“At the PCO, our spending is nearly all on salaries. We don’t administer programs so it’s not complicated for us to provide an overall picture. It’s about staffing cuts,” Bill Pentney, deputy secretary to the Cabinet for plans and consultations told the Government Operations Committee on April 30.
In March, the PCO, which spent $159.931-million in 2010-2011, employed the equivalent of 1,017 full-time workers. By April 1, that number had decreased to 987, according to the PCO. On April 11, PCO management told 139 people that their jobs could be cut. Those people will find out between June and November if their jobs will be eliminated, said Michelle Doucet, assistant deputy minister of corporate services.
Ms. Doucet estimated that PCO would ultimately let go of 90 to 100 people. The number hasn’t been finalized as some employees may opt to retire or otherwise leave voluntarily.
Already, PCO employees hoping to continue on in the civil service are posting on the government’s internal job-seeking forum, looking to swap places with workers who want to leave the public service but occupy a steady job.
The $17.6-million, or 12.5 per cent, cut to the PCO’s 2012-2013 budget is the product of two cutting initiatives, the strategic and operating review detailed in the 2012 budget, as well as the 2010 strategic review, and the wind-down of a number of projects.
This year the PCO will cut $2.2-million from its budget due to the 2010 review, after cutting $1.1-million last year. For the strategic review, departments and agencies examined their program spending and identified five per cent of its lowest performing or priority work or practices for a cut. PCO will cut a total of $5.7-million from its budget by 2013-2014 due to this review.
In 2011-2012, the PCO’s budget in the main estimates was $140.7-million. This year, the main estimates give the Privy Council $126.8-million in funding. The office expects another chunk of its funding to disappear with tabling of the supplementary estimates in Parliament, as early as June. Then, another $3.7-million will be cut due to the implementation of the first phase of the government’s strategic and operating review.
In total, the PCO will cut another $12.2-million from its budget by 2014-2015, due to the recent strategic and operating review.
“To achieve these ongoing savings, … we will have to change the way we work in some significant ways,” said Ms. Doucet.
Some of the measures the PCO is putting into place due to the SOR this year include shutting down the Public Appointments Commission and its secretariat, for savings of $1.1-million, as well as $1.4-million in cuts to the department itself, and another $1.2-million in cuts to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat.
Like other government departments, the Privy Council Office, headed by PCO Clerk Wayne Wouters, has also faced budget pressure due to salary increases since a freeze on operating budgets was instituted in 2010. The PCO has had to let some positions go vacant after employees left in order to come up with the funds to compensate remaining employees, said Mark Bélisle, the executive director of PCO’s finance and corporate planning division.
One of the major factors in the decrease to PCO’s budget in this year’s main estimates includes $7.4-million it transferred to Shared Services Canada to centrally manage its email, data centres and networks. SSC will handle all the PCO’s information up to secret level clearance, but the office is still responsible for handling top secret-level information, in a system shared by other sensitive departments and international partners, according to Ms. Doucet.
NDP MP Denis Blanchette (Louis-Hébert, Que.) a former computer analyst and public servant, noted that having both Shared Services Canada and PCO manage IT could cause unnecessary duplication and costs.
Ms. Doucet said she couldn’t provide any details on whether the new system will raise costs, but said that computer services in PCO were managed in a “very cost efficient way.”
Mr. Pentney said that the office has had to tighten its belt over the past few years.
“The last couple of years have provided other opportunities to look very hard at what we do. With the nature of the budget changes that we’ve been living through…we’ve had to step back and ask some hard questions about what we do and why we do it,” he said.
Another contributor to the department’s budget decrease is a decline of $3.9-million due to the winding down of the Afghanistan Task Force, housed within PCO. The taskforce coordinated the government’s efforts in Afghanistan. As of April 1, just a small team has remained in PCO.
The task force is one example of the temporary government projects that are housed under PCO, noted Mr. Bélisle. He said these projects getting introduced and coming to an end cause PCO’s budget to fluctuate.
Some PCO work has received an increase in funding, including the Office of the Special Adviser on Human Smuggling and Illegal Migration, which saw a $1-million increase to its budget. Led by Ward Elcock, the office brings together several departments and agencies, including the RCMP, CSIS, Public Safety and Foreign Affairs, to work on the human smuggling file. The office has six people in it and was created in 2010.
The Commission of Inquiry into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River, led by Bruce Cohen, is also getting $500,000 to finish its final report. The report was originally due May 1, 2011, but Mr. Cohen requested an extension due to the complexity of the study. The report was postponed to June 30, 2012, and most recently the deadline has been extended to September 30. Despite the extra funds, the commission will still be within its $26.4-million budget, according to the PCO.
Conservative MP Scott Armstrong (Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, N.S.) said the PCO has done a “very good jobs of meeting the demands that are placed on it.”
“As we modernize and transform the way we do business, we are cognizant of the need to preserve the right level of service to the Prime Minister, Cabinet and portfolio ministers, as well as maintain our core and unique capabilities to support the government,” said Ms. Doucet.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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