President of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) Debi Daviau and Stephane Aubry. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

The collective agreements that have snarled the Phoenix pay system for months could still be backlogged when federal unions are back at the bargaining table negotiating a new batch of contract changes.

The federal government is steering clear of setting deadlines for when Phoenix will finish processing the pay transactions created by past collective agreements but it won’t be before spring.

That’s if all goes to plan. The Phoenix roller-coaster ride of the past two years is a reminder that anything can happen to knock the government off course of stabilizing Phoenix by the end of 2018.

Many of the contracts being processed now will expire in May and unions are already putting together their bargaining teams to start a new round of negotiations.

“There have been no assurances that the outstanding collective agreements now that are causing so many problems will be finished before they will be forced to make more changes with new agreements,” said one senior executive. “So why would we think they will get those done before new ones are in.”

The president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada said she expects Phoenix will still implementing contracts negotiated in the last round of collective bargaining when new contracts from the next round start coming in.

PIPSC’s contracts expire between May and December and notices to bargain could be issued in March.

”We could finish bargaining the next round before they are done processing the contracts from this round,” said Debi Daviau.

Daviau said unions have not received accurate reports on the status of collective agreements being processed by the pay centre in Miramichi, N.B.

“They don’t know the status or have an accurate report … on how far along they are on implementing collective agreements so who knows how long it will take,” said Daviau.

She said the government is so overwhelmed with meeting the deadline for issuing tax slips that she’s braced for the processing of collective agreements to be put on hold until the tax season rush is over. Thousands of public servants reported the overpayments they received in 2017 so they only had to repay the net amount and had that reflected in their tax slips

Public Services and Procurement Canada had hoped to have contracts, which were signed last year, implemented. But pay operations were hampered by being unable to hire enough compensation advisers; transactions took much longer than expected; unexpected manual processing — and now the end-of-the year rush to get accurate T-4s to employees on time.

Implementing the changes from contracts negotiated in the next round is expected to be easier. The big difference: retroactive payments won’t go back four years and pay records won’t be divided between Phoenix and the defunct regional pay system.

In fact, many argue the government and unions could take some of the pressure of off Phoenix if it negotiated agreements before they expired. That has rarely happened, however, and bargaining typically drags on for months.

Phoenix has been wracked with unexpected problems since it went live in February 2016 but the collective agreements threw a big curve at PSPC and increased the volume of outstanding financial cases because they require more time and manual processing than expected.

PSPC also jettisoned the installation of some Phoenix functions in the run-up to the Phoenix launch to save time and money, confident they could be added later with little problem.

One of those features was Phoenix’s ability to automatically handle the massive revisions of collective agreements — including the calculation of retroactive payments.

After more than three years of negotiations, Treasury Board and unions have reached 20 contract settlements which cover 90 per cent of the public service.

The transactions, including raises and retroactive pay, have been so bogged down that the government has missed legal deadlines set to implement some. The unions are filing grievances galore and seeking damages on those late payments.

The most recent deal for the government’s 7,500 corrections officers – who have complicated shifts and pay rules – won’t be signed until the end of February and the government will have four months to implement it.

There are still another 15,600 employees who haven’t reached deals so those contracts have yet to be sent to Phoenix.

Unions representing the lawyers, diplomats and border guards have hit impasses and are in conciliation or arbitration to sort out their differences. The lawyers are expecting the binding decision of a conciliation board this month but the Professional Association of Foreign Services Officers, which represents Canada’s diplomats, isn’t even scheduled for its arbitration until early March.

Treasury Board is still in negotiations with unions for federal pilots, ships officers and university teachers but those talks have stalled with no dates set for further bargaining.

The government is chugging away in negotiations with separate agencies. It has reached 17 tentative agreements – which is about half of the contracts covering separate agencies.

Bargaining is underway with unions representing employees at the National Research Council, Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Canada Revenue Agency, Canada Revenue Agency and Statistical Survey Operations — with some sessions scheduled into late March.

Agreements have yet to be reached with the following bargaining units.

• 9,600 border guards represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC)

• 2,900 lawyers represented by the Association of Justice Counsel

• 1,300 foreign service officers represented by the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers

• 1,100 ships officers represented by the Canadian Merchant Services Guild

• 400 pilots belonging to the Canadian Federal Pilots Association

• 270 university teachers represented by the Canadian Military Colleges Faculty.