Opening Remarks for Patrick Borbey President, Public Service Commission of Canada at the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

May 18, 2017
9:45 to 10:45 a.m.
Room 237-C, Centre Block

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Thank you Madame Chair for the opportunity to appear before the Committee to discuss the Public Service Commission of Canada’s Main Estimates along with our Departmental Plan. I am joined today by Tim Pettipas, Acting Senior Vice-President and Philip Morton, Acting Vice-President of Corporate Affairs and our Chief Financial Officer.

This is my first Committee appearance as President of the PSC, having only been recently confirmed and appointed yesterday, May 17, 2017. I would like to sincerely thank the members of this Committee for the confidence you showed in me by supporting my nomination.

When I appeared before this Committee last month to discuss my nomination, I noted a number of priorities, including accessibility, diversity, bilingualism and strategies for the recruitment of youth and veterans.

Today, I would like to expand on these a bit in the context of your study of the PSC’s Estimates and Departmental Plan.

Let me start by saying how proud I am to lead an organization that plays such a pivotal role in building and maintaining Canada’s merit-based, non-partisan public service.

The PSC has undergone many changes since it was created in 1908. While the cornerstone of our work – merit and non-partisanship – remains the same, our operating context is rapidly changing. The Public Service Employment Act continues to guide us. It spells out the PSC’s mandate:

• Independently safeguarding merit and non-partisanship;
• Building a public service that is representative of Canada’s diversity, drawn from across the country, and able to serve the public with integrity and in the official language of choice;
• Allowing managers the flexibility to staff to achieve results for Canadians; and
• Ensuring fair and transparent employment practices.

It is not enough to simply adapt existing strategies in an effort to keep pace with this change. Effective leadership is more and more about anticipating future trends and needs and proactively defining innovative strategies. We will need to take informed and intelligent risks to push the perceived and real boundaries of staffing if we are to bring in the next generation of Canadians, and build a diverse workforce capable of meeting tomorrow’s challenges.

We also need to work even more closely with our partners in advancing a whole-of-government approach to recruitment and non-partisanship.

Our focus needs to be on recruiting the next generation of public servants. This is a priority for the Clerk of the Privy Council, for departments, agencies and for the PSC. Our last annual report highlighted the fact that almost 25% of all public servants would be eligible to retire in the next five years – and that almost 12% could retire immediately. I was also shocked to learn that only 20.5% of public servants are aged 34 and under, compared to a workforce availability of 34%. However, what is encouraging is that in the past five years, over half of both terms and indeterminate hires were under the age of 35.

Recruiting millennials is essential to the future sustainability of the public service. But retaining and developing them will be equally important. We need to be less focussed on hierarchy and process and more focussed on innovation, intelligent risk taking and delivering measureable results for Canadians. As I said when I appeared before the Senate Committee of the Whole, this also means accepting that sometimes there will be failure and that we can learn and improve from failure.

From a human resources perspective, federal departments and agencies need to make sure they are recruiting the right people with the right skills to take over the important work of building Canada and supporting Canadians well beyond our country’s 150th birthday. When new employees are hired, we need to “onboard” them properly so they feel welcome and can begin contributing immediately. We also need to make sure they understand the balance between participating in political activities and working in a non-partisan manner.

I am sure you will also agree that the public service can benefit from hiring more veterans. These are individuals who have shown their commitment to public service, they have benefited from Government of Canada training and many of them have a range of skills and competencies that are in demand. For example, we can certainly strengthen our capacities in project management and large scale operations. The Veterans Hiring Act has provided the means, but we need to do more to collectively embrace this opportunity.

Diversity is the foundation for a highly effective, innovative workforce. We need to focus less on targets, though important, and more on outcomes. As opposed to only looking at accessibility and accommodations as requirements, we need to look at this as a means to improve our candidate pools and make the public service a preferred career choice for Canadians of diverse backgrounds and all abilities. I am looking forward to seeing the lessons learned from the name-blind recruitment pilot, and am interested in continued experimentation to help inform strategies to help support diversity in the federal public service.

I intend to make official languages a key priority. I am a big believer in the concept of receptive bilingualism, where all employees can participate in meetings in their official language of choice, and fully understand what is being said in the other official language. Additionally, employees must share the responsibility of becoming bilingual and in maintaining their level of bilingualism. I also think that within the public service we need to modernize second language standards and look at greater use of technology and other alternatives to the way we assess the second language abilities of candidates and employees.

The PSC has made progress in recent years in reducing unnecessary staffing-related reporting and the administrative burden placed on departments, agencies and hiring managers and this will continue to be a key priority over my mandate. The changes made in support of the New Direction in Staffing recognized that a one-size-fits-all model across departments was not the best approach. This resulted in the PSC providing deputy heads with the ability to better customize their staffing models to meet their unique needs.

Much work has also been done to improve the application process for federal employment. We are making progress on this front and I am pleased to report that based on recent changes, students are now able to complete an application for employment in only six minutes – a sure sign that innovation leads to increased effectiveness and efficiency.

We need to move away from our traditional model of posting a job ad and hoping good candidates apply. We need to move to a more active model where we reach out to future employees if we are to achieve our goal of hiring a diverse workforce - one that will best allow us to deliver on our commitments.

In short, it means we need to find new ways to attract high-quality candidates, streamline our application process and explore new and effective ways of assessing candidates. We need to identify and understand our gaps in recruitment, and build solutions working with those we seek to attract. I also know time to staff remains a frustration for many, but progress has been made in targeted areas. Much more remains to be done, and this is something we will continue to work on, in close collaboration with departments.

In addition, we will continue to make better use of social media and communicate to job applicants and departments using language that is more informal, more open and gets to the point more quickly. Overly bureaucratic language that is unnecessarily complicated detracts, rather that attracts, the next generation of public servants.

Now, if you will allow, I will quickly explain our estimates.

The PSC has $83.5M in planned spending for the current and next fiscal year. The majority of the PSC’s spending is on salaries for over 800 full-time equivalents who work both in the National Capital Region and in regional offices across the country. Our people continue to be our most important resource as we deliver on our priorities to promote and safeguard a merit-based, representative and non-partisan public service that serves all Canadians on behalf of Parliament, departments, agencies and Canadians.

We would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.