rejected.
I attended several of the committee meetings and discussions in order to present amendments for my colleague, the public service critic for our party.
The officials who turned down our amendments, which had been proposed by the Alliance and by public servants, never provided any clarification or justification for doing so.
It is regrettable to include public servants in an act that is close to being final, without having consulted them. They are the ones who will have to live with it, once again. There is no modernization, and the bill does not help employees to carry out their duties, nor does it provide a suitable framework. Instead, it is the administrators who are being protected. This is legislation that was designed for administrators, for public service managers.
Understandably, therefore, we are opposed to this bill, since no changes have been made to it, particularly in connection with the protection of public servants who report dubious, immoral or fraudulent practices, and also in connection with the active promotion of linguistic duality. In addition, there has been no significant change relating to the controversial merit principle.
Our concerns about merit stem from the fact that essential qualifications only are required, which creates some ambiguity as far as the level is concerned. The word essential might indicate minimal competency, not optimal, thus creating concern about possible favouritism.
Our concern about the current whistleblowing policy is that it does not have force of law and could be changed without anybody knowing about it. Its scope is too limited to meet in any real way the objective, which is to build trust in deputy heads, so that employees can disclose fraudulent actions they come across.
Under the bill, remedies are few in that only abuse of power and the denial of the right to be assessed in the official language of one’s choice are covered. Abuse of power is very difficult to prove. That is why we believe it is essential that the scope of the remedies available to employees be expanded, so that they can take any abuse or breach of law to an administrative tribunal or to the courts.
With respect to harassment, we asked that Bill C-25 be amended to reflect changes already made to the Act respecting Labour Standards in Quebec. We wanted to address psychological harassment in particular, which affects more than 20% of the Canadian public service.
The commissioner's recommendations focused mainly on incorporating the concept of linguistic duality to ensure representativeness and making enforcement mandatory when it comes to training and litigation.
We thought that codetermination would greatly help promote merit as a selection criterion and reduce the risk of cronyism in the selection process. Our amendments asking for a codetermination mechanism have all been rejected at committee.
I will remind hon. members once again that we are opposed to this bill. We put forward 120 amendments. I would say that the Bloc Quebecois did what it had to do to ensure that the officials went back to the drawing board and that the minister, who was totally inflexible, reconsidered this bill. We would like her to reject the bill, go back to the drawing board and start over. This is not legislation for those who work in the public service, but legislation for those who wield power.
