Public Accounts Committee on May 13th, 2010

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

One of the biggest problems we have had historically in Canada, certainly through the 1990s and the early part of this century, is that governments make great announcements of large amounts of money that are going to be spent--and the media loves to print them--so we end up talking a lot about how much money we threw at a problem, etc.

I want to ask how you are committed at Industry Canada to emphasizing actual outcomes as opposed to inputs.

[Richard Dicerni]

At the end of the day, the most important thing is to measure results. I'll give you two examples of areas we are tracking. One relates to the economic action plan, the knowledge infrastructure program that was put into place, and the other one is the overall investment in R and D by government and by business.

In terms of the knowledge infrastructure program, I believe the Auditor General may have referenced this. The staff are doing an audit of how we spent and the impact it has had. We follow this very closely with our provincial counterparts, with whom we are delivering this program, in terms of what is actually happening on the ground and what benefits it will have in enhancing the quality of the infrastructure of post-secondary education in the country.

With regard to investment in R and D, Canada does quite well overall in terms of its investments in research. Where we lack is in the area of business investment, which is something that we track.

The government--in the last budget, I think--announced that it was going to review R and D spending overall as it relates to the amounts that are spent, to achieve better commercialization, better outcomes, which goes to your point about what we are getting for this money.

It covers a wide range of instruments that government has, ranging from tax measures to things like IRAP and its programs. Because we're trying to get to the bottom of what impact this is having on the ground, how this is moving commercialization and how this is bringing product to market.

So we do keep an eye on, if you wish, the larger issues at hand.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you.

I think we fail, in many cases. I've discovered a number of situations where investments in IRAP have returned a lot of money to the treasury. We don't talk about that enough. There are a lot of good things going on.

In the opening remarks, it was mentioned that you've gone to a concise report of 40 pages that somebody can go through in a shorter period of time. You have more credible and reliable links to sources of information, and you have trending now, because trending is very important. You're also reporting in detail on lessons learned. I guess if you don't admit that you've made a mistake, you'll never be able to correct it, etc.

You have used previous reports to improve future performance. Can you please summarize a little on how this corrective action has been beneficial?

[Richard Dicerni]

If you look at the TPC program and, in some ways its successor, the strategic aerospace and defence initiative, you see that the TPC program had many successes. It had some gaps, but it had many successes.

We have built on that in order to improve terms and conditions and also in terms of what we get from the companies we are partnering with and how we track progress. Progress is not just about getting repayments; progress is about permitting these firms to produce products that will make Canada a leader.

You're quite right when you point out that we don't celebrate our successes.

This, in part, was the result of an IRAP initiative--

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Sorry, but for the record, you're holding up your BlackBerry.

[Richard Dicerni]

Yes, sir. I'm sorry.

There's always a lot of emphasis put on the failures, because those get some amount of attention, but unfortunately the very good initiatives often go unmeasured.

So this type of instrument assists us in tracking and improving year over year, but this will never be a finished, perfect product.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Young.

Thank you, Mr. Dicerni.

We're now going to go to Mr. Christopherson for five minutes and then over to Mr. Dreeshen.

Mr. Christopherson, you have five minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you for your presentations and for attending today.

I have to tell you, Deputy, I was taking bets that you wouldn't show, just because human nature being human nature.... I'm very impressed that you made the effort and it says a lot about you.

I want to move to--

[Richard Dicerni]

How much did you win?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Sorry?

[Richard Dicerni]

How much did you lose?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Are you willing to help?

My question, first of all, is to Mr. Maxwell. You made this comment in your opening remarks:

It must be recognized that performance reporting takes place in a political environment. Balanced reporting, that is, admitting to shortcomings as well as successes, does not yet appear to be part of the management culture of government.

Have you looked at the two reports that we're studying today?

[Neil Maxwell]

We have not. I had mentioned in the opening statement that we had not looked at these two.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I knew you hadn't analyzed them. Did you have a chance to even...?

[Neil Maxwell]

We did have a chance to read them in advance of this. Tempting as it might be to offer an on-the-spot audit, I'll resist the temptation.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's fair enough. Nonetheless, my point is still that the idea is to give a balanced presentation, and even the handbooks from Treasury Board call for that.

Perhaps the deputy or someone else can show me in here the other side of the picture. I'm the one who accused these things of being self-serving fluff. We've been working for a long time to change that. Part of that is the balance, so that it's not just a “hey, we're wonderful” document. You have a lot of those, so please show me the balance.

I found all the good stuff that you're bragging about. That's easy to find. Show me the rest, please.

[Richard Dicerni]

I'll make one comment and then Kelly can point to some.

I look upon this as one element within a menu of instruments by which we as officials are held accountable. The various officers of Parliament hold us to a certain standard of accountability, let it be the access to information commissioner, let it be colleagues who have left. They all contribute to enhancing the information that is available and they tend not to be shy about pointing out parts where sometimes we maybe don't totally hit the mark.

In here we've tried, and Kelly can point to some. Page 19, showing barriers to competition and trends, declining, so there are some if you point to--

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

No, sorry. I'm glad you raised that early on, because what I don't accept, quite frankly, in here is I saw where it said that there is a decline in your trends”, but that's talking about economic indicators. That's like a Statistics Canada report and then an editorial.

What I want to know is on your performance in terms of what you were going to do.... There's only so much you can do and then the economy does what it's going to do, so as for reporting to me whether trend lines are up or down, I can get all that from Statistics Canada. I want to know what expectations your department set up for yourselves to help achieve those things, and where you failed, because nobody's perfect. Where's that?

[Richard Dicerni]

It's at “Percentage overall satisfaction of clients with CIPO's services”, declining, on page 25

[Kelly Gillis]

In the report there are several areas.

[Richard Dicerni]

Do you have that one?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes.

[Kelly Gillis]

There are several indicators in declining.... Above and beyond the particular online report, we have a number of other lower-level indicators available online, which we have more attribution on and where we're improving or declining in about 25% of the cases overall. We say where we're declining.

Above and beyond that, for the 2009-10 departmental performance report, as we've included in the 2009-10 report on plans and priorities, we also have targets. We're going to report not only on trends, but also on targets: did we meet our target, yes or no?

We'll have two different indicators telling the reader how we're doing at varying levels, at the outcome level, which is longer reaching, and the economic, and then more granular as we go into the program activity, the sub-activity level.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay. Well, obviously, we'll have our analysts take those words and take the documents and conclude.... But if you're going to tell me the negative stuff is all buried in the next step, that's not that great.

I don't have a lot of time. Again, the template thing still makes me crazy. When I went to Transport, I wanted to see risks. I went to the table of contents and there was “risks”; I could find it. Here it's not even in the table of contents. I had to find it on my own.

So again, there's this business of a lack of commonality. Risk is important these days. I wanted to ask questions about cyber-risk. I'm not even going to get to that today, but part of it was that I should be able to pick up this document and look for “risk”. To their credit, they did it in Transport. They didn't do it in Industry.

While I'm on risk, if I may, it seems to me.... I look at this thing and I don't see a balance on risk. It says in the handbook that you're to show the negatives and the positives of things. The risk looks to me like just an essay study; I mean, it really.... Where's your analysis of your security risks, your cyber-risks, and the other risks? Where are those in there?