Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Today, as part of Ontario’s pre-Budget consultations, AMAPCEO submitted its recommendations on behalf of its 13,250 professional public sector employees.
AMAPCEO’s submission focuses on three specific recommendations:
- improve the quality of public services by ending wage restraint
- end the austerity agenda through the use of new progressive revenue tools, and
- stop privatization and the overreliance on private consultants.
AMAPCEO President Dave Bulmer outlined these recommendations to a panel from the Ministry of Finance, including MPP Yvan Baker, the Ministry’s Parliamentary Assistant, on January 9.
“The government must stop this wasteful privatization agenda and begin wisely investing in public servants to deliver the quality programs that Ontarians rely on,” Bulmer said. “It’s time to broaden the approach from one focussed on austerity towards a more sensible one, in which meaningful revenue tools are on the table.”
A summary of the three major recommendations from AMAPCEO’s 2017 Pre-Budget Submission to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs is below. The full report is available at the bottom.
The government must end its policy of wage restraint in the public sector
The Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services was formed to examine the way government delivers services to Ontarians. Their 2012 report, known as the Drummond Report, included hundreds of recommendations, the majority of which the government strove to implement.
Among the recommendations in the report:
“Tactics geared towards short-term fiscal gains such as wage freeze and limits on the number of civil servants should be avoided. Wage freezes damage labour relations and are often followed by wage catch-ups.” (page 52)
The government ignored this advice, instead choosing to pursue a course of wage freezes for its employees. In doing so, the government brought true a warning from the Drummond Report: labour relations were damaged, as indicated by both AMAPCEO and OPSEU holding strike votes for their OPS members in their last bargaining rounds. Both passed with greater than 90% support, an unprecedented level of labour discord within the OPS.
Wage freezes affect the quality of Ontario’s public services. Inflation erodes frozen wages until eventually, suitable compensation for OPS positions are not on offer, leading to recruitment and retention difficulties—another caution from the Drummond Report that the government ignored.
In 2016, Don Drummond authored another report, and among its recommendations was wage increases for public servants.
In order to attract competent employees and remain an employer of choice, there will have to be a rebound in the future for all salaries and wage scales throughout the OPS.
The government must work to increase revenue
Simply put—Ontario has a revenue problem, not a spending problem.
It is clear that the government, while seemingly wedded to a low-tax regime, understands this. How else to explain misguided policies such as the privatization of Hydro One?
It’s time for the government to broaden its approach from one focused on austerity and the one-time sale of valuable public assets towards a more sensible one, in which meaningful, progressive revenue tools are on the table.
The government must minimize—and produce transparent reports on—the use of private consultants
AMAPCEO believes the OPS must limit its overreliance on the use of external consultants throughout the government, and most pressingly in Information Technology.
The track record on IT programs and projects demonstrates that there is better value and are better outcomes when IT is delivered in-house by public servants. Public servants are more cost-effective than private consultants, whose rates can easily double or triple the cost of a project. Further, public servants deliver better results as they retain the knowledge necessary to maintain and improve the systems down the road.
It’s also become clear that consultants are often used as a substitute for full-time employees due to mandated limits on staff numbers. These limits incentivize managers to hire expensive consultants not because they are the right people for the job, but simply to circumvent Ministry limits on staff numbers. The end result is that there is no difference in the number of actual people working on a given project, but there is an increased cost and a reduction in quality.
AMAPCEO also believes the government should shine a light on the use of private consultants and proactively disclose all contracts valued at over $10,000. At a minimum, these disclosures should be published and searchable online, and include details such as the vendor name, contract date, description of the contract, value of the contract, and the contract period.