Federal Professionals' Message to MPs: Protect Public Science, Ensure Tax Fairness, Retain Professional Expertise

OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Feb. 23, 2016) - Federal public service professionals are taking their message of revitalizing federal science, ensuring tax fairness, and reining in outsourcing directly to Members of Parliament (MPs) in a series of one-on-one meetings being held today.

"The new majority government has indicated a far greater willingness to listen to public service professionals than the previous government," said PIPSC President Debi Daviau. "Along with opposition MPs and other Canadians, we want to ensure that our concerns continue to be heard, especially in the area of promoting evidence-based public policy. This is especially important to protecting scientific integrity, ensuring tax fairness and retaining professional expertise within the public service."

"We feel very strongly that the best way to ensure federal scientists aren't muzzled by governments in the future is to have the right of scientists to speak recognized in our collective agreements. That would ensure there exists a proper, binding process to deal with complaints and concerns that arise in the future. Science should never be silenced again," added Daviau.

"There is also an estimated $7.8 billion in uncollected taxes currently sitting in offshore tax havens," said Daviau, "yet how many MPs or other Canadians know that the costs of recovering those taxes are a mere fraction of what is owed? To a government embarking on major infrastructure spending, we think this is important to know - to say nothing of vital to efforts at ensuring the fairness of the tax system."

PIPSC members are also raising the alarm about the government's growing over-reliance on outsourcing, which circumvents federal employment standards of merit-based hiring, bilingualism, and inclusiveness. The federal government currently spends on outsourcing more than the budgets of Statistics Canada, Health Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, the National Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission combined.

The concerns raised individually by PIPSC members in their meetings today also form the basis of the Institute's pre-budget submission to members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada represents some 55,000 public-sector scientists and other

professionals across the country, most of them employed by the federal government.