Thank you. I want to thank the officials for coming in today. Auditor General, thanks to you as well. It's nice to finally meet you.
I want to talk about some comments that were made earlier about ship procurement, not that specifically, but we talked about options. In other words, this is a process that is noble, but nonetheless, because of the budget caps, options have to be made, and therefore, these numbers have to be adjusted, and so on and so forth.
These are major decisions with major amounts of money, as we all know. What bothers me and alarms me the most is—and I'll read directly from chapter 1. It says:
Eight years after government made it a priority to have in place effective internal controls over financial reporting, I am concerned that several large departments are still years away from knowing whether these controls are in place and working effectively.
What I'm saying is, I'm very alarmed at the monitoring that is not taking place. Specifically, since I'm the citizen service critic for the Liberal Party, I want to focus on chapter 2, “Access to Online Services”. I'll give you some time to check that out. It says that since 2005 “the government has not significantly expanded” the services it offers online to its citizens.
For the last five or six years, we've constantly been hearing about how the government is going to steer traffic, the clients from in-person visits and telephone calls, over towards the online service. Now I get that, because the numbers you show say that it costs the government close to $30 for a person-to-person visit to an office, but if it's done online, some of the studies show it can be as cheap as 13 cents.
The problem is that it's just not keeping up with what the expectations are. The government says that they want more people online, but it seems to me they're just not ready for it. There's no coordination.
I'll leave you with this example from paragraph 2.42 in chapter 2 about online access. This is what's alarming. It says:
Service Canada does not have an overall service delivery strategy, although it has been working on developing one since 2009.
Millions of dollars have been spent advising people to go online when it's not there.
What is most egregious to you since 2005 that deserves attention?