Sources say Public Services and Procurement Canada has asked for an extra $500M to \u0027stabilize\u0027 the problem in the face of a rising backlog
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You may unsubscribe any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails or any newsletter. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againSources tell the Post that Public Services and Procurement Canada, the department responsible for Phoenix, has asked for an extra $500 million to “stabilize” the problem in the face of a rising backlog of cases. Last year, government expenditure on Phoenix was $713.7 million across all departments, according to Treasury Board’s departmental results report. In 2019, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated the cost of correcting Phoenix’s data problems at $2.6 billion. That now looks like an underestimate. The Trudeau government is in a ludicrous position where a growing number of people are complaining about mispayment because it did not fix Phoenix before hiring an additional 50,000 public servants — and the only solution is to hire even more bureaucrats to tackle the volume.Article content Michele LaRose, a spokesperson for PSPC, said an increase in the number of transactions being processed at the government Pay Centre in Miramichi, N.B., meant the department hired 172 pay processors in September and another 174 in November. “Due to the pay program’s current funding sun-setting in 2022/23, we are working on measures to ensure continuity of service,” she said.Not only has it underpaid many public servants, it has also overpaid an estimated $500 million to 100,000 employees, which the Auditor General noted is subject to legal time limitations when it comes to cost recovery. At the Commons government operations committee meeting in late November, Public Services and Procurement Minister Helena Jaczek was grilled by opposition MPs over Phoenix’s escalating problems.Article content She admitted that the backlog has grown in excess of 200,000 cases, largely because the government has hired so many public servants. “We’re making progress overall, but as the volume has increased, the numbers in the backlog have also,” she said. Her deputy minister, Paul Thompson, said the number of cases has grown more quickly than the pay centre’s capacity to deal with them.John Ivison: Liberals will have to backtrack on electric vehicle sales push A recent report by the Parliamentary Budget Office said that the federal public service, including the military, grew from 342,000 people in 2015/16 to 391,000 in 2020/21. Personnel costs have grown an average of 6.7 per cent a year, from $39.6 billion to $60.7 billion in the seven years since the Trudeau government was elected, the PBO said. The combination of more people, complex pay structures and an inadequate pay system has resulted in a complete Charlie Foxtrot, to use the military phonetic acronym.Article content Jaczek said the government is carrying out pilot projects of an alternative “Next Generation” system in a number of departments and the plan appears to be to transition to a cheaper technology that could handle pay and human resource requirements for around one third of the operating costs of the Phoenix system. A recommendation will be made to government this fall. But as a separate PBO report on Phoenix from 2019 pointed out, pay file data cannot be transferred to a new system until it is corrected. Hence the need for half a billion new dollars to “stabilize” the system. That request is understood to have been greeted in the Prime Minister’s Office with the enthusiasm it normally reserves for the findings of investigations by the ethics commissioner. But the hard truth appears to be that a new system cannot be launched until the old one is fixed.Article content Stephanie Kusie, the Conservative Treasury Board critic, said the government is “throwing good money after bad as a result of their incompetence.” “It’s close to five years and $2 billion later and this problem is still unresolved, at a time when people are struggling to buy milk and bread,” she said. It should be noted, there is plenty of blame to go around. Phoenix was launched in 2016 to consolidate more than 45 departmental pay systems but it was conceived by the Harper government as a cost-saving measure. The idea was to cut more than half of the 2,000 pay adviser positions, which played a large part in the ensuing screw-up. Still, it was the Liberals who ignored warnings that the system wasn’t ready to be rolled out in April 2016, and it is the Trudeau government that has allowed the problem to fester. The human impact was a backlog of about 600,000 pay complaints by mid-2018, suicides and bank foreclosures.Article content Phoenix is a textbook case for those who question the omni-competence of government, claimed implicitly by its advocates. What can it do, if it cannot pay its own employees? It is also an example of the runaway spending that has characterized this particular government, and helps explain the doubling of the national debt in seven years. Until recently, the question of budget creep was not considered a problem — witness the hiring of 50,000 more public servants. Further, the failures of Phoenix raises concerns about the other large IT projects Ottawa has embarked upon, including benefits modernization, which will see Old Age Security, the Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance administered using new technology programs in the coming years. Phoenix is not so much a mythical bird that has risen from the ashes, as the ghost at the feast that continues to plague the government’s efforts to put its mistakes behind it.
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Ivison: The Phoenix problem got worse as Ottawa hired more civil servants. Now it must hire even more to fix itSources say Public Services and Procurement Canada has asked for an extra $500M to \u0027stabilize\u0027 the problem in the face of a rising backlog
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