Top public servants unanimously opposed ‘big bang’ pay switchover for public service

Alex Benay, Associate Deputy Minister at Public Services and Procurement Canada, speaks during a news conference at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa, on Tuesday, July 9, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

OTTAWA — A top federal official says fixing the payroll problems caused by Phoenix cost taxpayers more than $5 billion — and they’ll keep paying extra to run two public service payroll platforms at once as Ottawa weans itself off the problem-plagued system.

Alex Benay, associate deputy minister at Public Services and Procurement Canada, says the alternative to running the Phoenix system in tandem with its replacement, Dayforce, would have been worse.

The other option, he says, was a “big bang” deployment that would have switched roughly 350,000 public servants from the old system to the new Dayforce system all at once.

That’s what happened when the federal government introduced Phoenix, which led to nearly a decade of mispayments for public servants and major lawsuits.

Benay says taxpayers likely spent about $5.1 billion to process a backlog of Phoenix errors that caused some public servants to be mispaid — or sometimes not paid at all.

While he doesn’t have a cost estimate for the switch to Dayforce, Benay adds senior government officials agreed not to repeat the mistakes of nine years ago when Phoenix was brought online.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 23, 2025.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press