PM appoints chief justice for New Brunswick
The federal government is trying to hit the reset button on its two-year-old bid to repair and replace the problem-plagued Phoenix pay system.
Federal cabinet minister Carla Qualtrough was dispatched Friday to northeastern New Brunswick, where she officially opened the centralized Public Service Pay Centre, which processes paycheques for 300,000 federal employees in 46 departments.
“We have reason to celebrate the hard work of the people working here in Miramichi,” the public services minister said after a ribbon-cutting ceremony outside the new building, which actually opened for business in January.
“They work every day to resolve these problems. We have seen progress, even if it’s not as fast as we would like.”
The feel-good photo-op comes more than two years after the government implemented the IBM-built Phoenix system. The previous Conservative government said Phoenix would save taxpayers more than $70 million annually.
Instead, it has caused so many snafus across the country that the backlog of transactions stood at 625,000 as of March 21.
That number is expected to dip only slightly when the latest figures are released later this month, Qualtrough said.
However, a pilot project developed at the Miramichi centre will be rolled out across the country to ensure more timely payments, she added.
“This pilot that we have done has reduced the queue in the departments in the pilot project by 24 per cent,” Qualtrough said.
“That’s not a small amount.”
The Prime Minister’s Office says Judge J.C. Marc Richard of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal will be the province’s new chief justice.
Richard replaces Drapeau.
The new chief judge was first named to the Court of Appeal in 2003 after a career as both a Crown prosecutor and a private litigator.
The Moncton-born chief justice is an Acadian and fluently bilingual, and is a former president of the Law Society of New Brunswick.
He was educated at the University of Moncton and the London School of Economics.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Richard leads by example.
“He is truly one of Canada’s preeminent jurists and has been widely recognized throughout his 15-year judicial career for his ability to apply the law in a way that is both principled and thoughtful,” the prime minister said in a statement. J. Ernest