Transcript:
The government employees who take care of everything from Canada's environment to our tax system and data security are being systematically replaced by something else: a shadow public service,made up of private contractors.
This process of contracting out services and functions previously performed by the government is called outsourcing, and Canada’s over-reliance on outsourcing increasingly threatens the public services that we all rely on.
Take the Canadian government's payroll system. The government spent $142 million to outsource the development of the Phoenix payroll system. But it's already costing an additional $50 million dollars to fix its never-ending malfunctions. Those malfunctions have negatively impacted over 80,000 government workers and their families. That’s 1 in 4 workers.
Because they haven't been paid - sometimes for months at a time - thousands of these workers are in debt and some are even at risk of losing their homes.
Someone didn't trust the government's own experts to build Phoenix, and now, those same experts are paying the price.
That's just one project. The Canadian Government spends over $10 billion annually on outsourcing. That's more than the combined budgets of 10 major federal departments.
The government is outsourcing things that a government exists to do in the first place; things we have a permanent need for. Imagine what the same kind of reckless outsourcing at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, or Health Canada, or the Nuclear Safety Commission.
It’s time to put an end to Canada's over-reliance on outsourcing.
It’s time to invest in Canadian public servants.
It’s time to invest in Canada.