:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good morning to committee members.
Thank you for inviting me to speak to the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner's 2015-16 main estimates and our reports on plans and priorities. I might add that it's a pleasure to appear before your committee again, following my nomination appearance almost a month ago to the day.
[Translation]
Our priorities for 2015-2016 are the following: first, ensuring a sound management of our disclosure and reprisal regime—timely, rigorous and accessible; second, fostering a growing awareness and understanding of the regime; and third, ensuring the human resources capacity is in place to support those first two priorities.
[English]
The way in which we manage cases at the office has evolved over the last eight years, after treating more than 800 files. The office has improved the quality and efficiency of delivering its program by refining and standardizing processes, developing service standards, and seeking feedback from stakeholders.
Looking forward, in order to provide clear guidance for staff and for people who come forward to our office with a disclosure of wrongdoing or a complaint of reprisal, we will continue to update and to publicize as appropriate our policies and procedures based on our ongoing experiences in applying and interpreting the act.
[Translation]
The office will continue to evaluate affordable technology and systems that will support the operations, such as the cross-government shared case management system initiative. In addition, the office continues to consider proposed amendments to the act that would improve the application of the PSPDA.
These priorities are consistent with the guiding principles that I defined during my nomination hearing before this committee last month: accessibility, clarity and consistency.
[English]
Awareness activities have over the last number of years been aimed at management across the organizations to which the act applies. It's a priority to evaluate and implement new approaches to reach a broader section of public servants, which encompasses those working at all levels of federal departments and federal agencies, as well as parent crown corporations.
Our third priority relates to staffing and retention. It's a unique challenge in small organizations and, as I also mentioned in my recent appearance, it's an ongoing challenge. We have a number of planned staffing activities and strategies currently underway, including the re-establishment of qualified pools for key positions within our organization.
In establishing these plans and priorities, we started last fall with a risk evaluation process. The process engaged management staff and our audit and evaluation committee. The same assessment was used by our office to develop a three-year strategic plan and then was used as the basis for establishing operational work plans. I'd like to say that this approach to planning builds partnerships and mobilizes staff toward developing and achieving common objectives. It was part of the process in preparing the 2015-16 report on plans and priorities that we're here to discuss today.
The office is projecting a constant level of spending from 2015-16 through to 2017-18 of $5.4 million, of which $3.7 million is for personnel costs. Of the total, 62% of expenditures are planned for the disclosure and reprisal program—that's our core mandate—and the balance is for what we have described as internal services.
[Translation]
PSIC has started 2015-2016 with 55 active files, of which 16 are investigations underway. Last year, the number of new files was comparable with activity levels in recent years.
[English]
While we don't control the number, the type, or the complexity of the disclosures and reprisal files we receive, we do monitor our workload closely and plan our resource expenditures accordingly to the extent possible. I'm confident we're able to manage within our budget at the present time and in the present circumstances.
Mr. Chair, I am also confident of our capacity to meet the challenges ahead. I look forward to keeping you and your fellow committee members advised of our continuing progress in this regard.
[Translation]
I would be pleased to answer any questions or provide details on our office.
Thank you.
:
Again, thanks for having us. I'd like to take this opportunity of meeting with you today to discuss our main estimates, as we are required to do, and our reports on plans and priorities.
The Public Service Commission is responsible for safeguarding merit-based appointments and making sure that appointments are free from political influence and, in collaboration with other stakeholders within our system, to protect the non-partisan nature of the public service. As you may know, we report independently to Parliament for our mandate, and we also administer programs on behalf of departments and agencies in order to recruit qualified Canadians from across the country.
Under the delegated staffing system that we manage, it is set out under the Public Service Employment Act. The Public Service Commission fulfills its mandate by providing policy guidance and expertise, conducting effective oversight, and delivering innovative staffing and assessment services.
[Translation]
Now, I would like to turn to our strategic priorities for this year.
Our first priority is to provide independent oversight on the health of the staffing system and protect merit-based staffing and the non-partisan nature of the public service. Those are our main principles. The commission oversees the staffing system through regular monitoring, and conducting audits and investigations, where needed. Based on these oversight feedback mechanisms, we are able to assess the management of staffing and identify areas for improvement.
Throughout the year, we will continue to provide policy guidance and advice, and work collaboratively with organizations to enhance our support to address not only issues detected through our oversight, but also to promote innovation in all aspects.
We are adapting our approach to auditing small and micro-sized organizations, which have significantly fewer staffing activities. That means we are distancing ourselves from the standardized approach—the one-size-fits-all approach—and adapting our mechanisms to the organizations' needs and structure.
[English]
As for political impartiality, we will continue to engage with stakeholders on issues related to merit-based staffing and non-partisan public service.
The Public Service Commission has developed a number of tools available on our website to inform public servants on both their legal rights and their responsibilities related to political activities. These tools are redistributed across a number of departments. For instance, we have an online tool to help public servants self-assess their own particular circumstances in order to make an informed decision about whether to engage in a political activity. We also launched a video to inform public servants of the process involved should they wish to become a candidate in a federal, provincial, or municipal election, and we are working on other tools presently for other portions of our mandate.
Our latest staffing survey found that employees' awareness continued to increase. Over 75% of respondents were aware of their rights and their responsibilities with respect to political activities, which is up from 72% in a previous survey.
[Translation]
Our second priority is to enhance our policy and oversight frameworks to ensure that they are fully integrated, thus improving the staffing process across the public service. It is important for us to be consistent in the actions we take with our partners, the departments.
We have more than 10 years of experience with full delegation of staffing authorities to deputy heads. Our staffing system is mature and works well. Organizations now have in place strong internal capacities to monitor their own staffing processes. The operational realities and staffing needs of organizations have evolved.
As a result, we are currently reviewing our policies and associated guidance with a stronger focus on our role of providing expert advice and support to enable deputy heads to exercise their delegated authorities.
As part of our focus on integration and modernization, we are also adapting our oversight mechanisms to a risk-based approach, while providing support through outreach activities and training sessions for organizations and stakeholders.
[English]
Our third priority is to offer support and expertise in staffing assessment to delegated organizations and stakeholders. We are modernizing our processes, systems, and tools in close collaboration with stakeholders, based on a single-window approach. We continue to modernize our services, to expand the use of technology, and to make it more user-friendly.
Over the years, we have made significant progress in moving from paper-and-pencil testing to online testing. Approximately 70% of PSC's tests are now administered online. This means reduced operational costs, better security features, faster scoring, and quicker communications. The results are now available within 24 hours, as compared to 15 days, which was the case prior to online testing.
For the post-secondary recruitment campaign, the use of paper-and-pencil exams was reduced by more than 90%. We went from 33,000 exams in 2010-11 down to 2,600 in 2014-15. Operating costs were reduced by over 29%, from $736,000 in 2010-11 down to $500,000 in 2014-15. We saw similar efficiencies in our second-language evaluation testing. More than 92% of them are administered online.
We also support departments with their own online testing, which are on our testing platform, by hosting their standardized online tests. We currently host 14 standardized department tests on our platform. For fiscal year 2014-15, we estimate that these tests will be administered to more than 20,000 candidates.
Other key innovations include unsupervised Internet testing. This allows organizations to identify candidates early in the hiring process who are more likely to succeed in subsequent supervised testing. This type of pre-screening reduces costs and time to staff, while increasing the quality of hires. We estimate that, during the fiscal year 2014-15, unsupervised Internet tests were used in 35 recruitment processes. We believe that the use of unsupervised Internet testing for those processes reduced the cost of testing by over $500,000 for hiring departments.
This type of testing has two other important advantages. First, it increases access to public service jobs by allowing applicants to take the test at the location of their choosing, no matter where they live in Canada. Second, it provides greater accessibility by removing testing barriers for persons with disabilities, who can now use their own adaptive technology at home to do their exams.
We will continue to look for ways to innovate, to improve user experience and expand access to opportunities in the public service.
[Translation]
Staffing and recruitment are an important part of the commission's role. Last year, we reported an increase in hiring and staffing activities for the first time in nearly four years. While student hiring was up by 8.6%, permanent hiring of new graduates was down.
We are concerned that the portion of employees under the age of 35 is also down. Those trends have implications for the renewal and future composition of the public service, and we continue to look for the best mechanisms to attract and recruit graduates.
Our post-secondary recruitment campaign is one of the tools that we use to recruit graduates. Last fall, the commission, in collaboration with departments and agencies, participated in more than 20 career fairs in all regions of Canada.
[English]
This year we have aIso focused on preparations for the implementation of the , which received royal assent on March 31. We are continuing those preparations in order to move to full implementation of the legislation. Once it comes into force, this act will change different mechanisms that support the hiring of veterans and current members of the Canadian Armed Forces into the federal public service.
We have been working very closely with our colleagues at Veterans Affairs and the Department of National Defence, and are ready to implement these changes. The draft regulations are now close to completion.
Given our responsibility for administering the priority entitlements within the federal public service, we want to make sure that the entitlements of the medically released Canadian Armed Forces members are fully respected. We are considering additional initiatives to support veterans as well as current Canadian Armed Forces members in bringing their valuable experience and skills to the federal public service. For instance, the commission itself is looking to hire veterans to help Canadian Armed Forces members and other veterans to navigate the Canadian public service staffing system. We're also working right now to finalize training modules and to help human resources advisers and are hiring managers to apply these changes in the system.
[Translation]
Finally, I would like to speak to you about our financial situation. In our main estimates for 2015-2016, the commission is authorized to spend $83.6 million. In addition, it has an authority to recover up to $14 million of the costs of our counselling and assessment products and services provided to federal organizations. We have sufficient resources to deliver on our mandate, and we will only spend what is needed.
For the commission, the most serious risk would be not being able to fully respond in a timely manner to government-wide transformation initiatives and to realize efficiencies. However, we continue to closely monitor all possible scenarios in our planning.
[English]
Mr. Chair, we recognize that our responsibilities form but one of the many elements of the overall framework for people management in the public service. ln order for that whole to remain modern, effective, and responsive, we continue to explore ways in which we can better perform our roles with respect to the merit and non-partisanship of our system.
We look forward to working with departments and agencies to achieve the priorities that we have set out. We will continue to foster strong collaboration and relationships with parliamentarians, bargaining agents, and other stakeholders, so that Canadians will continue to benefit from a professional and non-partisan public service.
Thank you very much. We're ready to take your questions.
To the point that young Canadians need jobs, we're working with departments at different levels. We're working at the deputy minister level, doing presentations. We're working with different communities, like the young professionals network, the middle managers network, and so on. We're trying to work with them to bring people into the government.
Let's say that we have the jobs identified and so on. What we need to do, and what we've been doing over the last couple of years, is more outreach. We've been going to job fairs—over 20 job fairs in the fiscal year we just finished—which is good because there are expenses that come with it and so on. This time we are doing it in a more informed way. Before we go to the school, we check to see who is going, so there is more convergence with the other departments. We're not doing it all ourselves.
All of the deputy ministers are champions of a university somewhere in Canada. We weren't working very closely with them before; now we are. Before we go to the school that they are championing, we get a briefing from them. We give them a briefing. When they go, they tell us, and when we come back from the career fair, we do a little survey and we send that to them. We say that when we went there, about 500 people came and so on.
What's interesting is that there is interest, as mentioned by the chair. We have one big campaign during the fall, the post-secondary recruitment. This is a big campaign to recruit from outside. There are roughly 18,000 applications, roughly 13,000 individual applicants, and they go through the tests and so on. We give them a little survey and we ask them questions.
It is interesting that a lot of younger Canadians think that the jobs are all in Ottawa. If they don't want to come to Ottawa, that is one thing. However, it is not true, as 60% of the jobs are in the regions and roughly 40% in the NCR. They think that the jobs are all bilingual, which is not the fact either. They think that the jobs are all at entry level. When we do those campaigns, they think it's for entry level and that, for instance, there are administrative jobs only, which is not the fact. There are all kinds of scientist jobs, engineers, nurses, psychologists and so on.
To wrap it up, we're trying to do better outreach and to build a relationship with all those schools and the community. We can't go everywhere. The communities are kind of our ambassadors at the same time.