START OVER ON PHOENIX
Two years later, it still seems astonishing that any government could have allowed the Phoenix pay system calamity to occur. There were myriad warning signs — studies, interim reports, memos to senior officials — that the massive public service compensation project wasn’t ready for prime time. Yet a perfect storm of bureaucratic and political hubris pushed it out of the nest before it was anywhere near ready for flight. Now the federal government is in imminent danger of having to just kill it and start over.
If so, it must say so soon, or bear this deep wound into the 2019 election. As reporter James Bagnall explains in today’s Observer, both the Liberals and Conservatives share blame for the boondoggle. But it is the Liberals who are in power and who must act. So what’s the plan?
Most Canadians outside the Ottawa bubble don’t care. They should, if only for the impact this disaster has had on their pocketbooks. Taxpayers have already parcelled out more than $500 million in unanticipated costs to keep Phoenix fluttering (aside from the $310 million spent to introduce it in the first place). Both politicians and the federal auditor general have said the spending could top $1 billion.
Canadians should care for another reason too. Love or hate government, it must function competently, and there are several signs the pay chaos is undercutting its ability. Public servants, for instance, are declining or deferring promotions and overtime, and even delaying retirement, because Phoenix might fuddle up changes to their compensation. How do you bring new blood into the public service when people actively fear leaving ? This trend to the safety of inertia cannot be good for either policy or bureaucratic culture in general.
If you’re a public servant, the relevance of the Phoenix failure is more acute: It may ravage your paystub at any time. In January, more than 630,000 pay transactions were mired at the Miramichi pay centre, with staff struggling to fix a plethora of payroll mistakes.
Lessons are being learned, to be sure: Don’t introduce an ambitious project and insist on saving wads of cash at the same time; don’t assume you will succeed on one project because a previous task (in this case, modernizing pension services) went well; don’t let political expediency override common sense; don’t neglect the all-important training of people who must actual run the system.
The federal government has learned all this, of course. Now it must decide whether to start rebuilding from scratch. Frankly, we don’t think it has a choice.