Executives with troubled pay system no longer there

OTTAWA — Four senior executives who helped launch the federal government’s troubled civil service pay system are no longer working for Public Services and Procurement Canada and didn’t receive any bonus pay, the minister responsible for the Phoenix system said Wednesday.

Judy Foote made the statement just hours after the deputy minister responsible for the file said senior executives in the department could still collect bonuses once a review of what went wrong with the pay system is complete.

“None of the senior executive who worked on the Phoenix system are still working on it and none of them received any executive bonus pay,” Foote said as she left the House of Commons.

Foote would not say if the executives were fired, instead repeating that “they are not working with the department.” She also could not confirm whether the four were now working in other departments, or if they would be receiving bonuses elsewhere in government.

Opposition MPs called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to apologize for the debacle after Foote’s deputy minister, Marie Lemay, acknowledged some lower-level executives received performance pay last year, even though thousands of government workers weren’t properly paid.

Documents tabled this week in the House of Commons show the department paid 340 executives nearly $5 million in bonuses and performance pay over the last fiscal year.

In response to a question from Conservative MP Kelly McCauley, Liberal parliamentary secretary Steve MacKinnon told the House that $4,827,913 was paid out to executives in the department, with most of them receiving payments in December.

That did not include general wage increases that had already been scheduled to come into effect Jan. 1.

The average payment amount was $14,199.74 between April 1, 2015 and March 31, 2016, according to MacKinnon.

McCauley said he was “disgusted” by the revelation.

“I don’t believe the money should be paid out for anyone remotely part of the Phoenix system. End of story.”

But only a handful of the executives — as many as 10 — would have been working on Phoenix, Lemay said as she defended the raises.