2009 Legislative Session: First Session, 39th Parliament

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

MINUTES AND HANSARD

MINUTES SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Monday, November 16, 2009

9:00 a.m.

Douglas Fir Committee Room

Parliament Buildings, Victoria, B.C.

Present: John Les, MLA (Chair); Doug Donaldson, MLA (Deputy Chair); Norm Letnick, MLA; Don McRae, MLA; Bruce Ralston, MLA; Bill Routley, MLA; Jane Thornthwaite, MLA; John van Dongen, MLA

Unavoidably Absent: Michelle Mungall, MLA; John Rustad, MLA

1. Pursuant to its terms of reference, the Committee began its review of the three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budget estimates of the Independent Officers of the Legislative Assembly.

Merit Commissioner

• Joy Illington, Commissioner

2. The Committee adjourned at 9:59 a.m. to the call of the Chair.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.

The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

select standing committee on
Finance and Government Services

Monday, November 16, 2009

Issue No. 15

ISSN 1499-4178

[ Page 401 ]

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009

The committee met at 9:05 a.m.

[J. Les in the chair.]

J. Les (Chair): Good morning, everyone. To members of the committee, welcome back. It's been so long. We're minus two members this morning. John Rustad is away, and Michelle is away this morning.

We're here this morning to have a discussion with the Merit Commissioner, or at least she who was the Merit Commissioner. Good morning to you and to the staff, Shelley and Lanny.

In the gallery we have the Ombudsperson, Kim Carter. Good morning to you too.

Why don't I turn it over to you first, Joy? By the way, we appreciate your coming in and doing this. I made light of the fact, you know, that you are she who was, but it's indeed a pleasure to have you come back and make this presentation on behalf of the office, almost on your own time, as it were. Very much appreciated.

Office of the Merit Commissioner

J. Illington: Thank you, Members. I will be brief. I know you've got a busy morning ahead of you.

You've got two documents in front of you. One is the service plan, and the second is the budget. If I may, I'll just take a few moments to go through the service plan. I'm aware that there are a number of people who are new to this committee and, perhaps, new to the idea of the Merit Commissioner, so if I may, I'll just very quickly go through the service plan, just to give you an overview of what it is that the Merit Commissioner's office does.

If you turn to page 2, you'll see just an overview of "The public service as a workforce." These figures are current as of the end of August, so there are about 36,000 employees, and about 80 percent of them are unionized. They're organized into 21 ministries, and there are also 15 agencies and seven independent officers, all of whom appoint staff under the Public Service Act.

With the exception of OIC appointments — there are about 300 of them in government — the Merit Commissioner does review appointments. All appointments must be made on merit. The Merit Commissioner does the review. If you turn to page 3, you can see in the little box "How we work." We do audits of new appointments. We do special audits of categories of appointments, and I'll talk about those very briefly later.

We provide a final staffing review. Anyone who is employed by the B.C. public service has the ability…. If they feel that they applied for a job and they didn't get it and the reason that they didn't get it was something to do with merit, they may apply for a review. They may apply for a review. Step 1 — just getting feedback on their own application. Step 2 is from their deputy minister or the head of their organization. Then step 3 is, if they applied for a position in the bargaining unit, that they have the right to request a review from the Merit Commissioner. That's how staffing reviews…. It's an expedited appeal process in front of the Merit Commissioner.

We do an analysis of the annual work environment survey that is given to every one of the public service members once a year in about March. We also do focus groups and surveys, and we do a lot of outreach about the value of merit. We make the connection to people that merit is one of the four key drivers of employee engagement.

Employee engagement is absolutely critical to productivity. If you want a productive and engaged workforce, which you must have in order to deliver the services that British Columbians need, then you do have to pay attention to hiring on the basis of merit.

Finally, we do an annual report and make recommendations.

[0910]

I want to also just turn, if I may, to page 7, where you see a little graph that talks about the "Year-to-year comparison of merit performance, annual audits." On page 7 of the service plan, you'll see in 2005 we just looked at…. The green is appointments based on merit. Yellow is merit with exceptions — in other words, although that hiring was based on merit, or the promotion was, there was some aspect of hiring policy or collective agreement that wasn't followed properly. And a very small 3 percent is merit not applied.

You can see that that has stayed relatively the same. I'm just making that 80 percent to merit and then other parts of it not based completely on merit. I'm only reporting the first half of 2009. We're now reporting out the third quarter of 2009, so please don't be concerned about the very last one, which is sort of faded out, I think, so you can see.

I am going to talk about the work environment survey. On page 8, in the box, you'll see that this is the annual work environment survey that is administered by the Public Service Agency. These are the overall results. So if you took all…. I think there was something close to 27,000 people who answered the question.

There are two questions, but there's one important one: "In my workplace the selection of a person for a position is based on merit." It may be kind of shocking to you to see that only 52 percent agreed. However, when I started this position in 2006, 40 percent agreed. So it's increased by 12 percent.

I must say that looking at the overall results is a bit too broad, because if you look at individual ministries, you'll see where individual ministries have very high results in some places and very low results in other places. I wanted to draw this to your attention, because we're going to be doing some interesting work there.
[ Page 402 ]

That's sort of the overview, if I may, just on that. Then I want to just get right down to the three things that are going to be most important to the Merit Commissioner's office in the next three years. I'd say that just in the last three years the Merit Commissioner's office has done some robust audits to provide some baseline data that you saw about the incidents or the level of merit-based hiring and promotions throughout the public service.

Now, the next three years is going to be a time of change, and it's going to be a change in part because of the influence of the Merit Commissioner's office. When I came before the committee last year and reported the results of the 2007-08 audit, one of the things that you did see then was that in 20 percent of appointments managers were not following really basic hiring, legal policy or collective agreement obligations.

They weren't doing it not because there was widespread misconduct but because managers had been delegated all of the hiring. They had a lack of information and a lack of support. Many managers were new to hiring and many managers were simply new to the public service. This shows a real vulnerability in a public service hiring system, and one of the recommendations made was to do some systematic and a bit of a campaign of education about hiring.

Government decided not to do that. They have announced a different approach, and it's an approach that I'm supportive of as well. That is that the hiring system is going to change from the delegated model, where all managers are delegated the hiring, to a centralized model.

The B.C. Public Service Agency will now be government's corporate hiring centre. They're all professional HR people. They're going to recruit, assess and prequalify pools of people. They'll refer prequalified candidates out to managers, who are basically then just hiring to see "who will fit best with the team that I have and the objectives I have to meet."

Promotions are also going to be managed centrally. So now annual audits, which sample new appointments made throughout the province…. And we sample by large and small ministries for bargaining unit and excluded management positions. We'll also now include the hiring centre's process.

[0915]

Our audit program, which has been one that looked at individual competitions, is going to have to change a bit to reflect the changed process for hiring and involving prequalified pools. It can be changed. It's something that is going to require a lot of cooperation, and I anticipate that that will be the case with the Public Service Agency.

So the annual audit is one thing that will change. The second change is special audits. I did say that in 2009 there'd been a response rate to the workplace environment survey of 87 percent. That's 23,000 employees and a bit — 23,500. There are two questions about fair and merit-based staffing practices. Each year we've sliced and diced that work environment survey a bit. We've looked at it by ministry, by job description, by region. We've looked to see if there are differences by age, gender, years of service, level of engagement and appointment status.

This year, in '09-10, we're doing the first special audit of appointments that are just by, in a sense, job classification. We selected a job classification which has been down at the very bottom of people who agreed that merit was the basis on which people got jobs. We've actually selected the classification of peace officer, law enforcement, conservation. It's all one classification, and it tends to be sheriffs, correctional officers and conservation officers.

This year, in 2009, more than 58 percent disagreed that merit was the basis on which people were selected for their positions. We're looking at that because that seems such an anomaly compared to the annual audit results that we get. We're going to learn a lot more, and I suspect that that job classification is also going to learn a lot more about merit as we go through that.

We'll be doing that. We have not started that audit. It will start right at the close of 2009 because we intend to audit every single one of the appointments that are made to that classification — not to the beginning level but to the next level up. The special audit for the following year is going to be building on what we learn from doing this audit that I'm just explaining to you now, that special audit.

The third one is on staffing reviews. With 80 percent of the public service being in bargaining unit positions — and 80 percent is a lot of people; almost 20,000 employees — you would imagine that I might be getting a fair number of reviews. I would say I've never had fewer reviews, but I've never had more informal complaints.

I'm suggesting that the Merit Commissioner for the coming year does a special survey making sure that employees know that the Public Service Act gives them a right of review and also asking a bit about the attitudes about the use of that review. My concern is that while legislatures often supply something like a right of request to employees, sometimes the work culture makes people afraid to use that right. I want to know that.

I think that a survey will let people know whether or not…. It may very well indicate that people know about that right and they're not using it, which would be a good sign, a good indicator, a positive indicator. But on the other hand, if people know about that right and they're afraid to use it, then I do think that following on that will be some discussions with the public service about letting people know that.

Certainly from my point of view, every deputy minister would welcome reviews. They want to know if people think that things haven't been going fairly within their own ministry.
[ Page 403 ]

Those are the three great challenges.

[0920]

I should lead you through the performance measures, if I may. On page 4 the performance measures for audits are simply that we report at a confidence level that allows us to generalize from the results of our sample to what's going on across the public service. We have exceeded that confidence level in the past, and we are setting ourselves a confidence level of 90 percent. In the past we have been reporting confidence levels of 95 percent, just so that you do know that.

The special audits are completed and reported. As you see, I have targeting "low-merit results in work environment survey." Those are the ones that we're consistently going to go after over the next three years, because that will, I think, help close the gap between what employees perceive and what the Merit Commissioner's office is able to measure by way of audits and reviews.

On page 5, for staffing reviews. When an employee asks for a review, there are kind of two sets of uncertainty. One is whether or not that job can be confirmed or whether or not the deputy minister will be asked to reconsider on the basis of a review. It's important to do that quickly. There's nothing in the act that says this, but I've set the target that we'll complete those reviews within 30 days.

In most cases we've been able to get that done quickly. Sometimes it's been a case of people away on holidays, etc., that hasn't allowed us to talk to everyone that we wanted, but it's important that a thorough staffing review decision be provided not just to the employee but to the employer as well — within 30 days. That's the end of the measures.

If I may, I'll just speak about the core strategies just for two quick things. You may have heard that the government's corporate human resources plan does some very thorough projections. One of the things that it is projecting is that by 2014, 45 percent of managers and 35 percent of the bargaining unit employees are eligible to retire. At this point, retirements look like they're on track, even with the downturn in the economy.

What has slowed is the number of voluntary exits. People are less anxious to leave the public service at this moment. But it still looks like, in the future — with the retirements, with not filling vacancies — there'll be a reduction of about 20 percent, at this moment. That is what is projected of the B.C. public service. So 30 percent would've been 10,000 people; 20 percent will be slightly less than that. This will require a highly engaged workforce to deliver public services to a growing population. It will also require a lot of other things — a lot of innovation, etc. That is sort of the core strategy of government.

One of our strategies has been not just to deal with the lag indicators. The lag indicators are those red boxes that you saw, saying: "These appointments were not based on merit." What we've been looking at are the leading indicators — those things that are indicators to you, ahead of time — that what we've got is a public service that has really internalized the principle of merit and understands that not only should this be done as a matter of good leadership and good ethics but that it's good business principles to do hiring on the basis of merit as well.

We've used a framework that talks about senior management commitment to the principle of merit, continuous improvement in the principle of merit and employee involvement and responsibility. You can see that on page 6. The left-hand column just gives some leading indicators of workplace culture, some leading indicators of a merit-based hiring system and some leading indicators of employee responsibility. Those three things are the way that we've looked at framing a framework of positive indicators as opposed to the lag indicators.

[0925]

The very last thing. I understand that I should just tell you a bit about progress on key commitments. We're on track for the 2009 annual audit. We audit within weeks of an appointment being made these days. We do that so that deputy ministers can get a quick report back. It helps correct any errors, so that the same manager doesn't keep making the same mistake over and over again, and it gives some very good indicators and trends of what's going on, what needs to be fixed quickly and not.

Secondly, the special audit, as I said, for 2008-09 for temporary short-term appointments — that's been a pretty big audit. Just to recap for a moment, you can make temporary appointments for less than seven months. You don't have to compete those appointments, obviously. Historically, they were for the kinds of jobs where you needed people but they didn't have to be the best people. They just had to be people qualified to do the job. So they were, in olden times, snow removal, firefighting, roadbuilding — those kinds of things.

They're not good examples these days, since firefighting has become an extremely specialized art, but that's what temporary appointments of less than seven months are meant to be. You don't have to have competitions for that.

What concerns me is when we see appointments that are meant to be temporary — for less than seven months — renewed over and over and over. In some cases we've seen them renewed for years, which works to the detriment of the public service. People are wondering why it is that someone is being continuously renewed — why it hasn't gone to competition.

Other people who would like to have that opportunity are disconsolate that they are not having the opportunity to compete for the job. There's almost a deterrent effect, where it becomes "Lanny's job" instead of a job that should be open to all people.

So we have done a special audit just looking at those appointments, and we're focusing very specifically on
[ Page 404 ]
the 21 percent of appointments for that group of less than seven months that have been renewed multiple times, some as much as up to five years. I will be reporting on that in the annual report, because we are in train in that special audit now.

I've told you about our '09-10 into the group that has consistently replied, over the last three years, most negatively about staffing being based on merit. We also did a look this year at merit and how other organizations have increased diversity while upholding merit. We've looked at two private organizations that have been prize-winners in terms of having diverse workforces, and we've also looked at the Ontario public service, which has recently won a prize on doing that.

The reason that we've said that is that a public service hired through a merit-based process should reflect the diversity of people, skills and ideas available in the province's labour force. And at this moment B.C. Stats indicates that the B.C. public service is not as diverse, in terms of young workers, as is the available public workforce, or for visible minorities, as is the provincial labour force.

In fact, curiously enough, we saw that if we had just looked at the Legislative Assembly — the Members of the Legislative Assembly as they were elected in the last election — they are more diverse than the B.C. public service. I just thought that was an interesting quick comparison, if I could.

Staffing reviews, as I've said, are fewer than in previous years, but the number of people in groups that have contacted my office with informal complaints has never been higher, and that's what's provided the impetus.

So the three priorities, as I say, are.... I'm now on page 8. The annual audits which sample new appointments will include the hiring centre and will include a change in audit process. The special audit will build on the audit that we're doing this year of the conservation officers, sheriffs and correctional officers job classification. And the staffing reviews — we'll do a survey.

[0930]

That is the service plan writ large. On page 9 you can see I have a very small office — four people — and we keep our costs down through Shared Services. The Ombudsman's office, the Police Complaint Commissioner, the Information and Privacy Commissioner and the Merit Commissioner share services all together. That is why Lanny Hubbard, who is director of Corporate Services, is on my left. His understudy and soon to be replacement, I believe, is Shelley Forrester, the director of Shared Services. So you will see these two people accompany the next three independent officers, as well, who come before you.

Appendix 2 simply talks about the organizations within the jurisdiction of the office, and I won't go into that. I will turn to the budget submission, unless there are questions about the service plan to date.

J. Les (Chair): I think we'll take a few questions at this point, and I have three, starting with Norm.

N. Letnick: Thank you very much for your presentations, Joy. You said at the first interview that a performance appraisal happens in 30 days from the time someone is hired?

J. Illington: No, I'm sorry. When an employee of the public service applies for a job and is unsuccessful, they in fact have five days to ask for feedback, another five days from that to ask for a deputy minister review. And then, following that deputy minister's review, if they come to the Merit Commissioner's office and ask for a review, my commitment is to get that review done within 30 days.

N. Letnick: Okay. Thank you very much.

J. Illington: Sorry, I really confused you there.

B. Routley: I've got a couple of questions. The issue of merit, again, sounds good, but how do you put that into context? In other words, is there a framework document that lays out for whoever is determining the merit…? Is there a list of issues that you…? Is it like a checklist? If you have such a document, how do I get a look at that — what issues you determine as merit?

The other observation that you made that really concerns me is…. In my previous life we discovered discrimination in one of the plants where they actually had a team of 12 people — made up of some management and some workers — to do the hiring, and it all sounded very like they were applying the principles of merit. But we discovered that 12 white guys sitting around don't necessarily do the right things when it comes to having somebody from the Sikh community come and apply.

We actually had a case headed towards Human Rights, and we were able to deal with it. But your statement that there is not the same level of minorities…. Could that be because of the framework document in its actual application to individual applicants?

J. Illington: Let me answer the first question first, which is that you will find the factors of merit that must be considered in the Public Service Act. There are six factors. They are experience, education, skills, knowledge, past work performance and then years of continuous service. Those are in the Public Service Act, and we do check to make sure, when we are doing an audit, that those have been considered.

The second part is that the audit program that our office uses is available to everyone. It is up on our website. It is likewise published as part of our annual report, so we make it absolutely transparent what we look at.

The third question, in terms of…. I do know that our audit program is not calculated to find out if there have
[ Page 405 ]
been conspiracies. It's not sophisticated enough to do that, but the tracking and the robustness of our audits are sophisticated enough to be able to look for similar patterns across years.

[0935]

The committee has given us sufficient funds to develop that kind of database, and we do look for that. That's one.

Two. Obviously, discrimination on the basis of any of the human rights headings is prohibited in terms of merit-based hiring. I have not found, in the three years of auditing and reviews that we have done, that race has ever been a factor. I do find — and this is why we were doing the studies on organizations that have increased diversity — that, while upholding the merit principle, there are better ways of recruiting that the Public Service Agency could be doing and is aware now that they must be doing.

B. Ralston: Two questions. You talked about the special audit you're proposing for peace officers, corrections officers. That's a bargaining unit category.

J. Illington: It is, yes.

B. Ralston: Is there a role for the union in that process, or not?

My second question is on the issue of the revolving renewals of the six-month appointments. There used to be, many years ago — at least, as I recall it — a grievance process. Mr. Ready was involved. If you achieved your 1,827 hours, then it was called a conversion, and there was a process whereby if you had that number of hours of continuous service or within a certain time frame, then you were converted to become a permanent employee. Does that no longer exist?

J. Illington: No, it does exist. That's the whole process by which auxiliary employees are converted to full-time regular employees, and that still does apply. It doesn't actually have much to do with the less-than-seven-month appointments. I would say more than…. I don't want to prejudge it, because we haven't looked at the end of all of our results, but a great many of the renewals of appointments of less than seven months are not for auxiliary employees, necessarily.

They are for managers who are not sufficiently organized to be running competitions, etc. — you know, who are being careless. I'm critical about that, and that's exactly why we're looking into that. You don't run a good workforce on a continuously renewing temporary basis. People need to have some stability, an ability to be able to plan themselves in their careers and even the objectives that they're supposed to be able to do.

A role for the union in terms of looking at the audit…. I don't think there will be a role for the union, just as there is not a role for managers in terms of our audit. The results of our audit, I think, will be talked about very thoroughly with the union, with managers, and may bring about some changes.

This is the open question at this moment. They may bring — and I hope they do, if necessary — some changes in our auditing process. But they may — and, if necessary, I hope they do — bring some changes in the way that people are interviewed and hired and promoted in those jobs.

J. van Dongen: I think both of the special audits that you refer to, Joy, are good, based on what I know of the public service. Just a couple of questions.

First of all, what are the reasons, when you find that there hasn't been a merit hire…? What are some of the things that you've found? Secondly, are there differences? Have you found differences, sometimes, between perception of employees in, say, a group and what you judged to be the reality of hires? That would be the second question.

The final question is: do you think that the more centralized hiring process that the government is embarking on will actually provide a little bit of arm's length and improve merit-based hiring, or not?

[0940]

J. Illington: Some of the reasons why we have found that merit was not applied…. Some have to do with favouritism, where there has clearly been a candidate who's been favoured above all others, notwithstanding the qualifications of other candidates.

Sometimes it has been a very flawed assessment process, where we look at…. I'm sorry. This goes back to Mr. Routley's question too. It goes back to…. We always look at what the position is and the requirements for the position and then how candidates' qualifications are measured against those requirements.

Sometimes it's been flawed just through lack of knowledge. The manager might as well have been using a Ouija board to hire someone. But sometimes it's been flawed because there have been qualifications lowered for certain candidates and not for others.

Sometimes it's been a case where, although it may have been done properly all the way up to the end.... There is, for BCGEU positions, quite a complicated formula. Government has agreed to look at years of continuous service, and managers quite often get that formula wrong. So what should have been, at the end of the day, a question whether or not people who have been considered to have fairly equal qualifications but one person has more years of continuous service…. That person should have been hired, and in the end, that person wasn't, because the formula wasn't applied properly.

All three of those are the leading reasons why we have found that merit was not applied.
[ Page 406 ]

That's one. Two is that yes, we have found that there's a distinction between our findings and the perceptions of employees. We talked to managers, especially, a great deal about that — about why it's important for them to talk about, if there are going to be vacancies, how those vacancies are going to be filled and, once those vacancies are filled, why it is that they selected that person or those people over others.

Oftentimes it's a plain old human being question, I think, that people have, and that is that they wonder: how did this person get to be sitting at the desk next to me? If there's no communication from management about how that decision was made, people are going to come up with their own reasons.

I guess the third thing is that there are certain pockets of government, and they are the case where sometimes there has been a hiring based on favouritism or, you know, a really bad hiring — a hiring of a family member, for instance — where that turns into an urban legend and lives on to damage the reputation of that branch or of that ministry for a long, long time. So much more, then, the reason to communicate clearly and consistently about what you're using when you’re hiring.

That's part of the outreach that we do with managers — to talk to them about the importance of talking about the principle of merit and showing people how it's being applied.

J. van Dongen: Strengths and pitfalls of where the government is going on more centralized hiring — I would appreciate that assessment.

J. Illington: Sorry, yes. I am supportive of a centralized hiring process because I think it will eliminate completely that category where you have managers struggling to apply that complicated formula and getting it wrong.

I do think that, in the end, that will serve the majority of hiring, which is into the bargaining unit. I think that the professionals working within the hiring centre should be consistent on that. We should also see consistency in terms of assessment — no more Ouija boards.

I think the third thing is that there will be a bit of a distance now between managers and those that they hire. It's not that managers won't know any of the candidates. They will know some of the candidates. But it should break a bit of what I've seen less as a pattern but more as a perception that as one person rises up through the public service, they bring their two or three favourite top performers along with them.

[0945]

There's less of that going to happen with a hiring centre sending prequalified people.

J. Thornthwaite: I just wanted to ask…. You mentioned that the Ontario public service had a prize. Can you tell me what that was and how it relates to our public service?

J. Illington: Their prize…. We specifically looked to them, although they look to the B.C. public service a great deal of the time for innovation in hiring and innovations in the public service altogether.

The Ontario public service, I think, was driven by two things. One of them is that Ontario has the most diverse workforce in Canada. Secondly, they realized, as has this public service, that as they hire younger people, as they do replacement hiring, their work profiles are more and more diverse. So they instituted a specific program on diversity and on recruitment, and they targeted three areas: certainly, visible minorities; people with handicaps or physical and mental challenges; and aboriginal people.

Their results are as a result of targeted recruiting, not as a result of affirmative actions. It wasn't, "We'll take these people but take a lower quality of person" — not at all that. But as a result of targeted recruiting, they did increase their numbers of diverse hiring a great amount. So that's why we looked.

J. Thornthwaite: Could I just have a follow-up? That was what I was getting at, because it is a fine line, I would assume, between targeted hiring and affirmative action. People feel, you know: "Why did that person get the job? Well, because they're a visible minority."

J. Illington: Right. They did it in a way that was not affirmative action–based, and I would not recommend affirmative action–based hiring here either. They did it on the basis of saying: "Let's make sure, as we look at each job competition, that we've got a candidate pool that includes diversity." So it's specifically recruited for that too.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation, Joy. I'm very pleased to see that you're considering the audit on the rolling of the temporary positions consistent…. Because it is a question of stability. I've benefited from it. One of my constituency assistants was in that situation for four years with forestry, continually being renewed just as the seven months came up, and she left that for the stability of working in an MLA office. So I don't know if that….

J. Les (Chair): Careful, now. Careful.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): I'm not sure…. It must say something about her feeling of instability at the Ministry of Forests. I think it's a situation that I'm happy you're looking into.

My question was on the staffing review in relation to the mandate of your office. It's a two-part question. First, does that staffing review apply when hires are being made from outside the public service — so not with employees?

J. Illington: No, it's only internal.
[ Page 407 ]

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Secondly, in the small percentage where merit was not applied, then, if you find that, what are the consequences of that?

J. Illington: The act does not provide any provision for the Merit Commissioner on audits — finding that merit was not applied — to reverse that hiring, etc. It is mainly used to determine what went wrong and, therefore, what needs to be corrected in the future.

[0950]

Certainly, if it was a case where we discovered fraud or some conspiracy — as, for instance, the federal government has done where they discovered, through audits, a series of people who'd consistently been cheating on their French tests and in fact couldn't speak French…. That led to some firings. But in the case of the Merit Commissioner, the Merit Commissioner doesn't have the ability to undo anything that has been done, by way of audit.

By way of reviews, which is still dealing with the unsuccessful employee applying for review right at the time of a hiring — the hiring has not yet been confirmed one way or the other — at that point the Merit Commissioner has the ability to ask the deputy minister to reconsider that hiring.

That has happened twice during my time as Merit Commissioner. Once, it was reconsidered, and an offer was withdrawn and made to another person. That was through the wrong application of that complicated formula for BCGEU. In another case, prior to me making a finding, I talked to the deputy minister, and the deputy minister cancelled that hiring process and started a new competition because the competition had not been done fairly.

J. Les (Chair): Okay. If there are no further questions, we will move on to the review of the budget submission.

J. Illington: Thank you very much. Believe me, this should be much shorter. I'm perfectly aware that you've been going around the province talking to people about the budget, and I'm aware that you're delivering services from a limited public purse. Because of that, I have already made some changes to the proposed budget that reduce the operating costs of the Merit Commissioner's office in the areas of travel, central management support services, and office and business expenses.

The budget that I'm presenting has had a 5 percent reduction in those areas already, but I am asking for an increase.

The increase is solely due to the fact that, while we've talked about the fact that we share services through a shared services model, the four independent officers have applied and received permission from this committee to consolidate their rented spaces and just share one building together. That will increase the efficiencies that we're already able to achieve. The reason I'm asking for more money in this budget is simply because I will be getting more space. I will pay an increase in rent.

For the 2011 fiscal year I'll also ask for a one-year increase in the capital budget to pay for tenant improvements, systems and furniture purchases in the new building. I hasten to say that we are not acquiring brand-new furniture, etc. — not at all. We need to install cables so that we can continue to have our operating systems for our computer work, etc. — those kinds of things.

That is what the budget increase is. As I've said, it's $23,000, which reflects a higher rent for more workspace; a one-year increase of $204,000 to pay for the tenant improvements for this new building; and then I believe that there is…. I'm just turning to page 4 of the budget, and I'm asking you to compare from 2010 to 2011. You'll see that from the current budget to the proposed budget the increases that are being asked for are all to do with increased rent and the cost of moving into the new building.

There is, as I said, one exception to that, and that is a change of $7,000. On STOB 52, under "Employee benefits," you see $7,000 there. That's a vehicle allowance that apparently the Merit Commissioner is entitled to receive. I didn't receive it. I declined it while I was Merit Commissioner. I have no idea if the new Merit Commissioner will need a vehicle allowance, but it's there just in case the Merit Commissioner does. That's the only change-up in the budget that is not related to new buildings.

J. Les (Chair): Okay. Questions?

N. Letnick: Is the salary of the Merit Commissioner set by order-in-council just like the legislative salary is? The reason why I ask is that we're going to get a new Merit Commissioner after all this.

[0955]

J. Illington: Yes.

N. Letnick: Are they going to get paid the same as you, or are they going to get paid less because they're brand-new and work their way back up?

J. Illington: No. There's no working your way back up. It's set by OIC. It's a per diem, and I think that the new Merit Commissioner is going to be paid the same per diem. I actually don't know that, but we budgeted as if that is.

You know that the Merit Commissioner is a part-time job. So unlike any of the other independent officers, it's not set at a salary that is equivalent to a Chief Judge of the Provincial Court. It's on a per-diem basis — always intended to be a part-time job.
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J. van Dongen: If we look at page 3, just looking at 2009-2010, the significant increases there reflected the hiring of an additional person. Is that correct?

J. Illington: Yes, that's right.

J. van Dongen: So that's when Shelley came on. You said, Joy, that you're increasing the office space. How many square feet of office space do you have?

The second question is: when we look at STOB 75, where $53,000 for 2011 represents, I think, five months, and then $128,000 is the full year…

J. Illington: Correct.

J. van Dongen: …what do you get for the $128,000? How many square feet is your office, and what do you get for the $128,000?

J. Illington: There are five closed offices, a reception and what's referred to as a box storage office. I'm sorry. I'm just going to give you a visual, if I may. Our whole office space is the equivalent of from that wall to these doors, I think. So that is our office space currently. We're going to increase space so that we have the ability….

You know, when we do audits, we get file boxes — sometimes hundreds and hundreds of them — in our office, and we have to deal with those boxes properly because they contain a lot of personal information of people. So our offices at some point tower with boxes to the point that we had a safety audit saying that you couldn't pile them that high.

Our increased space is not that much for our office spaces. We do have a bit more space for box storage, but also, we'll be paying, for instance, for meeting rooms and part-share of a reception that we don't currently have and that we will be able to use.

For instance, one of the things that we will do is have access to audiovisual equipment. We do more and more webinars these days, as opposed to travelling around the province. It's just a very efficient way to reach managers quickly and cheaply and without the carbon costs. We'll be able to do that now, instead of using the facilities of the Attorney General, which is what we have done in the past.

J. Les (Chair): Any other questions?

Great. Well, I think that brings us to the end of your presentation, Joy. A very fulsome presentation, I must say. Thank you very much. It became clear to me as we were listening this morning that whoever follows you has a large set of shoes to fill.

J. Illington: Thank you very much.

J. Les (Chair): Thank you again.

A motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:59 a.m.

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