Public Accounts Committee on April 15th, 2008

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

My next question is for Mr. Edwards.

You said in your opening remarks that you now have a plan. I find it hard to understand—and I was talking about other departments partly because of that—why any department would wait until the Office of the Auditor General conducted an audit before it developed something as important as a strategic plan to recruit personnel. I cannot understand why you did not do this earlier.

You speak on behalf of the department. You had not been in your position for very long, but I still wonder why no one thought of this. You also say that you now have a program focusing more on non-traditional recruitment methods. Should a department like yours not have figured out much earlier that traditional recruitment methods are not suitable? To my way of thinking, employment is different, so different recruitment methods are called for. That is my question for you.

[Leonard Edwards]

First of all, regarding a human resources plan, I agree that ordinarily, government departments should have such a plan. We had a plan before, but it was not complex enough and not designed or drafted well enough to meet our current needs.

The same is true of recruitment. For the past 50 years, we had a recruitment system in Canada. Every fall, we held exams to recruit foreign service officers. We had some 5,000 to 6,000 applicants every year, but we targeted foreign service officers. Now, we need to open our doors and our recruitment campaign to other employee groups.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

The process of preparing such a strategic plan includes a step where you have to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Did you find at that point that your weaknesses matched what the Auditor General had mentioned in her report? Does your department have weaknesses other than the ones she raised?

[Leonard Edwards]

Previously or now?

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

I am talking about the plan you just developed. When you conduct an analysis to prepare a strategic plan, it includes a step where you identify strengths and weaknesses.

[Leonard Edwards]

Yes, of course.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

In the analysis your department conducted, did you find any weaknesses aside from the ones the Auditor General had identified, so that you could take action and be proactive?

[Leonard Edwards]

In the plan I mentioned in my remarks, we identified strengths and weaknesses, as you said, and it is because of those weaknesses that we decided to recruit employees for positions other than foreign service officer positions from now on: commercial officers, economic officers and so on. It is because of the weaknesses we identified in developing this plan that we decided to do that.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Could we have a copy of that comprehensive plan for our information?

[Leonard Edwards]

Yes, of course.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Merci beaucoup, monsieur Laforest.

Mr. Sweet, you have seven minutes.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to begin with a question to Mr. Edwards.

The reason I needed your remarks is that I didn't think I heard in the six principal themes the word “security”. Particularly in our consular offices abroad, I think it would have to be one of the core focuses, particularly for locally engaged staff. I'm certain there was one incident, and there may have been multiple incidents in the past, of computers in consular offices being compromised by people who were former or present staff.

So it's with great concern that I look at paragraphs 3.66, 3.70, and 3.71 of the Auditor General's report. I notice a distinct lack of any kind of oversight for locally engaged staff, to the point where in paragraph 3.71 we read: “We noted that in recent years, the Bureau visited only four missions per year on average.”

With all of that, coupled with the fact that it's not uncommon for us to have people come into our constituency offices with concerns about the way some family members had been handled at some of our offices, do you not have any concerns about any kind of security supervision in these offices at the moment? And what are you doing, as far as your plan goes, not only to get qualified people, because there are plenty of those, but to make sure these people are also not a security risk?

[Leonard Edwards]

I think your question has to do with our locally engaged staff, if I understand correctly. When we hire locally engaged staff, we do so just as we do when we hire Canada-based staff. It's a competitive process. We put out ads, we interview, and so forth, and there is always, before we confirm the hire, what we call a reliability check done on locally engaged staff. That means that we talk to the local security and police authorities and so forth to determine, in effect, a security clearance.

It's not a formal security clearance such as we have with Canada-based staff, but our locally engaged staff all need to be checked for their reliability. They have reference checks to determine that they are of upstanding moral character, and so on. We don't hire anybody until we've done all of that. That's the first point.

The second point is that all local staff are in fact supervised by Canadian staff, including those who work in the trade sections and consular sections. We even have local staff who work sometimes in our political sections in the non-secure areas, doing work around the provision of local reporting on political developments and so on.

So we have in each of our missions abroad a structure of supervision that we believe is reliable.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

But Mr. Edwards, that's exactly what I'm questioning. Let me repeat some of paragraph 3.66 to you:

We found that the Department does not have accurate and complete information to properly manage these employees. We noted instances of staff recorded as working at the wrong mission, of missions without complete employment histories of their staff....

But here's one that really concerns me:

In addition, we found in some cases no record of an oath of office taken by local staff, as required by the LES Employment Regulations, or no record of their security checks.

You're telling me about this great process, but in fact when we check, there's a lack of integrity in the records. How do we possibly know that this is happening?

[Leonard Edwards]

We are taking steps to correct those shortcomings identified by the Auditor General. I can't deny that those shortcomings are there; the Auditor General found those shortcomings.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

So in a random check today, this would not be found in any consular offices of ours?

[Leonard Edwards]

We constantly remind our heads of mission and our people abroad to follow the regulations, which includes security checks and keeping the records up to date.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Okay. And has there been new training, have there been new advisories going out? I notice in a number of other areas—paragraphs 3.66, 3.64, 3.56, 3.59, all in this report—that in various different levels there is a distinct lack of--how would I say it?--professional habit among leaders at the executive level of making good notations in HR reports, whether they're automated or recorded in their file at the local office.

[Leonard Edwards]

I don't deny that what is in the Auditor General's report is what she and her staff found, but I can assure you that we are taking steps to correct it.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

But Mr. Edwards, that's the second time you said that. What specific steps are you taking?

I asked whether there was additional training. Have you gone to some kind of advisory where you're keeping these people on a short leash and saying, if these steps are not followed, there'll be consequences?

[Leonard Edwards]

We're doing a couple of things, one of which, of course is, as you say, that missions have been reminded of their responsibilities as managers of the staff to ensure that the practices that we insist upon and have insisted upon with respect to hiring qualified people, having the reliability checks done, records kept, and so forth, are followed. So yes, you're right. We've done that.

As to the second thing we are doing, as I said in my comments, one of the areas in which we have been woefully behind is the maintenance of these employee handbooks, which serve the managers of missions, but also the staff, as the framework for their employment. They deal with issues such as these, and we're taking steps to have them updated across the board.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

You had mentioned in your remarks that you are tasking the mission leaders with developing their own strategic plan for human resources at the local office. Could you tell me what extra resources you are giving them in order to accomplish this?

[Leonard Edwards]

We're giving them no extra resources. This is part of the normal management of missions, and administrative sections working under the head of mission will need to do that work. It's a requirement, and we haven't given any special resources for that. That's part of their normal work.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Well, I might argue with you on that, but I have only a limited amount of time, because going back several Auditor General reports, in fact that hasn't been regular management practice.

Lastly, in reference to paragraph 3.47 on page 13, we're talking about getting more staff, but there have been consistent problems with having the adequate staff, or should I say competent staff, at the appropriate level. Are you addressing that? It says there, “We found that 35 of those had not demonstrated the competencies to pass the first step of the ongoing process for promotion to the EX-01 level.”

Are you dealing with competency as well?