The number of federal workers that fall under the Public Service Employment Act grew by 4.6 per cent annually in the 2018-19 fiscal year, says a new government report published Thursday.

Over that span, total hiring activity jumped by 11.9 per cent, with indeterminate and temporary employee hires jumping to their highest levels in the last 10 years, reads the Public Service Commission of Canada’s 2018-19 Annual Report.

Specifically, indeterminate hires — employees appointed on a continuous basis as opposed to contract, casual, seasonal or student workers — increased by 34.2 per cent in the last fiscal year. Term or contract workers picked up by 10.9 per cent in that period.

RELATED: Government spending on IT consultants increased by $695 million from 2011 to 2018: PIPSC

The president of one of the largest federal public service unions says the numbers in the report may look positive on the surface but departments are continuing to fork over billions of dollars in lucrative contracts to external consultants.

Debi Daviau of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) pointed to a report published by the union last month that found the federal government spent nearly $12 billion from 2011-18 on management consultants, temporary help contractors and IT consultants.

In particular, government departments spent $8.5 billion over that time period – or seven out of ten dollars used on outside employees – on IT consultants, rising from $605 million in 2011 to over $1.3 billion in 2018, according to the PIPSC study.

“A lot of money is still being spent on contractors and temporary help and outsourcing of government work,” Daviau said in an interview on Friday.

“Years of unchecked spending has created a shadow public service of consultants and temporary staff that are operating alongside the government workforce doing the same job.”

One of the “root causes” driving this uptick in outsourcing is the time it takes to hire new employees, according to Daviau. Facing pressure to find the right employees for time-sensitive new projects, she said government departments are opting to simply contract out work, instead of spending weeks or months finding an appropriate match through an internal applicant search or the external hiring process.

As a result, taxpayers are left on the hook for these more expensive consultant contracts and none of the specialized expertise developed through this work remains in the public service, Daviau claimed.

“As they do this, the contract between them and public service employees is breaking down because outsourcing means higher costs, lower quality services for Canadians; it means less transparency, less accountability; loss of institutional knowledge and skills; and it means that specialized knowledge and skills are moving out of the public service,” she said.

Aside from the time-draining hiring process, Daviau also pointed to a “lack of training and development opportunities within the public service,” and called on the federal government to retrain its focus from counting the number of employees to developing current staff and providing needed training opportunities to ensure “they can meet the government’s changing priorities.”

The Public Service Commission report notes that there were nearly one million applications to the 3,263 federal public service job advertisements open to the public, which the commission says is a clear indicator that “many Canadians want to work for the Government of Canada.”

Collectively, the commission found that 221,144 federal employees were captured by the Public Service Employment Act at the end of the 2018-19 fiscal year, with nearly 85 per cent of those being indeterminate workers — which is a 5.2-per-cent increase from the previous year.

The largest single occupational group was administrative services, constituting 15.2 per cent of all employees. Programme administration and clerical and regulatory were the next most popular occupational groups, at 12 and 10.4 per cent, respectively. Economics and social science services, which eight per cent of all employees fell under, saw the largest growth of the top five occupational groups in 2018-19, rising by 10.9 per cent. At 7.3 per cent, computer systems rounds out the top five.

Appearing before a parliamentary committee in 2018, Daviau called on the federal government to improve staffing by understanding existing employee skill-sets, by improving pre-planning to ensure departments have the necessary time to complete hiring searches and by making better use of government-wide staffing pools.

Individual government departments or organizations are typically unwilling to share their purpose-specific staffing pools because they’ve spent the time and money creating them, according to Daviau.

This leads to situations in which pre-screened and qualified employees are stuck without work because no relevant position is available in their respective department despite the need existing elsewhere in the public service, she said.

“Staffing is already a very long, rigorous process. So if you got a list of people that you put through that long and rigorous process, it would be nice to have those people to be accessing staff,” Daviau added.

The report also touched upon the number of public service employees seeking out permission to engage in political activities.

Federal public servants must first seek approval from the Public Service Commission before seeking the nomination or being a candidate in municipal, territorial, provincial or federal elections. In making a determination, the commission says it has to determine whether the political activities will “impair or be perceived as impairing an employee’s ability to perform their duties in a politically impartial manner.”

The commission considers factors like the nature of the election and the employee’s duties and the level and visibility of the employee’s position. But even if permission is granted, the commission can also “set out conditions to avoid or to mitigate potential risks to political impartiality.”

In 2018-19, the commission says it had 81 requests for permission, with one request denied after determining that measures “could not be implemented to mitigate the potential risk associated with the public servant’s duties, particularly the degree of influence over the drafting of legislation.” Of that total, 56 requests were made for nine different municipal elections, 13 were made for three separate provincial votes and 12 were made for the 2019 federal vote. The 2018-19 fiscal year ended on March 31, 2019, months before the Oct. 21 federal election.

Also, the commission says it received 18 allegations of improper political activities in the past fiscal year, most of which “concerned a failure to seek and obtain permission before running for office.” There were 12 cases that warranted an investigation, of which seven reached a “founded conclusion and appropriate corrective actions were ordered.”