Adjudication of Grievances in Public Service of Canada

Avant 1967, les employés de la fonction publique fédérale n'avaient aucun moyen véritable d'obtenir le redressement de leurs griefs.La Loi concernant le service civil du Canada de 1961 prévoyait, cependant, un mécanisme d'appel dans les cas de promotion et de mutation, de refus d'augmentation de salaires, aussi bien que dans ceux de suspension, de rétrogradation et de renvoi. La Loi obligeait le comité d'appel à tenir une enquête sur le litige et à faire des recommandationsà la Commission sur la façon de disposer des appels. La décision finale revenait à la Commission de la Fonction publique. Comme le comité d'appel n'était pas habilité à prendre des décisions, au mieux sa fonction demeurait consultative.Depuis l'adoption de la Loi sur l'emploi dans la Fonction publique et de la Loi sur les relations de travail dans la Fonction publique, en 1967, la situation a beaucoup changé. Les griefs qui donnaient lieu antérieurement à une révision du comité d'appel ont été répartis entre le mécanisme permanent de règlement des réclamations et l'arbitrage prévus à la Loi sur les relations de travail dans la Fonction publique, d'une part et le comité d'appel prévu à la Loi sur l'emploi dans la Fonction publique, d'autre part.Des désaccords comme les nominations par « concours restreints », les promotions sans concours, les rétrogradations et les renvois pour incompétence ou incapacité relèvent encore de la Commission de la Fonction publique. La législation a prévu remède aux plaintes relatives aux suspensions, au refus d'augmentations de salaires, à la rétrogradation ou au renvoi pour inconduite au moyen du mécanisme permanent de règlement des réclamations et de l'arbitrage en vertu de laLoi sur les relations du travail dans la Fonction publique. La compétence du comité d'appel se limite maintenant à permettre à un fonctionnaire pris individuellement d'obtenir la révision des décisions des ministères qui ne sont pas du ressort du comité des réclamations et de l'arbitrage prévus à laLoi sur les relations de travail dans la Fonction publique. Il y a, toutefois, certains cas où le plaignant n'a droit ni à l'appel ni au mécanisme de règlement des griefs.LaLoi sur les relations de travail dans la Fonction publique a assuré à tout employé de la fonction publique fédérale le droit d'accéder à un mécanisme de règlement des réclamations pour trancher toute plainte contre son employeur. La LRTFE est unique en ce qu'elle permet même aux personnes qui occupent des postes de direction et de nature confidentielle de présenter des griefs. En règle générale, celles-ci font partie des cadres et ne sont pas comprises dans l'unité de négociation, qu'il s'agisse du secteur public ou du secteur privé.LaLoi sur les relations de travail dans la Fonction publique comporte un mécanisme permanent visant au règlement des griefs par un tribunal indépendant. La législation du travail dans les autres champs d'activité exige qu'une convention collective contienne une clause relative à l'arbitrage exécutoire comme dernière étape du processus de règlement des griefs. La Loi a stipulé qu'il pourrait y avoir arbitrage des réclamations peu importe qu'une convention collective s'applique ou non au plaignant. Par le mécanisme permanent d'arbitrage, la Chambre des Communes a tenté de substituer la « Rule of Law » (règle de droit) à la discrétion administrative totale dans le domaine des relations du travail dans la fonction publique. La Chambre des Communes n'a pas voulu, cependant, que l'arbitre nommé en vertu de la Loi ait l'autorité de s'immiscer dans les prérogatives de la direction en matière de gestion et de discipline non plus que d'y passer outre. Il a voulu que l'autorité de l'arbitre de réviser la décision de la direction en ces matières se limite aux cas où la direction allait jusqu'à la sanction.L'arbitrage ne semble pas toutefois suppléer à toutes les décisions unilatérales. Contrairement à la pratique générale, l'arbitrage, en vertu de la Loi, s'ajoute aux appels des ministères, pour ce qui est des griefs pour lesquels on ne dispose d'aucun remède satisfaisant.Trois catégories de griefs peuvent être référés à l'arbitrage par les plaignants eux-mêmes ou leur agents de négociation (les syndicats). La première catégorie comprend tout grief d'un employé qui a trait à l'interprétation ou à l'application d'une clause de convention collective ou à une décision arbitrale. La deuxième catégorie comprend les griefs où il y a eu sanction disciplinaire contre le plaignant qu'il s'agisse de renvoi, de suspension ou d'amendes. La troisième catégorie inclut les cas où l'on recherche l'exécution d'une obligation découlant d'une convention collective ou d'une sentence arbitrale. L'agent de négociation ou l'employeur peuvent soumettre ces griefs. On appelle familièrement cette catégorie de griefs des « griefs politiques ».La décision de l'arbitre est finale. La Commission des relations de travail dans la Fonction publique a été autorisée à réviser la décision d'un arbitre en matière de question de droit ou de compétence. Le système d'arbitrage fonctionne sous la surveillance générale de la Commission des relations de travail dans la fonction publique sous l'autorité de l'arbitre en chef. Au cours des cinq dernières années, les arbitres ont disposé d'un bon nombre de plaintes et ont ainsi donné une orientation nouvelle aux relations du travail dans la fonction publique fédérale.Employer-employee relations in the Federal Public Service of Canada entered a new era with the proclamation on March 13, 1967, of three Acts— The Public Service Staff Relations Act ; The Public Service Employment Act ; and anAct to Amend the Financial Administration Act. The employees have been guaranteed the right to organize, the right to bargain, the right to strike and the right to get grievances adjudicated by an independent tribunal. The statutory right to grieve and get the grievances adjudicated have provided to the federal public employees a sense of justice and « fairplay ». The adjudication system has made the private sector of industrial jurisprudence applicable to the federal public services with a remarkable success. This article deals with the function and operation of the statutory Grievance Process and Adjudication

Enhancing Privacy and Security of Autonomous UAV Navigation

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become essential tools in defense, law enforcement, disaster response, and product delivery. These autonomous navigation systems require a wireless communication network, and of late are deep learning based. In critical scenarios such as border protection or disaster response, ensuring the secure navigation of autonomous UAVs is paramount. But, these autonomous UAVs are susceptible to adversarial attacks through the communication network or the deep learning models - eavesdropping / man-in-the-middle / membership inference / reconstruction. To address this susceptibility, we propose an innovative approach that combines Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for secure autonomous UAV navigation. This end-to-end secure framework is designed for real-time video feeds captured by UAV cameras and utilizes FHE to perform inference on encrypted input images. While FHE allows computations on encrypted data, certain computational operators are yet to be implemented. Convolutional neural networks, fully connected neural networks, activation functions and OpenAI Gym Library are meticulously adapted to the FHE domain to enable encrypted data processing. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach through extensive experimentation. Our proposed approach ensures security and privacy in autonomous UAV navigation with negligible loss in performance

ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings

We present a scalable approach for learning open-world object-goal navigation (ObjectNav) -- the task of asking a virtual robot (agent) to find any instance of an object in an unexplored environment (e.g., "find a sink"). Our approach is entirely zero-shot -- i.e., it does not require ObjectNav rewards or demonstrations of any kind. Instead, we train on the image-goal navigation (ImageNav) task, in which agents find the location where a picture (i.e., goal image) was captured. Specifically, we encode goal images into a multimodal, semantic embedding space to enable training semantic-goal navigation (SemanticNav) agents at scale in unannotated 3D environments (e.g., HM3D). After training, SemanticNav agents can be instructed to find objects described in free-form natural language (e.g., "sink", "bathroom sink", etc.) by projecting language goals into the same multimodal, semantic embedding space. As a result, our approach enables open-world ObjectNav. We extensively evaluate our agents on three ObjectNav datasets (Gibson, HM3D, and MP3D) and observe absolute improvements in success of 4.2% - 20.0% over existing zero-shot methods. For reference, these gains are similar or better than the 5% improvement in success between the Habitat 2020 and 2021 ObjectNav challenge winners. In an open-world setting, we discover that our agents can generalize to compound instructions with a room explicitly mentioned (e.g., "Find a kitchen sink") and when the target room can be inferred (e.g., "Find a sink and a stove").Comment: code: https://github.com/gunagg/zso

Universal sectors of two-dimensional Carrollian CFTs

We revisit modular invariance in two-dimensional Carrollian conformal field theories from a geometric perspective. Focusing on the characters of the induced and highest-weight representations of the theory, we show that there are regions of parameter space where the vacuum character dominates in the dual channel. We use this property to zoom into different subsectors of the Carrollian theory. One of them is reminiscent of the Schwarzian sector of a relativistic CFT2 and has a flat space holographic interpretation as O-plane orbifold. It exists only for the highest-weight representation. We prove that for all sectors with vacuum dominance in the dual channel, the specific heat is negative, concurrent with the holographic interpretation of the negative specific heat of asymptotically flat spacetimes with horizons

Mapping India's energy subsidies 2021: time for renewed support to clean energy.

Government support is more important than ever for the energy transition in the wake of COVID-19, as governments around the world take unprecedented measures to help stimulate economic recovery. Shifting government support from fossil to clean energy can ensure that every rupee of public money helps access, affordability, energy security and the shift to a low-carbon economy. This report examines how the Government of India has used subsidies to support different types of energy from FY 2014 until FY 2020, and draws on qualitative data to describe major shifts since the onset of COVID-19. In light of the government commitments to Aatmanirbhar Bharat ("self-reliant India"), it also includes two special thematic chapters. The first explores how subsidy policy can best promote solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing as part of the road to 450 GW of renewable energy by 2030. The second examines how investments by public sector undertakings (PSUs) - that is, enterprises where the government is the majority owner - are supporting clean energy. Our data, summarized in Figure ES1, cover all subsidies from production to consumption for coal, oil and gas, electricity transmission and distribution (T&D), renewable energy, and electric vehicles (EVs). Nuclear and hydropower are not included due to a lack of adequate data availability. The underlying data are available online and have been made easier to explore with an accompanying data portal

Prostate cancer outcomes following whole-gland and focal high-intensity focused ultrasound

Objective: To report the 5-year failure-free survival (FFS) following high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). Patients and Methods: This observational cohort study used linked National Cancer Registry data, radiotherapy data, administrative hospital data and mortality records of 1381 men treated with HIFU for clinically localised prostate cancer in England. The primary outcome, FFS, was defined as freedom from local salvage treatment and cancer-specific mortality. Secondary outcomes were freedom from repeat HIFU, prostate cancer-specific survival (CSS) and overall survival (OS). Cox regression was used to determine whether baseline characteristics, including age, treatment year, T stage and International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) Grade Group were associated with FFS. Results: The median (interquartile range [IQR]) follow-up was 37 (20–62) months. The median (IQR) age was 65 (59–70) years and 81% had an ISUP Grade Group of 1–2. The FFS was 96.5% (95% confidence interval [CI] 95.4%–97.4%) at 1 year, 86.0% (95% CI 83.7%–87.9%) at 3 years and 77.5% (95% CI 74.4%–80.3%) at 5 years. The 5-year FFS for ISUP Grade Groups 1–5 was 82.9%, 76.6%, 72.2%, 52.3% and 30.8%, respectively (P < 0.001). Freedom from repeat HIFU was 79.1% (95% CI 75.7%–82.1%), CSS was 98.8% (95% CI 97.7%–99.4%) and OS was 95.9% (95% CI 94.2%–97.1%) at 5 years. Conclusion: Four in five men were free from local salvage treatment at 5 years but treatment failure varied significantly according to ISUP Grade Group. Patients should be appropriately informed with respect to salvage radical treatment following HIFU

Treatment-related toxicity using prostate bed versus prostate bed and pelvic lymph node radiation therapy following radical prostatectomy: A national population-based study

Purpose There is debate about the effectiveness and toxicity of pelvic lymph node (PLN) irradiation in addition to prostate bed radiotherapy when used to treat disease recurrence following radical prostatectomy. We compared toxicity from radiation therapy (RT) to the prostate bed and pelvic lymph nodes (PBPLN-RT) with prostatebed only radiation therapy (PBO-RT) following radical prostatectomy. Methods and Materials Patients with prostate cancer who underwent post-prostatectomy RT between 2010 and 2016 were identified by using the National Prostate Cancer Audit (NPCA) database. Follow-up data was available up to December 31, 2018. Validated outcome measures, based on a framework of procedural and diagnostic codes, were used to capture ≥Grade 2 gastrointestinal (GI) and genitourinary (GU) toxicity. An adjusted competing-risks regression analysis estimated subdistribution hazard ratios (sHR). A sHR > 1 indicated a higher incidence of toxicity with PBPLN-RT than with PBO-RT. Results 5-year cumulative incidences in the PBO-RT (n = 5,087) and PBPLNRT (n = 593) groups was 18.2% and 15.9% for GI toxicity, respectively. For GU toxicity it was 19.1% and 20.7%, respectively. There was no evidence of difference in GI or GU toxicity after adjustment between PBO-RT and PBPLN-RT (GI: adjusted sHR, 0.90, 95% CI, 0.67–1.19; P = 0.45); (GU: adjusted sHR, 1.19, 95% CI, 0.99–1.44; P = 0.09). Conclusions This national population-based study found that including PLNs in the radiation field following radical prostatectomy is not associated with a significant increase in rates of ≥Grade 2 GI or GU toxicity at 5 years

What can patient-reported experience measures tell us about the variation in patients' experience of prostate cancer care? A cross-sectional study using survey data from the National Prostate Cancer Audit in England

OBJECTIVES: A national survey aimed to measure how men with prostate cancer perceived their involvement in and decisions around their care immediately after diagnosis. This study aimed to describe any differences found by socio-demographic groups. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of men who were diagnosed with and treated for prostate cancer. SETTING: The National Prostate Cancer Audit patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) survey in England. PARTICIPANTS: Men diagnosed in 2014-2016, with non-metastatic prostate cancer, were surveyed. Responses from 32 796 men were individually linked to records from a national clinical audit and to administrative hospital data. Age, ethnicity, deprivation and disease risk classification were used to explore variation in responses to selected questions. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Responses to five questions from the PREMs survey: the proportion responding to the highest positive category was compared across the socio-demographic characteristics above. RESULTS: When adjusted for other factors, older men were less likely than men under the age of 60 to feel side effects had been explained in a way they could understand (men 80+: relative risk (RR)=0.92, 95% CI 0.84 to 1.00), that their views were considered (RR=0.79, 95% CI 0.73 to 0.87) or that they were involved in decisions (RR=0.92, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.00). The latter was also apparent for men who were not white (black men: RR=0.89, 95% CI 0.82 to 0.98; Asian men: RR=0.85, 95% CI 0.75 to 0.96) and, to a lesser extent, for more deprived men. CONCLUSIONS: The observed discrepancies highlight the need for more focus on initiatives to improve the experience of ethnic minority patients and those older than 60 years. The findings also argue for further validation of discriminatory instruments to help cancer care providers fully understand the variation in the experience of their patients

Comparison of the treatment of men with prostate cancer between the US and England: an international population-based study.

INTRODUCTION: The treatment of prostate cancer varies between the United States (US) and England, however this has not been well characterised using recent data. We therefore investigated the extent of the differences between US and English patients with respect to initial treatment. METHODS: We used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database to identify men diagnosed with prostate cancer in the US and the treatments they received. We also used the National Prostate Cancer Audit (NPCA) database for the same purposes among men diagnosed with prostate cancer in England. Next, we used multivariable regression to estimate the adjusted risk ratio (aRR) of receiving radical local treatment for men with non-metastatic prostate cancer according to the country of diagnosis (US vs. England). The five-tiered Cambridge Prognostic Group (CPG) classification was included as an interaction term. RESULTS: We identified 109,697 patients from the SEER database, and 74,393 patients from the NPCA database, who were newly diagnosed with non-metastatic prostate cancer between April 1st 2014 and December 31st 2016 with sufficient information for risk stratification according to the CPG classification. Men in the US were more likely to receive radical local treatment across all prognostic groups compared to men in England (% radical treatment US vs. England, CPG1: 38.1% vs. 14.3% - aRR 2.57, 95% CI 2.47-2.68; CPG2: 68.6% vs. 52.6% - aRR 1.27, 95% CI 1.25-1.29; CPG3: 76.7% vs. 67.1% - aRR 1.12, 95% CI 1.10-1.13; CPG4: 82.6% vs. 72.4% - aRR 1.09, 95% CI 1.08-1.10; CPG5: 78.2% vs. 71.7% - aRR 1.06, 95% CI 1.04-1.07) CONCLUSIONS: Treatment rates were higher in the US compared to England raising potential over-treatment concerns for low-risk disease (CPG1) in the US and under-treatment of clinically significant disease (CPG3-5) in England