Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning. I'm pleased to be before the committee. My name is Wilma Vreeswijk. I'm the deputy minister and president of the Canada School of Public Service. With me are my colleagues Jean-François Fleury, the vice-president of learning programs, and Elizabeth Tromp, the vice-president of corporate services and chief financial officer.

Because I don't appear very often before you, I thought I would go through our organizational context a bit to give you a frame of what we do.

The school is the common service provider for the public service in the area of learning. We equip public servants with the knowledge, skills, and competencies they need across federal organizations to fulfill their responsibilities in serving Canadians. In fact, our role is really to support deputy ministers and their HR and learning responsibilities for their organizations.

Over the past three years, we have been working on a significant transformation to make learning more relevant, more responsive, and more accessible. Most of the initiatives related to this transformation are now substantially complete.

In looking at the school now, you will see a standardized curriculum that offers learning opportunities at every stage of a public service career, including support at key transitions. From the foundations of public service, to specialized functional groups, and to the management of the executive and management ranks, the school supports the public service in serving Canadians with excellence.

We deliver this curriculum through an easy-to-access, interactive online platform. Our products cover a range of subjects, including policy design and implementation, financial and human resources management, and service excellence.

Our programming helps support public servants in delivering on government priorities, addressing such topics as indigenous relations, results and delivery, diversity and inclusion, and mental health.

Our curriculum ensures that public servants have access to resources that respond to their learning needs. And our flexible platform ensures that they can do so wherever they are, whatever their learning style.

As we have rolled out over the last three years new learning products, public servants have responded with enthusiasm. The total number of public service employees registering for school products across Canada has risen significantly over the last two years. GCcampus, our online, interactive learning platform, was created in April 2016. In this past fiscal year, 169,000 unique learners accessed that platform.

Across the country, we also offer three times more learning activities than we did previously, for a total of 300 learning activities across all regions on topics such as policy innovation, diversity, and inclusion.

We've also worked hard to ensure that the quality of our learning products is high and are pleased to report that the course evaluation results over the past three years indicate an increasing level of learner satisfaction. Just this past year, we were registering 87.5% satisfaction from learners reporting a positive learning experience at the school.

We have been able to dramatically increase our reach by putting technology to work in new and innovative ways. Over the last three years, 95% of public servants have used the school's learning products.

We are introducing more new learning opportunities, informed by extensive stakeholder consultations, such as our leadership and management programs for supervisors, managers, and executives, or the indigenous learning series that we are developing in consultation with the national indigenous organizations and which responds to the call to action on public service learning from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While achieving these improvements, the school moved from a blended funding model based on appropriations and cost recovery to one primarily funded through appropriations.

At the same time, the school's base funding has gone from $92 million in 2015-2016 to $77 million in 2017-2018. That is a reduction of close to 16%.

We have taken a number of steps to manage with these tighter financial resources.

We've reduced our staff complement by 13%. We've used IT-enabled learning to reach more public servants in a more efficient way. We have progressively streamlined business processes to keep our corporate functions as lean and as efficient as possible.

The school is now a significantly leaner organization, achieving better value for taxpayers.

It has not always been easy, but we are proud of what we've accomplished. Despite reduced resources, we have made significant improvements in the responsiveness, accessibility and reach of our products, as I have outlined.

We will continue to work with our partners in the coming year to refine the school's curriculum and infrastructure, ensuring that the school stays nimble and responsive to the complex environment and the tighter financial context.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I welcome your questions.

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