Phoenix pay system could burn Liberals
On Thursday, Canada’s privacy commissioner reported new errors with the federal government’s Phoenix pay system, glitches that have exposed salary information and other data about some public servants.
Daniel Therrien’s revelations were yet another indignity heaped atop the frustration, desperation and disgust felt by thousands of public servants who have suffered pay problems under Phoenix over the last 18 months.
Bureaucrats, however, may not be the only victims of this massive modernization botchup. Almost halfway into its mandate, the Liberal government now faces the very real possibility that Phoenix won’t be fixed before the next federal election.
Well, so what? Most people outside Ottawa don’t mourn the lot of public servants. A missing paycheque here, an incorrect overtime payment there — none of this will change votes outside the bubble.
But in the National Capital Region, where a large portion of the workforce earns its keep in government jobs, the flagging Phoenix could affect many usually safe Grit ridings. The Liberals’ local re-election teams must be wringing their hands.
For it is entirely possible the Phoenix disaster will drag on. Fixing the pay system has been like Whack-a-Mole: Solve a problem here, another one springs up there. One hundred departments or agencies have already been forced to spend extra money dealing with the cranky pay system.
So desperate is the government for help that it recently offered contracts and signing bonuses to retirees to work on system fixes. As well, it plopped a new assistant deputy minister into the maelstrom, Danielle May-Cuconato. And of course the political minister in charge has changed: It’s now Carla Qualtrough, who is scrambling to get up to speed.
She confirmed Friday that the government has spent $142 million to recruit and train more people to work on Phoenix, and to cover a host of attempted solutions. The NDP calls all this “a box of Band-Aids.”
Some of what the government is doing may work, but it’s not being transparent. It’s only thanks to digging by the CBC that the public is now seeing some of the contract costs between the government and IBM for the initial Phoenix system and the mounting price tag for trying to make it work (The CBC’s calculations add up to almost $750 million.) The unions say there are still more than 1,000 software malfunctions.
What else can go wrong with the Phoenix fixer-upper fiasco? For the Liberals, the ultimate losses may be at the ballot box.
— Postmedia News