Summary:
As of January 1, 2023, Transport Canada (TC) employs 6,507 indeterminate and term employees across six regions. Through its People Management Results Framework, TC has identified two strategic outcomes:
- A workforce that is principled, sustainable and adaptable; and
- A workplace that is fair, enabling, modern, healthy and safe
The Human Resources Program works with managers and senior leaders on several initiatives ranging from Talent Outreach and Recruitment, Diversity and Inclusion, Employee Experience, and Mental Health and Wellness in order to support current operations and to prepare the Department for future work, workforce and workplace opportunities.
Overview:
Workforce
TC has a highly dynamic workforce with 27 different occupational groups working in over 60 locations across the country (59% are in the National Capital Region).
The principal occupations are:
- Technical Inspection (TI) – 15.7%
- Administrative Services (AS) – 14.9%
- Economics and Social Science (EC) – 14.4%
- Program Administration (PM) – 9.9%
- Clerical and Regulatory (CR) – 7.4%
- Information Technology (IT) – 6.1%
- Aircraft Operations (AO) – 5.6%
- Engineering & Land Survey (EN) – 4.9%
- Executive (EX) – 3.5%
- Engineering & Scientific Support (EG) – 3.3%
- Financial Management (FI) – 3.3%
Diversity and Inclusion
The Department has made great strides in improving diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In the past year, representation for Racialized employees, Indigenous employees and Women has surpassed workforce availability (WFA). We continue to undertake initiatives to increase recruitment and retention of diversity and equity seeking groups.
- Women – 46.4% (WFA: 42.0%)
- Racialized People – 17.7% (WFA: 17.5%)
- Indigenous – 3.6% (WFA: 3.0%)
- Persons with disabilities – 4.4% (WFA: 8.2%)
People Management Strategies and Initiatives
In addition to continuing day-to-day human resources operational services, TC has a number of initiatives underway to work towards achieving its strategic people management outcomes. These include, but are not limited to:
- continuing the implementation of TC’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan
- supporting managers and employees in managing hybrid work and the return-to-worksites
- establishing a departmental recruitment and outreach strategy framework
- fostering the development of new skills and behaviours through the delivery of the Middle Management Development Program and the Leadership Development Initiative
- completing Classification renewal and conversion exercises
- implementing the Official Languages Action Plan
- implementing the Mental Health Action Plan
- reviewing the Values & Ethics policy framework
Compensation and Benefits
Following the launch of the Phoenix pay system and the centralization of departmental pay accounts at the Public Service Pay Centre in 2016, TC retained internal compensation and benefits service delivery for its employees and is not served by the Pay Centre. Despite this advantage, and similar to the broader Public Service, TC was significantly impacted by system and process-related challenges, and experienced difficulties recruiting and retaining skilled and experienced compensation resources. The backlog of pay transactions for TC had risen to over 11,000 in January 2020, challenging program integrity and creating frustration and trust deficit for employees.
Despite the challenges noted above, TC is currently more advanced on the stabilization continuum than centrally served Pay Centre departments, as in-house compensation service delivery allows for maximum flexibility to plan for, and agility to respond to, departmental pay and benefit priorities and client service needs.
To address the backlog of pay transactions, TC extended and increased pressure funding to the Compensation program in the fall of 2021. Organizational design and resourcing strategies are underway to grow capacity to a target of 70 compensation resources by the end of the 2022-23 fiscal year.
In 2022 alone, close to 100 staffing actions were completed to support targeted resourcing levels. Once targets are met, compensation capacity will be 3 times what it was in 2017-2018 and will be resourced to provide sustainable service delivery for our 6,500 active clients.
Operational focus continues to be in the areas of critical pay actions, backlog reduction, support for mandatory centrally driven initiatives (e.g., classification conversion, leave cash-out, collective agreement implementation, overpayment recovery, executive revisions) and expanded client service support/counselling.
Since January 2020, the backlog of pay actions has decreased by 34%, despite an average 20% increase in transaction intake (year over year), and diversion of resources to support mandatory, centrally driven initiatives.