While the current government has been right to criticize the last one for laying off hundreds of compensation staff before it rolled out Phoenix, it’s the decisions around outsourcing such projects in the first place that demand a rethink.
Ordinarily, the announcement earlier this month that spending by the Department of Defence (DND) will grow from its current $18.9 billion to $32.7 billion by 2026 would be cause for Canadians (and especially PIPSC members employed by DND) to feel more secure. But references throughout Strong, Secure, and Engaged, Canada’s new defence policy, leave little doubt that continued over-reliance on outsourced services will form a major part of DND’s future. The policy is already raising alarms among other unions.
In addition, Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s commitment to kick in $35 billion of federal infrastructure money to attract even more private sector funding of federal projects suggests the trend could become permanent.
Rather than continue to increase the number of outsourced services, DND needs to commit to reducing them (and much sooner than 2026!) and to reinvesting in the staff it already employs. A good place to start would be by implementing the new provisions of the recent CS Group contract with PIPSC.
Decreasing federal reliance on so-called public-private partnerships (P3s), such as last year’s “multi-year $322 million contract to Uptime Infrastructure Partners for the expansion of Shared Services Canada (SSC) Enterprise Data Centre (EDC)” at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Borden, Ontario, should also be a priority.
I will be writing to Minister Harjit S. Sajjan in the next few days to encourage him to do just that.
Better Together!
Debi Daviau
President
The recent recommendations of yet another consultants’ report on Shared Services Canada (SSC) demonstrate that, when it comes to federal government outsourcing, there’s no shortage of private sector advice. The “SSC Resource Alignment Review,” begun last year at a cost of $1.35 million by Gartner Canada Co., criticizes the government for the fact that it “vastly underestimated the size, scale and complexity” of its IT plans. It then proceeds to recommend a number of changes – e.g., a joint SSC Transition Task Force comprised of industry representatives and government executives, a “relief valve” to allow departments to find alternatives when SSC can’t deliver, and the need to consider a new structure for SSC, “such as an agency, crown corporation, strategic partnership, joint venture” – all of which would, if implemented, promote even wider outsourcing of services than is practiced now.
It seems like only yesterday that Public Services Minister Judy Foote stood in the House of Commons and insisted SSC would not be allowed to outsource nearly a third of its workforce, as a 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers report commissioned by SSC sought to do. This latest report deserves to meet the same fate.
After successfully negotiating stronger language to protect our CS Group members from the impacts of outsourcing, the suggestion that Shared Services should now be outsourced on an even grander scale than proposed under the Harper government is a bitter irony, given the Liberal government’s promises in 2015 to reduce spending on outside consultants to 2005-06 levels.
Equally troubling is the fact that the report’s “Management Summary” (the full report has not been made public) lists no fewer than 34 instances in which information has been redacted, meaning that the government is not sharing all the analysis and recommendations on which the report is based. PIPSC is filing access to information requests to learn more.
All of this comes on the heels of another separate report based on a 2016 survey of SSC employees by Ipsos Public Affairs which found, among other things, that outsourcing has contributed to a massive drop in morale at the department – a finding that corroborates our own survey findings of 2015.
Outsourcing didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now – as we are constantly reminded by the chronic cost overruns, delays and other problems associated with email consolidation, the Canada.ca website and pay transformation alone.
When it comes to outsourcing we’re all at risk of being Phoenixed.
The government should stop its overreliance on outsourcing and start listening to its own employees. That begins with investing in our members and the resources they need to make SSC succeed, not outside companies.
PIPSC will be writing to Treasury Board President Scott Brison to convey our concerns in detail and will pursue all means at our disposal to ensure the Gartner report is never implemented.
Better Together.
Debi Daviau,
President
A new report commissioned by Shared Services Canada (SSC) shows that the Institute is right in highlighting the dangers of outsourcing in the federal government.
The report, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs and made public earlier this week, summarizes the results of consultations held in the summer and fall of 2016 with agency employees, their fellow public servants, industry representatives and the Canadian public.
In one of the report’s key findings, SSC employees directly linked the Agency’s well-documented morale problems with the excessive use of external contractors, the lack of internal career advancement opportunities, and staff turnover.
In 2015, a PIPSC survey of CS Group members found that 91% of respondents reported contracted-out positions were never posted internally. That finding – and others – formed part of a report the Institute released in June 2016 titled Programmed to Fail, which argued outsourcing is actually costing the federal money, jobs, morale, accountability and productivity.
The Phoenix pay system fiasco and the stalled federal email transformation initiative are unfortunate, ongoing examples of large multinationals undertaking work best performed internally by the government’s own technical specialists such as CS Group members.
The evidence against outsourcing is in – and mounting. The federal government should pay careful attention to the report’s findings and to the concerns expressed by key stakeholders before undertaking any further projects to modernize its IT infrastructure.
Transcript:
The government employees who take care of everything from Canada's environment to our tax system and data security are being systematically replaced by something else: a shadow public service,made up of private contractors.
This process of contracting out services and functions previously performed by the government is called outsourcing, and Canada’s over-reliance on outsourcing increasingly threatens the public services that we all rely on.
Take the Canadian government's payroll system. The government spent $142 million to outsource the development of the Phoenix payroll system. But it's already costing an additional $50 million dollars to fix its never-ending malfunctions. Those malfunctions have negatively impacted over 80,000 government workers and their families. That’s 1 in 4 workers.
Because they haven't been paid - sometimes for months at a time - thousands of these workers are in debt and some are even at risk of losing their homes.
Someone didn't trust the government's own experts to build Phoenix, and now, those same experts are paying the price.
That's just one project. The Canadian Government spends over $10 billion annually on outsourcing. That's more than the combined budgets of 10 major federal departments.
The government is outsourcing things that a government exists to do in the first place; things we have a permanent need for. Imagine what the same kind of reckless outsourcing at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, or Health Canada, or the Nuclear Safety Commission.
It’s time to put an end to Canada's over-reliance on outsourcing.
It’s time to invest in Canadian public servants.
It’s time to invest in Canada.