Public Accounts Committee on May 4th, 2010

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

If you're the quarterback, and you throw the ball, do you have people out there to catch it?

[Alister Smith]

We hope that we will have more and more people to catch it as we move along, yes.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

So it really is you. I don't want to put more weight on your shoulders than is fair. You are the quarterback for the implementation of this whole thing across government. It's you.

[Alister Smith]

Yes, that's correct.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

That's a big responsibility.

[Alister Smith]

It is.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

It reminds me of a vignette of evaluators who go out to a food bank. They have their clipboards and their video cameras, and the food bank manager comes out and says, “We're too busy to do this now. Come back when nobody's hungry.”

Have you established benchmarks for the implementation of this across government?

[Alister Smith]

We've established milestones. We've established a great number of particular objectives. This year, as you have heard before, our primary objective is to ensure that our guidance is firmly determined, that it is supported by departments, and that they see this as pragmatic and doable. We hope to finalize our guidance to establish good departmental evaluation plans and to report annually on the health of the evaluation function. We hope to then move over this four-year period to the five-year real implementation period, when we will try to ramp up spending coverage to 20% a year from the current level of 16%.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

In the Auditor General's report there was reference to a March 31, 2010 deadline for a document called a guidance document. Did Treasury Board succeed in getting that guidance document out there on time?

[Alister Smith]

All of our draft guidance documents—and there are at least three different parts of this—have been in circulation in departments over the last few months. We're finalizing them now, and we will be finalizing them at different stages through 2010-11. By the start of the next fiscal year, we hope to have all this guidance in a very solid form.

It's very important that we ensure that we've thought through all the issues, such as, for example, the calibration of effort, before we require departments to follow this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Was that a clear enough answer? I'm not sure.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I was interested in the concept of the calibration of effort. I don't know what it is.

This five-year cycle, of course, is way out beyond the world that we around this table know. This is way into the future, so we're relying on you professionals to do this. I think we've made progress in focusing on some of the tangibles, but is there anything you wanted to add, Mr. Smith?

[Alister Smith]

No. We know that we have to continue to build the community, build up competencies, and build up our indeterminate personnel within government. We have some real challenges, clearly, but we're working on many, many fronts. We're working with 11 universities to build up the community. We have a community of practice well established. We have a lot of guidance, as we mentioned, in circulation. We have many expert evaluators within government helping us. So I'm confident that we can, over this four-year period, ramp up our capacity in order to undertake full coverage.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

This is a tough question for you, but do you have sufficient commitment and resources from the people who supervise you to do this job? Are there enough resources to accomplish the task?

[Alister Smith]

Within Treasury Board itself, or do you mean across government?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Well, anywhere in the system. You're the quarterback.

[Alister Smith]

Frankly, I think anybody responsible for an initiative would want more resources rather than less. Certainly we will be trying to make the case. In departments it will be a matter for the deputies, in the first instance, to determine whether they require more resources. Mr. Yeates and Mr. Shugart, for example, mentioned they are very conscious of the need for resources in these areas. There are limits to the resources available for any of these initiatives, but we will continue to argue for more resources in this area.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Just to clarify one point, Mr. Smith, regarding the recommendation that was made—and Mr. Lee brought this up—Treasury Board Secretariat responded by saying that it was planning to issue, by March 31, “written guidance for making risk-based choices for evaluation coverage to support departments during the transition period”. Can you file a copy of that guidance with the committee?

[Alister Smith]

Absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Can you do that within two weeks? Would that be fine?

[Alister Smith]

Yes. This is still the draft guidance, but we would be happy to provide it to you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mr. Kramp.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I have thought of a bit of a red herring in looking at a cost-benefit analysis of this whole process. I can recall being in business once, when an audit cost me $20,000 in professional fees. Goodness knows what it costs government. I know from my audit that there was an $11 discrepancy.

I'm asking for an opinion on the following. We have programs being run by the best people we have available in this country, by all of our program directors and ADMs. We also have an Auditor General who is doing a great job, and we're very, very pleased to see that. But we have auditors auditing the auditors of the department, who audit the internal auditors, who audit the evaluators. We're running down through....

I'm just wondering about the horrendous cost involved. Is the benefit of all of this comparable to the cost, or are we really just building another multi-levelled or layered bureaucracy? We have 350,000 civil servants in this country employed by the federal government alone. Is it necessary to audit the auditors, and to audit the other auditors who audit the auditors who audit the evaluators?

On my point, could you again just make a quick observation, Madam Fraser?

[Sheila Fraser]

I interpret that to mean why did we do this audit, right?