Public Accounts Committee on Nov. 27th, 2013

[Michael Ferguson]

What we looked at were the overall timelines for how long it takes to process a payment under any given program. We found that in some cases they are able to do it within their stated timeline, and in other cases they're not.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Okay, and I'll come to that. The nine-month target period, Mr. Chair, is the time in which the payments are met. The time the assessment gets evaluated seems to be too long, but once that assessment is made, then the targets are hit pretty much in terms of the payment going out. In fact, I think the nine-month target is reached 84% of the time. Is that correct?

[Michael Ferguson]

You'd have to refer me to the paragraph before—

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

It's paragraph 8.16.

[Michael Ferguson]

The department met its nine-month target for 84% of initiatives, yes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

The program that you evaluated looks at three disasters: disease, drought, or excessive moisture. Are the large payments under excessive moisture? I think if you go back to the front it talks about flooding.

[Michael Ferguson]

Certainly the largest program with the largest payment was under excess moisture, yes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Was that due to flooding?

[Michael Ferguson]

I don't know whether in all cases it was due to flooding, but certainly flooding would cause excess moisture.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

You did have a conversation with a number of agriculture commodity groups, I guess. I'm a little familiar with it, and in all my time here I've never heard this come up as an issue.

To go back, you say:

For example, a $44,000 excess moisture initiative was delivered in a total of 228 days, while the largest, at $150 million, took less than half that time.

We're talking about the wet, which mostly is about really bad weather, that takes it beyond what insurance would cover and into a disaster program.

I'm wondering what was said in terms of disease and drought, in terms of your assessment of the time. If you're in the agriculture field, actually, and if you have disease and drought, it's understandable that the assessment time will be quite a bit longer. There has to be an evaluation, I believe, with the crop insurance to see what impact that disease or that drought may have had on the yield of the crop.

I'm trying to understand the justification that both the province and the federal government are telling you, through the commodity organizations, that this is excessive. I'm wondering if there is a reason for that, just based on the comments I've made.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Give a brief answer, please.

[Michael Ferguson]

I think the brief answer is to refer to exhibit 8.3, which indicates the range of days that it would take to process claims under any specific type of disaster. It shows that the ranges are quite large.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Mr. Shipley, thanks very much. Your time has expired.

Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Mr. Ferguson, going back to food recall, I listened with great interest to my colleague, Mr. Woodworth. In your statement with regard to chapter 4, one of the things you said is that “While illnesses were contained in the recalls we examined, I am not confident that the system will always yield similar results.” Then you went on to talk about weaknesses in the inherent system.

While my colleague might say that you looked at some samples and you didn't actually find a lot of illnesses—albeit at XL there were some, there were not a lot, obviously—the other piece to look at under ICS is the additional piece that talked about how, yes, at the senior level, and I think Mr. Affleck said that, they understood ICS, but the folks who would have what we call “boots on the ground” did not.

There was this whole piece, it seems to me in reading this, and hopefully you can help me with this, that with regard to the folks who thought they had made decisions before who now weren't necessarily going to make the decisions, no one had actually told them that they weren't making the decisions anymore.

There was a whole ream of confusion, especially at the XL piece, because this was a major recall.... Well, it wasn't a major one; it was the largest meat recall in this country's history.

With that confusion, sir, is that a program that's actually working effectively when the identification is that we have confusion?

[Michael Ferguson]

Again, I think we need to go back to the two aspects.

In terms of the three large recalls that we examined, the number of illnesses were contained. When we saw that there was confusion in the decision-making, that people who would make decisions in the normal course of events were not making decisions in this case, and where there was confusion in the communication between the agency and the companies....

I think in the chapter we specifically identify that there was some confusion in the XL case around the dates that were involved in the recall and the products that were involved in the recall. We do say that the illnesses were contained in those three incidents. However, when you look at some of the things we saw, they need to be improved, we feel, in order for people to have confidence that the system will always return that level of success.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

I would certainly concur with that, sir, in the sense that if you don't know what the dates are when you're recalling a particular product, you may be recalling stuff that doesn't need to be recalled, but that's on the plus safety side, in a sense. It's a loss to the producer or the processor. The problem is if you have the wrong date, and you were supposed to have recalled the tainted material the day before and it's now out there. That seems to me to be a glaring gap when that confusion starts.

However, I want to move on to chapter 7. You indicated that with a hard cap, if I can use that term, in the budget, which the government has talked about before in the House and you've identified, you suggested that perhaps they will be faced with some choices. What do you see those choices being if they, indeed, stay at the same dollar figure that has been proposed, if there's no movement in opening up that budget in the next number of years?

[Michael Ferguson]

To clarify, Mr. Chair, the question referred to chapter 7. I think you're referring to chapter 3 on—

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Oh, sorry. Yes, it's chapter 3. I beg your pardon, Mr. Ferguson. You're right. I got ahead of myself; I want to go there next.

[Michael Ferguson]

Really, the types of choices, I think, are the normal types of choices you would see in any large project, whether it's acquisition of military equipment, acquisition of a building, or an information technology project where there are constraints. There's the amount of money you want to spend, there's what you want to buy, and there's when you want it delivered. I think people in the consulting business will usually tell you that you have those three constraints and you can have any two of them.

That's really what this is about. There are budget caps, there's the number of ships they want, there's capability they want in those ships. When you put all of those things together, I think it's a normal part of this type of large project that at some point in time there will have to be considerations made about whether there needs to be more money in the budget, whether it's fewer ships, whether the capability of the ships can be reduced, and we've already seen that within these projects. They're faced with having to make considerations in some of those areas.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

I'm sorry. Your time has expired, Mr. Allen. You can commiserate with Mr. Woodworth.

The last in this rotation will be Mr. Albas. You have the floor again, sir.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you to our guests for being here to share your work with us today.

I'd like to focus on chapter 5, “Preventing Illegal Entry into Canada”. I actually learned quite a bit from your report, sir. I note that approximately 98.7 million people, non-Canadians, cross our borders to visit or to do business every year. That's a tremendous number of people to control, because we want to make sure that we keep people safe. That's about 90,000 people a day, I understand. Can Canadians be confident that the CBSA is stopping those people who pose safety and security threats from entering the country?

[Michael Ferguson]

What we did in this audit was examine certain practices of the agency at the border for preventing illegal entry, and we took samples during a period of time. We did find there were instances where the agency would have had enough information to identify certain people at the border as people of concern, but there were still some people who were able to get through. Our samples were small and the number of people we talked about who got through were small. However, when you look at the size of the number of people who are actually entering, the level of those who were able to get through who shouldn't have gotten through, was high enough in our samples that it is concerning.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

Again, there are many different parts that your report touches upon, everything from lookouts to port runners, etc., but I'd like to focus a little bit on the information that is provided through the airlines.

I notice that the agency reported an average 99% rate of compliance by airlines for the 2011-12 fiscal year in sharing advance passenger information. That's certainly reassuring to me, although we still have that 1% to work on.

Again, sir, to the challenge function that your office operates under, I also noticed in paragraph 5.27: ...during the audit period, the Agency developed an action plan designed to improve the quality of the Advance Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record data it receives. The plan includes more systematic monitoring and reporting, and sharing of the results with airlines.

I'm really glad to see that even during an audit, the management at CBSA decided it would need to make immediate changes to its behaviour.

Could you give an idea to the people at home what the difference is with the advance passenger information and passenger name record data, and why that's important in the agency's work to keep Canadians safe?

[Michael Ferguson]

I won't go into a lot of detail on it, although there is one thing I want to clarify. In paragraph 5.25, it does say that the agency reported an average 99% rate of compliance, but the way it has been measuring that is that, if the airlines provide even one piece of data, it considers the airlines to be in compliance.

We would think that for the airlines to be in compliance, they really should be providing all the data required. There is actually more to work on than the 1%. We think the 99% really isn't a good measure of the airlines' compliance.

With regard to passenger name record and advance passenger information, I don't believe we have an actual explanation. I'll ask Ms. Loschiuk to refer to that.

[Wendy Loschiuk]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The advance passenger information and the passenger name record are data elements about the person flying, such as who you are, where you are from, what your nationality is, what travel documents you have, how many bags you brought on board, and what kind of ticket you are flying on. This information is important because the airlines have scenario-based risk assessment, and by plugging in data about travellers they are able to look at patterns and get certain hits, perhaps, against certain names that identify or alert them to risks that they should be looking into further.