Public Services to pitch next step for Phoenix pay fix in September
The office responsible for fixing the troubled Phoenix pay system is taking another step forward, hoping to cut the time it will take to get thousands of public servants paid properly. Problems with Phoenix have left public servants with too little or too much pay for almost two and a half years. Les Linklater, the associate […]
Action plan laid out in new PCO anti-harassment report encouraging, say union heads
Top-level managers are indicating they’re ready to get serious about rooting out harassment in the public service, suggesting in a new report actions with concrete timelines to better support victims and educate employees and managers on the long-standing issue. Safe Workspaces: Starting a Dialogue and Taking Action on Harassment in the Public Service, which was […]
PIPSC members demand answers after VP suddenly resigns, drops harassment claim against union leaders
Members of the second-largest federal public service union are demanding transparency and accountability after they allege two top officials secretly settled a harassment lawsuit against them filed by another executive, leading her to resign and drop her re-election bid. While Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada president Debi Daviau and vice-president Steve Hindle […]
Public service hiring stats useful to show imbalances
Re: “#DMsSoWhite: so few visible-minority senior public servants, feds won’t release stats,” (The Hill Times, Aug. 15, p. 1). Perhaps the focus on the lack of visible minorities in the senior management of the federal public service is unfortunately balanced in the lower ranks. Then-Treasury Board president Lucienne Robillard said in 2002 that “recruitment practices are based on the fundamental values […]
Universities wrong to accept so many foreign medical students, leave us holding the bag when they leave
The tension between Canada and Saudi Arabia has exposed backroom deals by universities with rich foreign nations for admission to medical schools that didn’t put Canadians’ interest first. As a result we are now left in limbo, and lives could be put at risk due to the possible shortage of medical professionals in hospitals if […]
Poverty, homelessness, inequality: a few causes that might outweigh cheaper beer
OTTAWA—Populism scrambles a lot of markers, so maybe nobody cares that Ontario Premier Doug Ford is making a big deal, using government promotional incentives no less, to prioritize in the early days of his administration a possible slight decrease in what Ontarians pay for beer. It’s an amateur move, to be sure, and would seem […]
Expect more deputy minister retirements as the pre-2019 transition machine rumbles to life, say insiders
With a little more than a year until the next election, civil service insiders say there will likely be an increase in deputy minister retirements in the coming months before the bureaucracy starts its process of preparing for a potential change in government in 2019. No one wanted to guess who was leaving or how […]
#DMsSoWhite: so few visible-minority senior public servants, feds won’t release stats
Fewer than 10 of 84 top-level public servants identify as visible minorities: so few that the federal government won’t pinpoint exactly how many there are. That means fewer than 12 per cent of top federal managers say they are people of colour. By comparison, that’s less than the 14.5 per cent of bureaucrats as a whole who […]
Bill C-69: Is anybody thinking about how to implement it?
In a recent piece for The American Interest, political scientist Francis Fukuyama laments that public policy schools are failing because they train students to conduct policy analysis, but completely ignore implementation. The kids are designing ever-more elegant policy proposals, but not how to actually implement them. One wonders if Bill C-69, the federal government’s sweeping […]
Number of top-level public servants rising under Trudeau
The number of top-level federal public servants has gone up by more than 15 per cent in the last decade, with the sharpest increase in the last couple years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, according to the Privy Council Office. In July 2008, there were 72 positions classified at the level of deputy minister or associate […]
