Thank you very much for that, and thank you for plugging the McGill JSDLP; I'm a former editor-in-chief, so I appreciate it.
Yes, I'm familiar with your article.
I'm not going to offer any opinions on where I think things should go, but I can tell you where we are and what we're working on.
The CESD audit was issued quite some time ago, and there have been many changes since then. I've been with the branch for about seven years and have seen things change and modernize quite significantly over that time. There are three areas in particular in which I think we're seeing some pretty dramatic improvements, and you're going to start seeing these play out publicly over time.
The first is with planning and reporting. That's about deciding what we should focus on and then how we communicate about the work we've done. In deciding how we should focus our efforts, and also to address Ms. Duncan's comments about regional staff versus headquarters staff, I actually don't see a divide at all between regional staff and headquarters staff.
I'm a relatively new director general. I've been on the job since July, and everything I do is about the work the regions do, because theirs is the work of the enforcement branch; everything else that happens, at headquarters, is supportive of their work. The widgets that we make are enforcement actions, not reports on things or PowerPoint presentations.
We've brought the regions very much in to help figure out what we should be doing on an annual basis, in that we have a representative from each region who sits on a committee that helps decide what our priorities are. They work with the staff at headquarters to crunch the data and look at what we've done in the past and where our interventions have been the most successful; then we figure out where to focus our priorities for that year.
It's very much grounded in what's really happening out there in the world. I think this shows a lot of respect for the work people do on the ground, but much more importantly, I think it actually makes our work a lot better.
Describing the work that we do in reporting is always a challenge in an enforcement organization; that is the case across the world, actually. Numbers don't really adequately tell the story of the work we do.
For example, you might see something that says we opened up an investigation. What does that mean? An investigation can take a few months, but 50% of our investigations actually take one to three years of lots and lots of hard work. It counts as one investigation, but it really doesn't tell you the story of what we've done.
We are getting better at reporting using narratives, appearing at industry association events and bar association events and events such as this to tell our story better and in a way that the public can understand. That's in line with what the present government is doing in terms of reporting out to Canadian people in a way that's easier to understand.
The second area we're getting a lot better in is the use of intelligence analysis. It helps us out strategically in considering where to plan our efforts for the year. Margaret mentioned that our planned inspections are based heavily on what our intelligence group is providing. We've made significant efforts to improve their capacity over the years, and that's only going to grow with time.
The third area in which we're improving dramatically is our investigative capacity and our hand-off to the Public Prosecution Service, in terms of working with them and improving our relationship with them. It's a very close relationship right now, and that closeness is also helping us make sure that things that need to go to court do go to court and that fines start to rise. I think you're going to see the efforts of this over time, and were we to be audited again in a couple of years, you'd see a different result.
