Government Operations Committee on April 25th, 2013

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Significant savings?

[Michelle Doucet]

Yes, there were significant cost savings as a result of that transformation.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Okay.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

John, you have 30 seconds.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

I'll leave it then because what I have to say is more than that.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

What a great committee member he is.

We'll move on to Bernard Trottier.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, I'm looking at the report on plans and priorities. We talked about item 1.5 in the report, which is “Internal services”. I'd like to focus my attention this time on item 1.1, which is “Prime Minister and portfolio ministers' support and advice”.

If you look at the six-year trend, there's a healthy trend if cost containment is your objective. It's not nearly as dramatic as in other areas.

Drilling down into 1.1. there are a couple of items I want some clarification on. It's related to what's called in your report on plans and priorities “International affairs” and assistance for international affairs and security.

Obviously, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade does a lot of work. I'm trying to understand the role of the PCO in assisting those efforts. As you know, there has been a big push within this government around international trade in particular. Is that something the PCO supports? We're the tenth largest economy with the 35th largest population. We can't just rely on our internal market, so we have this aggressive trade agenda. Would you describe that? I saw some mention of trade in your RPP.

[Michelle Doucet]

It would appear that today is my opportunity to actually explain the organizational structure of the Privy Council Office, and I'm really pleased to have the chance to do that.

There are a number of parts of the Privy Council Office that support the government's international agenda. Let me take you through them.

I'm going to begin with the national security adviser to the Prime Minister, who oversees a branch that includes the foreign and defence adviser to the Prime Minister, which is an ADM-level post, and another ADM, who work closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and also with CIDA to ensure that at the highest level those perspectives are integrated into the overall PCO advice, through to the Prime Minister. Those are done bilaterally in briefings from the NSA and also from the foreign and defence adviser to the Prime Minister.

They're also done in an integrated way through the clerk, because the clerk, as part of his management team, also has deputy secretaries who are deputy-minister-level officials in charge of operations, which include the subcommittees to cabinet—the operations committee, the economic committee, and the social committee. A number of trade issues come up often through the economic subcommittee, so that deputy minister uses his staff to pull together those perspectives as well.

Another important piece of the work that PCO is doing, in terms of informing the international agenda, is of course the work with our American counterparts. We spoke earlier about the border team. There is, of course, the work of the other piece of the action plan, which was the regulatory cooperation council, to create efficiencies and eliminate irritants in relationships with Americans vis-à-vis trade.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

If I could then paraphrase somewhat, DFAIT has to do what it has to do, but the PCO assists by making sure there is a whole-of-government approach. Other parts of government are affected by things that are done in international trade.

[Michelle Doucet]

That's correct, so we certainly have no wish to get in the way of the individual mandates of departments. They do a terrific job at carrying out difficult mandates.

As you will appreciate, there is a need for the Prime Minister to have that whole-of-government perspective. A core part of PCO's work is actually to facilitate that cooperation and, when there are horizontal cross-cutting issues, to get senior officials into the same room to have the conversations that need to be had so that this integrated advice can be provided.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

In the RPP you mentioned international trade and security in the same breath. Those two things go together. Elsewhere in the RPP you talked about a decrease in spending related to the sunsetting of the Afghanistan task force. This was at the end of 2011-12. So there's a peace dividend, if you will.

Are there other things like that? When you look at the world today, there's no shortage of dangerous situations, and Canada seems to get involved. Would you say there is a peace dividend right now when it comes to Canada's involvement?

[Michelle Doucet]

I'm going to—

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Obviously, I'm not asking the Minister of National Defence right now. I'm asking the PCO, to the extent you get involved in these questions.

[Michelle Doucet]

In my capacity as the ADM for the corporate services branch of the Privy Council Office, I think I'll be a little bit careful about weighing in on the question of peace dividends. I will tell you that when I look at the nature and quality of the expenditure plan that's set out here in our RPP, it is evident that over the past few years we have put a lot of our resources into security priorities. I think it is for each member of the committee to decide what the outcome of that has been.

There continues to be quite an intense focus within the core function of the Privy Council Office, through the national security adviser, on security issues, domestic and global writ large. It is an approach that appears to be effective.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Mr. Trottier.

Thank you, Madame Doucet.

We have time for one more round of questioning. I believe it will be divided between Mr. Ravignat and Mr. Blanchette.

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to come back to the spending projections—but by program. We talked about that overall, but you have a hard time controlling the costs of the program's two main elements—support and advice to the Prime Minister, the cabinet and the committee. We understand the strategic nature and the uncertainties involved in that. However, in your workforce projections, you continue to announce downsizing over the next two years. At the end of that period, you want to have 6% less staff in sectors where budgets are difficult to control.

How are you compensating for the loss of employees? Is there a significant increase in external contracts to address that problem?

[Michelle Doucet]

Thank you for the question.

Insofar as the question of how we will compensate for the reduction of employees by the Privy Council Office regardless of where it occurs, whether it's in internal services or whether it's in policy advice or communications advice, the approach of the Privy Council Office has been to do it in two ways. First, it is to find the obvious efficiencies where there's duplication and overlap, and we have found that in a couple of places. I talked earlier about the intergovernmental affairs piece—

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Yes, but I want to know whether you have been using external contracts more to help in that area.

[Michelle Doucet]

I think globally the answer would be no. The reason for that is because it's actually pretty tricky to hire external contractors to provide policy advice to the Prime Minister. We certainly use them on an occasional basis, but on the day-to-day advice, because of the sensitivity of the subject matter involved in advising the Prime Minister and the security clearances involved, insofar as it pertains to policy advisers, we're pretty careful about hiring from the outside.

Where we tend to rely more on hiring contract help is a bit in my world. The objective there will be to help with surge capacity. If we have a write-in campaign to the Prime Minister on something, because I have made some reductions in my correspondence unit—

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Thank you very much.

I yield the floor to my colleague.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

To the good people who are here from the conference secretariat, could you tell me if the former Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Peter Penashue, ever directed you or the secretariat to any particular action during his tenure?

[André McArdle]

In that context, obviously, he was the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. For instance, he signed all our documents and that sort of thing, so basically we had this relationship with the minister's office. It was always very productive, and on occasion we briefed the minister on the situation within the secretariat.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

But did he direct you with regard to doing anything particular to change and to understand intergovernmental issues? Did he call for a conference? Did he—

[André McArdle]

No. There were no intergovernmental meetings of ministers during the time he was there.