Public Accounts Committee on May 13th, 2010

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

And our opening comments.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I'm going to ask the clerk to speak to this, because there's some....

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Joann Garbig]

I was provided one copy of the opening remarks, which I was told was to be given to the interpreters, and I followed those instructions.

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

Okay. Well, then, please accept our apologies--

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

When you appear before other committees, are your opening remarks circulated to the committee? Or do you have a policy...?

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

Mine would be.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

It may have been a misunderstanding.

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

I apologize if that's the case.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

The clerk was of the understanding that the policy for Transport was that you were not to circulate, and we're not going to cast any aspersions here. I think there may have been a misunderstanding.

[Yaprak Baltacioglu]

I've been in Transport for eight months. Maybe I missed this policy. Sorry about that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mr. Christopherson.

This was not off your time.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

It's just that sometimes when we're getting set up and listening to other folks, we're able to go back and pick up what you said, because we can't necessarily in real time. It's a small matter. We'll let that be.

Now, on Treasury Board, I'm still having some trouble understanding, after all the Auditor General's reports, why we still don't have a common template for the report. Why are they different?

When the Auditor General comes forward, we know automatically what the template is. We know what her reports look like. They're always lined up the same way in terms of what she's done, how she did it, and the conclusions. We don't have to immerse ourselves in that. We can go right to it.

Yet these reports are completely different. I don't understand. Help me.

[Alister Smith]

We do provide very detailed instructions on what should be included in the reports and we do have a lot of examples in that guidance, including on the tables that are required, the plan spending, actual spending, charts, and all of that. We haven't given departments a strict template because the DPRs are owned by ministers and departments. So if they want explanations in particular areas, they're free to do so.

Certainly we could go to a fixed format, but that might end up being a little too much of a one-size-fits-all format. So we provide a lot of information, a lot of guidance, on what we need to see in the report, but it doesn't preclude--

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

The chair pointed out they don't get used as much as they should. We're trying to force the issue to make these more important, and have been for years, and I think it would help a lot if we could pick it up and understand what the layout was going to be.

I understand your point, but surely to goodness...smart people can create a template that allows room for certain variables within the.... I mean, the Auditor General does different kinds of audits of different kinds of entities and yet the template is the same. That's all.

[Amanda Jane Preece, Executive Director, Results Based Management Division, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Yes. We did adopt a principles-based approach so there are certain headers that we would expect to see in there, but it's up to the departments to describe their story under those headers.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm sorry, I don't want to get too caught up in this, but it doesn't make it as easy as possible to use. How many reports are there across the government?

[Alister Smith]

Over 90.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

There are 90 and they're all likely to be somewhat different, so that's 90 different worlds that you have to go into and put your head around, whereas the whole point of the idea is to be able to pick it up as a fast reference and get a snapshot of where the department is.

Maybe that's something we can deliberate on later in regard to making that recommendation. I think that's a major weakness here. Again, not that anybody would, but when you get to create your own, you can take the reader on whatever little walk you want, notwithstanding that you have to touch on certain points from within your handbook. I get that. Anyway, we'll deal with that later, too.

My first question relates to page 12 in terms of security and page 10 in terms of risk analysis.

However, before I do that, I do have to do one more thing. What the heck is “mostly met”? Is that like “pretty much, kinda, sorta” and “it depends how you look at it”? What the heck is “mostly met”, given that precision is one of the goals here?

[Alister Smith]

We do try to calibrate the extent to which targets are met. If they're 100% met, it means they're fully met. If they're mostly met, it's probably 70% of the performance toward the target established.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Is that an acknowledged measurement term? Am I missing something? I've never seen “mostly met” in a project before....

[Alister Smith]

One is always trying to ensure that there's some sort of quantitative or directional assessment of performance. If there's a defined target, how do you determine how far you've gone in meeting that target? You know that if the target is defined quantitatively and 100% of your requirements are met, then it's fully met. But if it's part of the way, we need some way of trying to calibrate that; so we said “mostly met” if it's a majority.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I hear you, but most of it could be the easy part while the really tough stuff is not done. It may be accurate wording, but I'm not sure that it really tells us anything. Do others use that term?

[Alister Smith]

Actually, in a lot of respects, I think we're further ahead than others in trying to calibrate the movement towards meeting the target. We tried to find some way of characterizing it rather than saying it's 70% or 60%, which would fall into the same trap of giving lower value measures the same importance as higher value measures.

We've tried to give it a bit of a qualitative spin with “mostly met”. That doesn't mean you're fully there. It means you're most of the way there. If you're not there at all, then we want to be able to characterize that as well. It's a bit of a qualitative assessment.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Do the other reports use that term? Is it a term that you encourage them to use?

[Alister Smith]

Yes, we encourage the same calibration for all reports.