I respectfully submit my report as National Executive Vice-President.
The Finance Committee will be very busy over the upcoming months as we prepare all of the costings for our Convention in September. I will be working very closely with the Finance Committee as we work to research and prepare all required information.
The Phoenix system is a daily nightmare for many of our members. Some of the issues are able to be fixed quite quickly while other issues are systemic issues which seem to be taking forever for the Pay Centre to fix.
The issues that we are dealing with for members range from no pay, acting pay not being paid, T4 errors that are having negative impacts for members trying to file their taxes, overpayment collections that are not following PSPC’s own procedures and this has yet again been raised by me to PSPC through Senior Management and is being looked into and followed up on.
The overpayments being collected outside of PSPC’s own procedures is a huge concern as it is putting members in financial distress. I will continue to advocate for PSPC to follow their procedures and ensure that our members are not negatively impacted. After Christmas, I raised the Consent Order to our Director General of Human Resources and have been advocating for the department to put in place all pieces of the Consent Order especially Point 6 which covers payments to members who are waiting for Maternity Leave Tops Ups, Parental Leave and for members awaiting Sun Life decisions. I am still advocating having payments provided to members who are awaiting Sun Life decisions and have requested updated information from PSAC’s recent meeting with Treasury Board and PSPC which I hope will assist me in having these payments put in place.
The morale and mental health of members going through Phoenix issues is impacted greatly and we will continue to support our members through this difficult time and will continue to advocate for the system to be fixed and for measures to be put in place to assist members in the interim while the Federal Government works to fix their systems.
I was assigned the NCCN Portfolio and had a NLMCC with the Director in late February. I had a meet and greet teleconference with the Director to introduce ourselves to each other. In advance of the meeting I reached out to each of the Local Presidents who have NCCNs in their offices to seek out agenda items or any concerns that they currently had.
I have started taking on line French language training which I work on in my evenings and weekends. I am also researching class language training which I will be looking at taking after I have completed the full on line course.
I look forward to continuing to work with our National Executive and our National Office staff.
My representation report is covered under a separate report.
In Solidarity
Virginia Vaillancourt
National Executive Vice-President