President's Message - 2015–16 Report on Plans and Priorities - Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

President's Message

I am pleased to present the 2015–16 Report on Plans and Priorities for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. This report outlines the Secretariat's goals and activities for the upcoming fiscal year.

Modernizing the federal public service is vital to the country's long-term prosperity. The Government of Canada's systems and processes must be periodically reviewed and updated to ensure they provide the programs and services that meet Canadians' changing needs and demonstrate value for money. Our role at the Secretariat is to put in place the management measures to do this.

Three ongoing priorities are modernizing the government's human resources management, reducing red tape and implementing open government. We have made good progress in each of these areas and will continue to advance this work in the year ahead.

Last spring, we reached an agreement on employee and retired employee health-care benefits, and put in place measures to improve the labour relations regime. In addition, all public service employees now have performance management agreements, which promote excellence and continuous improvement, and help build a high-performing workforce. Looking ahead, we are proposing a new sick leave and disability system that is fair to both employees and taxpayers.

Reducing regulatory red tape will continue to be a priority for the Government. In this area, we have implemented a One-For-One Rule that, as of June 2014, had saved Canadian businesses over $22 million in administrative burden and 290,000 hours in time spent dealing with regulatory red tape. To ensure this progress continues, legislation was introduced to give this rule the force of law. Results to date show that our systemic reforms are imposing a new discipline across the federal regulatory system.

We have also made progress in creating a more predictable and transparent regulatory system that is sensitive to the realities of small business. This includes publicly posting new and existing service standards, posting forward regulatory plans on departmental websites, and applying a “small business lens” when considering the impact of new regulations.

In the year ahead, we will maintain this momentum by continuing to refine and further integrate system-wide reforms to monitor, measure and control regulatory red tape.

We will also continue to advance our open government initiative. Building on the success of our first Action Plan on Open Government, we have introduced the Directive on Open Government, which aims to make federal data open “by default.” We also launched our Action Plan on Open Government 2.0, which sets out the actions we will take over the next few years to make our public institutions more transparent and accountable, and help spur innovation and economic benefits.

These are just a few of the priorities we are focusing on in 2015–16. I invite you to read this report to find out more about the work being done at the Secretariat to ensure our government is ready to meet the changing needs of Canadians in the years ahead.

The Honourable Tony Clement
President of the Treasury Board of Canada