Miramichi pay centre at heart of Phoenix problems
Revelation comes in wake of union leader saying pay centre should have never been moved to Miramichi
Public service employees are three times more likely to see delays receiving their pay if it is processed through the pay centre in Miramichi than at federal offices or institutions elsewhere in the country.
The Miramichi centre faces a higher rate of delayed processing, according to documents obtained by Radio-Canada.
The revelation comes in the wake of a union leader's suggestion that the pay centre should not have been put in Miramichi in the first place.
Last week, during an interview with the CBC's Harry Forestell, Greg McGillis, executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said it was a mistake to move the centre to the small New Brunswick city.
The statement provoked a demand for an apology from Miramichi Mayor Adam Lordon — an apology he received in a phone call Monday.
"This afternoon the president of the national PSAC union called me personally to apologize to say that Mr. McGillis's comments do not reflect the views of the union, that they have supported and will continue to support the centre in Miramichi and all the hardworking Miramichiers who work there," Lordon told CBC.
The mayor said he heard reaction to the comment from many city residents and people who worked at the centre.
Three times more delays
But as of Aug. 8, according to numbers from Treasury Board, 64 per cent of employees whose pay goes through the Miramichi centre were dealing with delays of more than a month.
This doesn't meet the government's recently established standards.
In contrast, in places where pay is processed internally, only 21 per cent of employees are seeing the same delays.
The Miramichi centre deals with the pay of two-thirds of public servants, or about 210,000 people.
It processes paycheques for 46 federal departments or agencies, including Parks Canada, Veterans Affairs and Correctional Services Canada.
The other federal public service employees, about 100,000, have their salary processed internally.
Regardless of where the paycheques are processed, the Phoenix pay system is used.
More employees needed
The decision to centralize public function pay processing in Miramichi was taken in 2010 by the Harper government, which then cut 700 pay workers.
The current federal government said it has hired some pay specialists since the cuts, but it is still looking to hire more.
"Efforts are ongoing," Steven MacKinnon, parliamentary secretaryto the minister of public services and procurement, said in an interview with Radio-Canada.
"We inherited a system we now have to fix," he said.
A year and a half after the Phoenix system went live, in February 2016, about 156,000 federal public servants, or about half, were still affected by the failures of the system
Hard to understand
Area politicians have a hard time understanding why the finger is being pointed at the Miramichi centre.
"I can't actually see why — why it would be different if you have a centre in Miramichi, or if it's located in Gatineau or anywhere else," said Pat Finnigan, the MP for Miramichi—Grand Lake.
"I speak to the workers very often. We visited the centre four times with the minister, and they are hard-working people, they are smart people and they as much as anybody else want to fix the issues that Phoenix is having."
Lordon, the mayor, said the numbers are cause for concern,but he doesn't think they tell the whole story.
"You could have the most qualified people in the world, the most intelligent people in the world, if they haven't been trained properly, then perhaps they're not going to have the level of success that we'd all hope for," he said.
Since the Phoenix system was launched in February 2016, tens of thousands of public servants have been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all.
Lordon said he hopes to see the federal government committed to finding a solution.
He said the continuing problems at the pay centre involve the software.
"They are not people issues."
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With files from Catherine Lanthier