:
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me here.
When I appeared before this committee on March 29 of this year to address issues related to recruitment, retention, and hiring practices of the federal government related to employment equity, I and my colleagues had an opportunity to address a number of issues that impact on the compensation advisor community.
I did this in response to interventions from the chair, a chair who was then and I hope is now frustrated and angry that successive governments have their priorities wrong when it comes to the appropriate classification, recruitment, and training programs for its compensation advisors.
Madam Chair, on March 29, you said, “Obviously we have to do something, because people aren't going to work for us if we can't pay them.” My predecessor said pretty much the same thing at the PSAC national triennnial convention in both 2003 and 2006.
I sincerely hope that the attention given to this issue by this committee will ensure action and allow me to stand before the 2009 PSAC convention and say that the government has finally got it right and has provided its compensation advisors, among others, with an appropriate and justifiable classification.
During our appearance on March 29, we said that the fundamental underlying problem faced by compensation advisors is that they are improperly classified, that their classification standard dates back to 1965—that is, it hasn't been updated since then.
The nature of their work has changed significantly over the past 42 years. The complexity and the files, myriad regulations, and legislative provisions have increased dramatically, yet changes to the classification of compensation advisors have not kept pace with the program and regulatory changes. Where's the justice in that?
I should tell you that I had an opportunity to raise the issue directly with the , on April 16, which was subsequent to my appearance before your committee. I have to say in fairness to the minister that he expressed concern over this issue, but time will tell whether his concern will translate into timely and appropriate action.
Your specific interest in this file, as well as the union pressure and individual representations to the minister and departmental officials directly from compensation advisors, is the best way to ensure speedy action.
I say this because classification issues historically take years to be resolved, and for whatever reason, the government does not have the capacity to move many classification files to completion at the same time.
For example, when my union and the Public Service Human Resource Management Agency of Canada agreed to a comprehensive classification process for the PA group a little over a year ago, we knew full well that some other federal public sector groups would have to wait for their legitimate classification issues to be formally addressed. That was the right decision, despite the negative consequences, because the PA group is the largest in the federal public sector. It is in many ways the most complex, and it includes compensation advisors.
I would say as well that the previous government acknowledged the extent of its classification problem, at least in part, when it earmarked fully $1 billion to correct existing classification problems. A measure of the failure to connect the extent of the problem with timely corrective measures and to engage meaningfully with PSAC on important related initiatives, such as policy renewal and how we can better move the labour relations and human resource communities forward, is the fact that very little of this money has been spent; in other words, the money remains on the government balance sheet and not in the pockets of the workforce, where it rightfully belongs.
In a submission to your committee, the Treasury Board's compensation advisors said the Treasury Board's solution to a centralized pension service in Shediac, New Brunswick, is a solution they do not believe will fix the problem. I would like to comment on that issue as well.
I should say at the outset that I, as well as other federal public sector union presidents, have been briefed on the government's proposal. I agree with the Treasury Board's compensation advisors that the planned transformation of pension administration will not fix the problem, but I have to say that in many ways it is a step in the right direction. The fact of the matter is that the pension administration system is broken, and centralization of the function in Shediac makes sense.
That said, this centralization will have a considerable impact on the compensation advisors community, an impact that I do not believe has been fully factored into the government's planned transformation of the pension administration. Moreover, there is a real concern that the transformation of the pension administration is motivated as much by employment reductions as it is by improved client service. This too needs to change.
I would also point out, as did the Treasury Board's compensation advisors, that employees, like all Canadians, do not consider 1-800 numbers and web self-services to constitute an appropriate level of service. This system is seen by government as an expected benefit from the pension administration transformation. Yet the same government must appreciate that its attempt to implement a similar client service model at Service Canada has been plagued by client alienation, dissatisfaction, and resistance, particularly from seniors. I am not a Luddite, and I believe that there are significant benefits from the use of tools such as 1-800 numbers and web self-service systems, but they are tools to assist the process and cannot replace focused face-to-face communication between pension and compensation experts and the people who have pension and benefit questions or who are in need of an analysis of their options.
So to sum up, the government has inherited a pension benefits and pay administration system that is antiquated. It has inherited a system in need of a complete overhaul. It has inherited a system that undervalues considerably its compensation advisors' workforce.
While it is not an issue that is on the public's radar screen, it is an issue that the government has both an obligation and an opportunity to fix, and my members will take your action on this file into consideration when they next have an opportunity to vote.
Again, I thank you very much, Madam Chair, for inviting me here to give you a presentation.
:
Well, I'm fine with trying to answer that one, because I think a lot of our prepared statement has been addressed, and I don't want to reiterate the same things. But one of the impediments to the reclassification, of course, has been service delivery models. It appears that instead of reclassifying the expertise we have, a way of circumventing that is to come up with how we deliver our service.
You are correct when you say there are two. There's one that is current, which is what most departments have; and one that is called activity based, which is the newer model. It takes responsibility away from individual compensation advisors to oversee your account, and what it does, in essence, is to set it up so that your account is handled by as many compensation advisors as there are. If you are getting a promotion, that will go to someone who is doing promotions. If you're getting acting pay or if you're retiring, it will all be very relative to a specific activity, and it is indeed these departments that are causing the greatest number of problems.
The moment you remove responsibility from the compensation advisor, it's a slippery slope to chaos, because now if you have any questions about your account, who do you even address it to in the compensation community? It also takes away expertise overall, because a couple of years down the road, as people are moving on with their expertise and retiring, you will have people who, if a complex issue were to be examined in your account, such as an issue with a T4 that was just not balancing out—Who do we give that to, if no one's done T4s and no one has the overall global knowledge, because all they've done are little bits and pieces of our job overall? So it's caused huge backlogs and chaos, with different people working on the same things.
It's also put people in a situation where, because of the huge backlogs, it's become a health issue. People are working six days a week and still can't keep up with the huge backlogs, so they are leaving. It used to be that compensation advisors could move from one department to another, based on anything from the job being closer to where they lived to their feeling that people were treated better at one job than another. Now fully trained compensation people are leaving; they're not going to compensation jobs in other departments. They're getting out and saying “I'm not going to do this job with this responsibility and this much pressure—given the complexity of the knowledge that's required—for this kind of money.”
So it is the departments—And you did mention one of them, Public Works, and there are CRA and Stats Canada. And DND is in a delivery model that straddles the two at the time but is trying to go to this activity-based model, and we've put up a huge struggle with management to say why this won't work.
:
Merci, Madame le présidente.
Thank you for not monopolizing the discussion. You've asked a few of my questions.
First of all, Madam Chair, through you to Mr. Gordon, I'd like to say about the threat of voting one way or the other, we're not in the forties, and your representative in Sudbury, the guy with the baseball cap, threatened me the first year I was elected. He's gone, and I'm still there, so that's nonsense. Don't threaten with me with “I'll vote for you or I won't”. I know damned well you don't vote for me, and you won't. Your members do, though.
I take offence to that one. You take people who have the duties that we have, the responsibilities that we have, and suggest that we can be bought with a vote.
I want to know if there's a problem. I want to know if the people who called us are not getting paid for three months. That's all I care about. The system is so screwed up I wouldn't understand it anyway. We've had your managers here. One department didn't know what the other department was doing. They couldn't answer our questions. I don't have the energy or the lifespan, enough years left, to fix the situation. I want to know if the young lady or the young man or the single mother working for the Government of Canada has to wait three months to get paid. That's all I want to know. Once I know that's happening, all I want to know is damn it, did you pay them? Are you caught up? That's all I want to know. All the rest....
Please tell me that's what you're going to talk about and I'll go to my office until we vote on something. I wasted time here on Tuesday. It's not what we want to study. Am I correct?
An hon. member: Yes.
Mr. Raymond Bonin: Okay, let's stick to it. We want to know about the employees, the ones who don't threaten us with their votes. We want to know because we care about them. Are they getting paid on time? If not, then we're going to take the ball and we're going to carry it. Somebody needs to inform us if the people who are calling us are telling us the truth. I believe they are, but I know damned well that the employees are so afraid of talking since January 2006.
I'm not kidding. It has become very serious. Directors of departments don't have the right to talk to members of Parliament, and their employees are even more afraid to talk to us. That's another problem. That's why we can't get in all the rest, and I'm going to ask that this committee study why the employees are so afraid to talk to their MPs. If the employees of the government are afraid to talk to us, how will they know how the Canadian public is being governed? That's another issue.
Please help me out. Are there people who are not getting paid? Is it caught up? Is the problem over, or are we still behind? Let's stick to that, please.
:
It was copied to you, and we all got a reply saying that the Canada Public Service Agency and the human resource council has engaged in the public-service-wide recruitment effort to build capacity in the compensation community.
I'm part of this recruitment process. I went to their meeting last week, and out of 5,800 applicants, they're down to 129 who passed all the tests and everything. Out of that, there are 56 who want to work in Ottawa. Out of 56, there are already 31 compensation advisors who are working in pay as terms, so they're going to be appointed as indeterminate. That leaves us with 25 who could be hired, which we'll all be fighting to have in every department.
This hasn't resolved anything. We had this process years ago. They don't stay in pay and benefits, because it's too complex and too much responsibility, and they're not recognized for the type of work they do. They have university degrees, and they leave for other jobs. This does not solve anything at all.
It is not an administrative error; it's the way they changed the service-delivery model. When you need to speak to somebody, there's a call centre. They give you a ticket number, and you wait for somebody to call you back. Well, good luck. It could take weeks; it could take months. That's the type of service they have, and this is what they want to change. They want all the departments to function this way.
Well, it's not functioning. I know, because at Industry Canada we've been asked if we can go help out Stats Canada. We've been doing elections—people who want to buy back service before they retire and things like that—dated 2005. But we are now in 2007. This is unacceptable, and it's only getting worse.
:
Thank you, Ms. Marleau.
Good afternoon, everyone.
The day before yesterday, we heard from people from the Treasury Board Secretariat. I don't want to be mean to them, but they didn't seem to be aware of what was going on. That surprises me very much.
I had the pleasure of meeting Minister Fortier in March. Other people wanted to attend that meeting, but they were afraid of losing their jobs if they met the minister, as a result of the scope that the matter was taking on for them. Although I received the minister's consent—and I'm not saying that the minister is a bad wolf—he had one fear.
Even though I had told the people to consult their union to be sure they had used the right process, one of them was quite happy to go with me. I did it as a favour to her and to move things forward. She wanted to express her distress: as a new employee, she had had to wait three months before receiving her first pay cheque. That's one of the points that was highlighted.
Another point is overtime, that the government is slow in paying. We heard someone say that he had had to wait up to one year before his overtime was paid to him.
Furthermore, people who were with the minister said during the meeting that some executives or senior officials who had changed positions and received a salary increase had had to wait a long time before receiving the difference in pay. Once that was said, a figure was cited, that is 2,000 persons at Public Works who live in Ottawa or Gatineau. I'm also from the region. They came to see me or called me to find out what was going on and what could be done. The minister told us that he would make the necessary effort to solve the problem. It was obviously inappropriate to say anything else.
You've previously talked about this in committee, and your documents discuss it as well. The people who were with me emphasized that there was a problem with regard to compensation. The compensation advisors receive training and go through all the stages and so on. But when they realize that they could have a better salary elsewhere with fewer duties, they leave their positions.
You suggest increasing salaries to market levels. You gave the example of computer engineers. We recently proposed solutions for keeping our computer engineers because they were leaving their positions very quickly to take up other positions elsewhere in or outside the public service.
You are a kind of union, and you represent your members. Do you have any clear solutions that we could present to the minister when he comes before this committee? That will appear in the record of this meeting. We know the problem, at least in part. Mr. Bonin is experiencing this situation in his riding, and other people know government employees elsewhere.
Do you have any potential solutions to propose?
:
Since 2000, we've appeared before all the committees of the federal government, including the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada, PSHRMAC, which is now called the Canada Public Service Agency. We also met Ms. Turmel, who was at the union at the time. We constantly tossed the ball back and forth. They said they were ready to reclassify us, if PSHRMAC agreed. The agency said it agreed, provided the union agreed.
When Mr. Gordon became our union president, they examined our situation and agreed to meet with us. They finally admitted that there was really a serious classification problem. As people don't want to work in compensation, there is a serious staff shortage. People aren't being paid on time. People who work in compensation do a lot of overtime and are making themselves sick.
That has a major impact on the income taxes of those employees. When a person is a year behind in paying provincial income tax and has only paid federal tax, that has a significant impact at the end of the year. As regards promotion, that person should have had it in 2005. It's now 2007, and she hasn't yet received her cheque. When she does receive her cheque, that will have a significant impact on the tax that she will have to pay.
Until they review classification, there will still be a problem. People don't want to stay in compensation. The work is too complex. At the moment, they're talking about taking duties away from us and sending certain files, such as pensions, to Moncton. That will resolve nothing. We're the ones who have employees' files. They'll still phone us. We'll have to confirm information, search the files and so on. People don't want to be served by a 1-800 number. When I retire, I'm going to call Moncton, and they're going to fax me documents so that I can complete them.
There are a number of us compensation advisors, and we meet with people in the associations and committees. When they know that we are compensation advisors, they tell us they work at Public Works and have no one to turn to. One person previously asked me to help her; she's changed her retirement date three times. Another person told me that documents had been sent to her by mail and that she did not know how to complete them. She told me that she would pay me if I helped her do it.
That's terrible; it's unheard of. They have to review our classification. If they refuse to do so, nothing will change, even if they hire people from the outside.
:
I'd like to answer this question, if I may.
Actually, I'd like to give a little bit of history. Going back, I think, to 1997, there were cuts in the public service. In particular, Treasury Board cut Public Works and Government Services Canada. As a result, a lot of the duties were transferred to compensation. Since 1997 we have had a lot more policy changes, a lot more collective agreement changes. There's been pay equity. It's been continuous, a growing number of policies.
If we compare our public service to a provincial one—I looked at the website, for example, for the collective agreement for the City of Ottawa employees, a very basic collective agreement, about five pages long. We have over 72 collective agreements. We have over 70,000 rules and regulations that have occurred over the time of government. And because of all of the departments, because of all the agencies, we have to know crown corporations, pension laws. The former Auditor General, Denis Desautels, wrote about this in 2000, and he wrote that it is one of the worst jobs in the government due to the broad body of dissimilar rules and regulations. So if we compare it to a provincial level, it doesn't work.
If we look back at the pay records of 1970, it was a walk in the park. They came, they arrived, there were no rules and regulations. But as government changed and policies came into play, it got more and more complex over time with all the collective agreements. And this is why we cannot compare it.
:
Thanks very much, and welcome to all of you.
This is an issue we have been trying to grapple with for some time and, as you have heard, we have not been very successful. We had a bit of frustration on Tuesday, when we had some witnesses who really could not provide us with the information we were looking for. I think we're getting more to the nub of the issue with your being here today. Thank you for the information you're providing to us.
I want to make sure I understand the problem. The problem arose when members of the committee were hearing that there were people who were not getting paid in a timely fashion, or not getting paid, period. What I'm hearing is that the pay problems are a result of problems with the position of the compensation advisor. From what you're saying today, I understand that this job not only requires complex skills but also deals with this myriad of very complex rules, collective agreements, and a variety of factors. You're dealing with all aspects of compensation.
As I understand it, the core problem with the compensation advisor is that the job is not classified properly, and therefore people are being underpaid because they're not ranked at the proper classification level. Because they're underpaid and the job is extremely demanding, there is a retention problem and a recruitment problem. This means greater staff shortages, which are compounded by the difficulty of replacing the baby boomers who are leaving, so it's a problem that keeps getting worse.
I noted in your handout that the compensation advisors also end up working extra hours that they're often not compensated for. Of course, we have all heard this week about the class action suit that's being launched against one of the major banks for this very issue. It is an issue that—It seems like a simple thing to get someone's paycheque solved, but it's actually the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
It sounds like an easy thing to maybe reclassify the positions, but how do we actually grapple with this? If the classification is the root of the problem, then if people were properly classified and paid at the appropriate level, it would be more attractive and easier to recruit and retain people. How do we get that done?
:
Madam Chair, this is not a novel subject. It comes up fairly frequently, to the point where I'm almost carrying around material on it all day long. I've had occasion to be before other committees recently on this, so I can't say that I'm totally surprised by the question or have come here entirely unprepared.
I'm looking at the motion, and the motion appears to propose that there be a moratorium on the sale of those buildings so the department can provide the committee with relevant studies and information. I take it that these studies and this information are the documents to which Mr. Kramp is referring when he is talking about seeking a document.
Given the nature of leasebacks, I take it that these documents would contain financial or commercial information of a kind that might be confidential to the interests of third parties contracting or dealing with the government. Is that right?
A voice: Correct.
Mr. Rob Walsh: Okay, I think I have the picture.
The general rule is easily stated, although it doesn't get you very far. The general rule is that committees have unlimited authority to call upon anyone, including the government, to produce documents for the committee.
Having said that, and maybe feeling a little warm all over having heard that, you then ask yourselves where you are. Well, not very far, frankly, because there are circumstances in which the government, or whoever the individual is, has bona fide legitimate reasons for not wanting to lose the confidentiality of these documents. Essentially what we're talking about here is confidentiality.
I should first refer you to Marleau and Montpetit, because that, of course, is our operational bible. This issue is discussed on pages 864 and 865. It provides an example, not exactly on all fours with what this committee is dealing with, but it's somewhat similar, on page 865:
Although the House has not placed any restrictions on the power to send for papers and records, it may not be appropriate to insist on the production of papers in all cases. In 1991, the Standing Committee on Privileges and Elections pointed out that:
—and this is contained in a report of that committee—
The House of Commons recognizes that it should not require the production of documents in all cases; considerations of public policy, including national security, foreign relations, and so forth, enter into the decision as to when it is appropriate to order the production of such documents.
In the footnote to this passage on that page, there is a particular case that emerged. A committee was not getting a document, and it reported to the House that it wasn't getting this document:
The Committee presented a report which concluded that the Standing Committee on Justice and the Solicitor General had been within its rights”. This is the committee on privileges and elections, which is now the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. It looked at what was going on at this other committee on justice, and it reported to the House that the other committee, the committee on justice, was within its rights “to insist on the production of the two reports and recommended that the House order the Solicitor General to comply with the order for production.The House subsequently adopted a motion to that effect, with the proviso that the reports be presented at an in camera meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and the Solicitor General.
Strictly speaking, the process here for this committee, if it's not provided with the documents it's seeking, is to go to the House, as that committee did. Or a member of the committee, or the chair, perhaps, on behalf of the committee, can raise a point of privilege or make a report to the House to the effect that you feel that your privileges have been breached. The House may then refer to the procedure and house affairs committee, then in turn report to the House. And the House may or may not concur with the finding that there was a breach of privilege and may or may not concur with an order to be given that the documents in question be produced.
That's basically the process. It may be productive, it may not be.
The other consideration you might want to look at—and I know this is not your favourite reading, but it comes into your life from time to time—is the Standing Orders. It is the document that sets out the mandate of the respective committees.
It might be informative for this committee on this occasion to look at the mandate of this committee, the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, and compare it to the work and the mandate of the public accounts committee.
Basically, government operations—and I'll explain that in terms of the Standing Orders in a moment—As the title of your committee indicates, government operations and estimates is about future spending, plans for spending. Public accounts is about what you spent and whether it was spent well.
If you read Standing Order 108(3)(c)(ii), which is the mandate provision relating to this committee, it talks about looking at the effectiveness, management, and operation, together with operational and expenditure plans.
When it refers to specific operational and expenditure items, as it does in subparagraph (iii) of paragraph (c), it refers to specific operational expenditure items across all departments and agencies. It is meant to be a government-wide review of such specific operational expenditure items.
I mention that just as a comparison to the public accounts committee, which then looks later at how the government spent the money it was given to spend. Of course, the public accounts committee also considers reports of the Auditor General. I mention this to you to indicate where your mandate comes from—from the House. The House tells you what you can do, and that's your reference point to see if what you're doing falls within it. I'm playing the part of your legal advisor in saying there's an argument to be made—it's just an argument, and we lawyers make whatever argument you want--that seeking documents relating to what deals the government may have made may not really be within the meaning of plans in terms of what government may plan to spend.
I don't know to what extent these documents fall within one category or another, but you're talking about studies of information on the impact of these leasebacks. Arguably studies done on the impact of leasebacks as a vehicle relating to the transfer of title to property as a financial study may well be something that's of legitimate interest to this committee relative to whether this is broadly speaking a valid way of proceeding in terms of the public interest.
On the other hand, to seek documents that show what particular leaseback deals either have been made or are in consideration with particular parties arguably may be going beyond what the public policy objectives of this committee or the public interest objectives of this committee are, and instead be an inquiry into particular transactions. I say this further, if I may, Madam Chairman, in the sense of the legal context in which this committee operates. I know it's true that committees have virtually an unrestricted power to demand documents. It's unrestricted in the sense that no one can go to court and get a court order saying you can't do it. But the committee is a public authority, as is the House, and it has legal powers. These are legal powers that you have. Generally speaking, in a legal context, legal powers are exercised pursuant to the granting of the powers in a statute, and generally speaking they're expected to be exercised with reason and in some cases with due process, etc.
You can say that doesn't apply to the committee of the House because who's to say what they're supposed to do. Maybe no one's out there who can tell you what to do, but this doesn't mean that you can disregard, in my view—Speaking now as a legal advisor to this committee and other committees, I think we have to operate in the House of Commons, not withstanding our exemptions from many laws by virtue of parliamentary privilege, in a responsible manner, as if the laws of the land do apply to us. This is partly because it's the expectation, in my view, of Canadians that all its public figures, public officials, and public institutions will govern themselves generally speaking along the lines of what other institutions do, and that is to say act reasonably and allow for appropriate process.
Having said that, this committee is the judge of whether it shall or shall not go forward in pursuit of a document. Make no question about that. There's no one else other than the House of Commons itself who can interfere with the judgment of this committee about what it wants to pursue. If you are held accountable for that, it's in the court of public opinion, as they say. I just counsel you in the sense that there is a legal context in which you are operating, as we all operate in this country. You can almost say it's like a broad cultural value that's sometimes called the rule of law, but the rule of law is a legal principle that applies more in terms of justiciable issues in a court. But we are in a culture that has legal standards, legal values, and legal expectations, and it's one of reasonableness and process.
You have also in this legal context of course the Auditor General Act. The Auditor General Act gives the Auditor General, as a public official, the power to seek information from government regarding its spending and contracts, etc. I'm sure many of you are well aware of that statute. There are corresponding provisions relative to the Auditor General's work in the Financial Administration Act. That's out there. So there is the Auditor General as an officer of Parliament who could well be asked to look into the leaseback dealings of the government as to whether there's value for money and this sort of thing.
The question you have to ask yourself as a committee, and maybe I'm going beyond my brief here, is whether in what you're looking for you're going further than what's appropriate for a parliamentary committee, and whether in some respects—And this is an issue the public accounts committee in the past has faced, where it was faced with some difficult situations taking place in government. I remember the chair at the time saying this committee is not getting into micro-management, we're not getting into managing government, we're not getting into trying to determine whether the right management decision was taken at a given time; we want to ferret out what took place, in terms of broad principles of probity and honesty, and so on, but we're not getting into management.
So in a similar fashion, you may ask yourself whether in fact what you're asking for is getting into micro-managing or entering into consideration of what is essentially the government's area of responsibility in managing the public funds they're authorized to expend.
While I agree with you, and I certainly want to affirm, and will be the first one to shout the loudest about this, that committees can do what they see fit—There's no question about that, and we don't have a democracy in this country unless this House of Commons and its committees are recognized to have that prerogative, sometimes referred to as the “grand inquest of the nation”. You can't have the House of Commons as the elected chamber carrying out inquiries in the public interest if in fact someone else out there can tell you, no, you can't do that. That is a privilege the House of Commons and its committees enjoy, but it's a privilege, in my view, that has to be or ought to be exercised responsibly—although there's no one who can tell you what that is. That's your own judgment, and I'm sure you will look at that in this frame of mind.
That's about all I would have to say on the position of this committee with respect to its seeking documents from the government.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Walsh, for being here.
I chatted briefly with Ray—who I don't think will mind if I say this—outside the East Block yesterday, and I think there's honest intent on his behalf and that of Madame Bourgeois, Madame Nash, and everybody over there with regard to this issue. So keeping in mind what Mr. Walsh has suggested, and because the wording of the motion is quite vague and the committee is not convinced of the benefit, and so on, that relevant studies and information on the impact of the leasebacks—I think the information that Madame Bourgeois may be looking for may be very different from what Mr. Bonin is looking for and from what Mr. Simard is looking for.
As this is written, I think the committee will be asking the government to exceed what Mr. Walsh has described, which is the reasonable self-restraint of the public interest with regard to the confidentiality agreements the federal government has signed with regard to the sale and leasebacks and the marketing that is going on right now. But there is other information that may not have been brought forward by the minister or the deputy minister or the ADM responsible for real property when they came before the committee, which committee members may not be satisfied with. That's fine, and committee members have every right to ask for whatever information they wish.
So what I would suggest, then, as an alternative to this motion—and this doesn't require a motion—is that committee members put together a list of questions and a list of the very specific information that individual committee members haven't seen and would like to see. We would offer the Department of Public Works the chance to provide a briefing for any committee member who wants a full briefing on this issue in private, one on one, so committee members can have access to the ADM responsible for real property and ask individual questions.
But as this is written, I think Mr. Walsh has been very clear that the motion asks the federal government to violate confidentiality agreements we have signed with people with whom we are doing business with regard to the sale and leasebacks. But there's information beyond that, which many committee members want, and which they feel they haven't had access to, which we'd be more than prepared to deliver. If individual members who have those questions would be clear on what those questions are, I would be glad, as the parliamentary secretary to the , to present those to the minister for a written response as soon as possible.
:
Thank for travelling to meet with us, Mr. Walsh.
First of all, I want to restate a little what I said at our last meeting. It must be clearly understood that this motion does not bear the colour of a party; it is not intended to be partisan. Nor is it a motion designed to prevent the sale of these buildings at all cost. Its purpose is simply to demand that we be provided with the information we need to do our work as members properly.
We have held four meetings of one and a half or two hours on these buildings. However, we have never been able to obtain the desired information. I find that quite pathetic. This is a matter of respect. You ask me what information I'm talking about. I'll give you an example. In 2003, a deputy minister at Public Works Canada appeared before this committee and said she had planning results indicating that the government was an efficient property manager. From what she said, the salaries of the employees who were sorting out those buildings was the only inefficient aspect.
The minister left telling us that the government was not a good property manager. I asked him on what he based that statement, but he did not answer me. We tried to determine even just a small percentage of the amount paid to the banks. We also wanted to know what would be done with the money from the sale of the buildings. Those people never gave us the slightest information about any planning concerning that money. They told us that it would be used to reconstruct other buildings, but without specifying the actual cost of those repairs. They told us they did not have a plan and did not know which direction to take on this issue.
I would like to point out to you that the money from the sale of those nine buildings also belongs to Quebeckers. If you are not accountable to Canadians, I am accountable to Quebeckers. I want my questions answered. I don't want to exceed my rights, but I want answers.
The second time the minister came and testified before this committee, we literally wasted our time. Everything is always confidential. I believe we are able to hold our tongues. We know just how far we can go. It's not a matter of boycotting the minister or the sale of buildings. It's simply a matter of respect for us as parliamentarians, our accountability and the Liability Act, under which we have obligations.
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The argument that we ought not be concerned with the confidentialities that are at stake here because the motion is not enforceable is really a sign of disrespect for the House. What does it say about us if we pass a motion, possibly knowing that it's not good for the country, on the grounds that it can't be enforced?
If it were enforceable, if someone might actually listen to it, then it would be bad, but because it's not enforceable, let's pass it. That's the logic I seem to be hearing, and that is a sign of disrespect to the House.
If the members in this committee honestly believed that the request in this motion would be good for Canada if it were to be implemented, then I'd respect their decision to vote for it; that I could understand. To vote for it because, while it's not good for the country or the taxpayer, it won't be implemented is a self-defeating exercise that shows disrespect for the House of Commons.
Second, there are confidentialities at stake here. I honestly don't believe members over there want to see confidentialities come out that would be detrimental to the Canadian taxpayer. I'm not seeing conspiracies around every corner here.
I would just suggest that the members who are pushing this motion simply amend it to list the precise information they would like to see. If they're not interested in seeing confidentialities, then just say we would like to see specific studies that have been done on the general nature of leasebacks, etc. Just list what it is you're looking for, and then I don't see any problem with the motion.
Perhaps it would be even simpler just to say “that doesn't violate confidentiality provisions in existing government contracts or contracts with suppliers”, or something of that sort, just to demonstrate that this is a good-faith motion designed to enlighten legislators in making a better decision, and not an attempt by a parliamentary committee to infringe upon the confidentiality interests of government and the private sector.
I'm offering a suggestion to those who are pushing this motion that they might limit its impact to areas that are not touched by confidentiality, and that they do so explicitly. Then the motion has a better chance of being followed.
The only other alternative is to put forward something that we know cannot be implemented. Perhaps many people who are voting for the motion don't even want it to be implemented; they're voting for it because they know that it won't be implemented. That is a self-defeating proposition.