Cancel the Phoenix pay plan

Re: Scrap disastrous Phoenix pay system, union head urges Trudeau government, Nov. 14. Kudos to PIPSC union head Debi Daviau for saying out loud what most government employees are thinking: The Phoenix pay system should be scrapped now.

After almost two years of ongoing and worsening snafus, the system is demonstrably beyond repair. It is critical that the government exercise appropriate control over the massive drainage of taxpayer dollars and plug the hole once and for all. Everybody in Ottawa knows people who have been negatively affected by Phoenix. The financial burden and grief caused to tens of thousands of innocent people are often not just inconvenient, but unconscionable.

During the 1990s, the federal government spent a fortune over many years getting public servants to redraft their job descriptions to correspond to some new standard in order to implement a “Universal Classification System” (UCS).

Those of us who were around remember the constant drumming of “next steps” and deadlines, only to find that after several frustrating years, all the worry was for nothing as the government suddenly dropped the project and pretended that it had never existed in the first place.

The pay system was the one thing the government used to previously handle that was beyond reproach. Now this historically sacrosanct function has been bungled.

Don’t drag it on and on like the USC fiasco. Cancel it now and cut the losses. Frank Leclair, Ottawa

SEAN KILPATRICK/THE CANADIAN PRESS Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, has said the Phoenix pay system should be scrapped now, and letter writer Frank Leclair agrees.