Archived: Response from Library and Archives Canada
From: Public Services and Procurement Canada
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Mr. Michael Wernick
Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet
Privy Council Office
80 Wellington Street, suite 332
Ottawa ON K1. 0A3
Dear Mr. Wernick:
In response to your letter of November 8, 2017, and in the context of the efforts in place to resolve issues related to the pay system, I am pleased to inform you of the measures we have taken at Library and Archives Canada (LAC).
At LAC, we take our employees’ interests seriously, and we are actively involved in trying to find solutions to the challenges we currently face. LAC’s active involvement includes representatives on the interdepartmental committees established by Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) and Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS).
At the outset, it is worth mentioning that LAC has maintained internal pay services. As a result, the issues experienced by our organization are not on the same scale as those of organizations who deal with the centralized pay service.
More specifically, we have put together an integrated team in our organization that includes specialists in compensation, finance, human resources systems and staffing. This team’s mandate is to develop and apply temporary solutions aimed at resolving issues with the pay system. To this end, LAC has implemented processes to deal with unresolved service requests as quickly as possible. New resources have been hired since the rollout of Phoenix, to take on the extra work and to resolve issues.
LAC is helping TBS to monitor the situation, by producing various reports and data. As well, LAC is examining reports provided by PSPC and making corrections where appropriate after thorough verification. LAC has also prepared additional reports to validate the integrity of system data. These reports enable us to detect anomalies and address them as quickly as possible.
From the start of this major change, LAC identified the need to communicate regularly with employees and managers. LAC therefore created a communications plan that is updated as needed. Employees and managers are given regular briefings through governance committees, forums, email and a dedicated space on our intranet site.
Training is a key element in successfully stabilizing the pay system. It is essential that managers and employees understand their roles and responsibilities in this new environment. Regarding the training made available to us, LAC has developed a mandatory training strategy that will be communicated to all staff in the coming weeks.
I am confident about the measures put in place to mitigate issues related to pay administration and thus reduce the effects on employees.
Yours sincerely,
Guy Berthiaume
c.c.: The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage