Government Operations Committee on May 22nd, 2018

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

I appreciate that. I have a background in economics, but I don't have a background in finance or accounting. I imagine that all Canadians are happy to have a simpler language that they can understand, a more direct language that is based on results, which allow other questions to be asked. When we understand, we are able to ask questions.

[Derek Armstrong]

That's exactly it.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you for the clarification.

This marks the end of my five minutes.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Mr. Blaikie, you have three minutes.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

I'd like to start by serving notice of motion for the following motion:

That the Committee invite each Minister responsible for the departments and agencies listed in the table on pages A1–2 through A1–8 of the Main Estimates 2018-19 titled “Budget 2018: Details of Spending Measures and Proposed Departmental Allocations” to provide a briefing as well as answer questions regarding the associated initiatives, and that the meetings be held no later than Wednesday, June 6, 2018.

I have a second motion:

That, notwithstanding motions adopted by the Committee regarding the subject matter of meetings to be held before a stated date, the Committee use the remaining meetings before Tuesday, June 5, 2018, for the study of the estimates process and reserve its meetings on Tuesday, June 5, 2018, and Thursday, June 7, 2018, for consideration of votes referred to Committee upon the tabling of the Main Estimates 2018-19.

I have those in writing for the chair, should she wish.

I want to ask Mr. Pagan a question. You and your minister also have talked about vote 40 being not quite clear. I think sometimes the impression given is that it's necessary to align the information in the budget and the main estimates.

Is it not possible that a table could have been produced without seeking authority for the funding that would show the plan to spend that money and follow that money through the course of supplementary estimates and that we give authority as the grants or programs are actually ready to go? What I'm trying to do is dispute the premise here that you need to ask for all the authority up front in order to reconcile the information in the budget and the main estimates.

Would it not have been possible to devise a mechanism by which you could indicate what government is planning to spend? When we're good and ready, and these programs or proposals have been put through Treasury Board, we'll come through the supplementary estimates to reconcile that information. What continues to mystify me is the contention that it's necessary to ask for the authority in order to provide the information.

[Brian Pagan]

I'm not sure where to go on this. If I use, again, the winter supplementaries as an example, Parliament is providing its approval after the close of business on the last fiscal day. Sorry, it wasn't Parliament, it was royal assent. In that particular year, it passed the House on March 26.

What I'm trying to point out is this tension between oversight, having information and being able to ask questions, and control and approval of programs. Respectfully, we're suggesting to you that it's the executive that approves the programs, and Parliament has to have a very clear view of where that money is going. We have done that in the construct of the budget implementation vote where we have listed by department—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Wouldn't it be possible to provide that same—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Time is up, but I gave you the leeway.

Thank you very much.

We will suspend for a minute, and then we'll get the next group of witnesses to do a demo on the InfoBase.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Committee members, please take your seats.

Mr. Pagan.

[Brian Pagan]

This is a demo.

Just as a word of introduction, Andrew is going to walk the committee through a real-time demonstration of InfoBase. You can be the driver. He will direct this wherever you steer. We've done a similar session with the Senate finance committee, as well.

GC InfoBase was created by TBS in 2013. It stems from a report by this committee in 2012, which included the recommendation that TBS create a searchable online database. This is the result.

It is very much an iterative process. We conceived InfoBase in 2013. Every year we have successfully added to the information holdings of the tool.

Andrew will walk you through this now.

[Andrew Gibson, Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Good afternoon, everyone.

I'm here to introduce GC InfoBase. It is an online tool that presents data on finances, people management and now government performance.

I will begin by presenting the tool, the principles it is based on, and recent changes relating to performance.

Four principles guide the evolution of the InfoBase.

First, we want it to be a reliable source. All figures presented can be found in a published source, such as the Public Accounts of Canada or the estimates.

Second, we present the information in a nuanced and comprehensive manner. There are several general presentations on the data so that the user can understand them as a whole. There are also detailed presentations for people who want more details.

Third, it is critical that GC InfoBase does not interpret or give an opinion; the data speaks for itself. Government organizations may submit background information through footnotes, but the data are presented in the same manner.

Finally, it is a tool that continuously adapts to users' needs. We are always looking for new techniques to communicate and visualize data.

Those are the four guiding principles.

What you have up on the screen in front of you is the main page. I'm going to walk through the different sections of the tool.

The main principle behind the InfoBase is that we seek to “re-present” information over and over again, in different ways. When someone cracks open the public accounts, it might be something really relevant to them, or their eyes might glaze over because there are a ton of tables and a ton of numbers and it doesn't tell them a story.

What we're seeking to do is to say that some people like tables and numbers—that's great—some people like to have the information described to them with words—you'll see that—and some people like to have pictures drawn for them—we're also doing that in the tool.

The finance section begins with a government-wide overview. Then there is a department and even a program, just to see how much data is available. Then there is the data on people, and again it goes back to the government level. Then we pick a department. Then there is the government's performance data. Once again, we will choose a department just to see the data entered at this level.

After that, we're going to look at some featured content.

I noticed a moderate amount of interest at the table around vote 40 and where that information is going. We're going to show you what we've done to drive more transparency around that, and I'm going to be talking about what more we're going to be doing. I'll talk about my favourite giant picture, which kind of lays out the government so that people can understand what information is available.

We're going to start with finances.

I should also say, there's a section here where, if someone just wants to search for a word, a department, or program name, they can jump straight to it. We are really trying to be inspired by all of the work that's done out there in terms of the Google app and all that stuff. They want to make their product as easy as possible for people to use.

There's always this weird tension. A while ago it used to be that you would come to work to use the Internet, and now, you go home to use the Internet. We're trying to make sure that the kinds of tools you get to use in your personal life are also available to you at work.

Going to the finance section, this is at the level of the Government of Canada. I'm not going to go over everything because I will bore you all to tears with that level of detail. If anyone wants me to stop, I will, and we can focus on a particular thing.

I'm sure some of you have noticed that the government likes to use a lot of complicated, technical terms when it talks about how it spends money. For those who aren't familiar with all the definitions, we have this hidden section here, where we lay out all of the definitions. We don't want to stop people from actually learning something, so we don't slap people in the face by making them read that right away, but it's there if they need it.

What you have here with these blue squares is what we call our welcome mat. It doesn't look like much, but it actually combines hundreds of reports into one kind of Government of Canada view. What you can easily see without having to open any books or do any homework or anything like that is how much spending was five years ago. This is a number you'll see in public accounts. You'll also see how many FTEs were employed in the Government of Canada last year, and what are we planning to spend in fiscal year 2019-20.

Going down, what you see here is a split of spending and FTEs by Government of Canada spending areas. You have economic affairs, social affairs, government affairs, crown corporations, international affairs, and internal services. Right away you can learn some interesting stuff. You see, for example, that while economic affairs is the highest spender, social affairs has a large number of FTEs. If you're particularly interested, you can just click on one of these bars—I clicked on social affairs—and you see a split by the particular Government of Canada outcome area, so you can see that breakdown.

Also, I should have said that, at the bottom of every page, or the bottom of every one of these little panels, you see a link where you can actually go and see the raw data behind all these graphs.

Moving down, you see authorities and expenditures. This is basically what was approved by Parliament and what was actually spent. This is as per public accounts for the past five years. You will see the current voted and statutory split as of the main estimates that have been tabled for 2018-19. It just tries to lay out graphically the largest areas of statutory spending for the Government of Canada, so someone can see that old age security and the Canada health transfers are by far the two largest bubbles in statutory spending.

Moving down, you see the details on voted estimates. You see—no surprise—that national defence is the largest recipient of voted authorities, followed by Indigenous Services Canada and Treasury Board with all of our fancy central votes.

Moving along, you have a five-year history of transfer payments. That is the largest particular area of government spending. I'll go over that again when we get to one of the other visualizations. You can see a breakdown between grants, contributions, and other transfer payments. Then you can see a five-year history of personnel expenditures for the Government of Canada.

That was one view, and what I said in the intro was that we were going to then dive down and pick a particular department. We're going to do Parks Canada.

You scroll up to the top. You start typing in “Parks Canada”. It auto-suggests it for you. I'm not going to go over it in the same level of detail. I'll just touch on where things are a bit different.

You have the same welcome mat, but now it's focused just on that particular department. You get to see the relative size of Parks Canada compared to the rest of government. You can see that same five-year history of authorities and expenditures. Here is something where you can look at a history of the standard objects of expenditure—for example, if you want to see what's been going on with personnel spending. You might also want to turn on transfer payments. I can turn on other parts of this so you can get a dynamic way of looking at where Parks Canada's level of the department spending money is. Going down, you can see where Parks Canada is in terms of transfer payments. I'm just going to skip a little bit, though, to the more interesting thing.

This is a transparency initiative that we started last year, and it's information that is actually not in any published document, and it provides a whole new level of transparency at the program level. What you see here with that horizontal bar chart is that each bar represents a program and it's split into the types of spending for that particular program. If we want, for example, to just focus in and see what the personnel spending is for all programs, there it is.

If you want to drill in and see professional and special services spending, you can get that. This is not information that is published anywhere else, but it does provide a lot more insight and it lets you understand at a much greater level of depth what a particular program is doing.

What you can do from here is you can say visitor experience is interesting; it's a program you might want to know more about it, so you can click on that and you have yet again another infographic at the—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Mr. Gibson, can I just interrupt you for a minute?

Committee, I need your approval. Do you wish Mr. Gibson to continue, or do you wish to ask questions? If you wish him to continue on for another 10 minutes....

[Andrew Gibson]

I can do 10 minutes; I can condense it down. I can go over....

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Then we can do one round of seven minutes. Okay?

Go ahead.

[Andrew Gibson]

There's a lot of content in here, so it's not easy to go through and do a—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

No, we don't want you to hurry through.

[Andrew Gibson]

Okay.

At the level of a program, you have the same welcome mat; you can see what's going on with this particular program. Going on, you have authorities and expenditures and you have a nice pie chart that says, this is the kind of program this is: it is a program that spends most of its money on personnel; on acquisition of land, buildings, and works, which makes sense for Canada; on professional and special services; and then on all the other spending objects. It's just an extra level of detail so that someone can understand what exactly is going on in this program.

Jumping up to the top, we're going to jump back to the level of the Government of Canada and are going to look at people management data.

This is something nice, because we added a bunch of employment equity data recently so that someone can get an even more detailed sense of what's going on with a particular department.

At the level of the Government of Canada, you can see a five-year history of the head count for the federal public service; you can see a nice dynamic map that shows all federal employees; if you mouse over a particular province, such as British Columbia, you can get a five-year history of the head count within that province.

I'm going to jump back up. Let's pick Canadian Heritage. Here you can start seeing some interesting stuff. Again, you can see Heritage in terms of head count compared with the rest of the government—a five-year-history head count for Heritage. You can see where Heritage employees are distributed across the country: the majority are in the NCR; there are 39 in British Columbia. That head count hasn't changed too much over the past five years.

What's interesting here is that now you can look at demographic trends for Heritage Canada. If you want to see what has been going on with the age composition of this department, you can see that there has been a slight increase in the number of employees aged 29 or less. You can also then go over to average age and see how Heritage Canada compares with the rest of government in terms of average age. Some departments skew older, some skew younger. It's interesting contextual data to understand the department.

You can also see the composition of the EX cadres. You can see what the different levels are for EXs who are managing this department. If you want, you can click on the non-EX box and see what the ratio is between employees and management for that particular department.

We have first official languages. You can see that for 60% of employees in Heritage Canada, French is their official language, and English is the inverse, at 40%.

You can also see the gender distribution: 66% of employees are women, and 33% are men.

Moving over to results—and we'll go back to the level of the whole government again—you see our terms and definitions and stuff like that. We have our promise that departmental plans from 2018-19 are going to be updated here as soon as we can finish processing all of the data. This is a transition year between the old policy and the new policy, so things are moving a little more slowly than normal.

The first thing we show you is a handy-dandy summary in which we break out results in two categories. This is data as of the departmental reports that were tabled in the fall. You see that as of the fall, the larger chunk of indicators tells you whether results were achieved that were due at the end of that fiscal year; the smaller one, underneath, is for results that have a longer target. You can see where attention is required. In some cases, they've decided the indicator is no longer necessary, or their information isn't there.

Below that, you have the largest departments, in terms of indicators. If you look at Canada Revenue Agency, you can get a mini-report card just for Canada Revenue Agency. Underneath, we have an interactive way of exploring data within the results data. This tool is in an awkward, adolescent phase right now, because we still have data as of the old policy—those are part of the departmental reports that were tabled in the fall—and we have planning information under the new policy. We're having to bridge the two policies.

You'll see here reference still to the idea of “sub” and “sub-subs”, because that was under the old policy. What this allows you to do is explore and look at all the programs, the subprograms, and the results. If you're someone who is very positive in nature, you can actually click on a filter to indicate that you only want to look at programs in which the result is being achieved. If you don't share that other person's rosy view of the world, you can change and just look at areas in which attention is required.

I'll pick, for example, the subprogram “Service Complaints“ to show you what you can do.

If we open that up, you can see the result they're trying to achieve is that taxpayers receive a timely resolution to their service complaints. You can see that they were targeting 80% and that they met it. They actually achieved 83% in terms of percentage of taxpayer service complaints resolved within 30 business days.

Just to show you the through line, if we move over to “Planned Data”, so if we change the tab, this is “Planning”. There's no actual results information in here. You can see that under “Tax”, you still have “Service Complaints” as a program, and you can see they're still seeking to receive the same result, and they continue to target 80%.

That will be reported in the fall, when those reports are tabled.

So this gives you a flavour of not only the financial people management but the results data. I'm going to go back out to the main section. How am I doing on time?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You've got five minutes.

[Andrew Gibson]

Perfect.

So going down to the featured content—I'll keep the budget funding for the very end— this one here is near and dear to my heart. I very much like how this lays out the government. This was inspired by the tool that Steve Ballmer does for the U.S. government. We took a look at that and thought we could build something a little cooler. So this is dynamic, and you can kind of open up different areas. What this particular slice of data shows you is broken out by ministry, what are the largest spenders for the Government of Canada. You can see it's Finance, ESDC, National Defence. No surprise. I should say also that you have “Ministerial Portfolio” in the first column. Then you have organizations and then the actual programs. If you want, you can click on a program, and you can get a description of it. You can see what the spending was, the number of FTEs, or you can go straight to the infographic. It really lets someone see the global view, find something interesting, and then dive in.

There are a lot of different data slices you can do here. My favourite one is in terms of types of spending. This can tell someone right away what the Government of Canada spends money on. What you see here is that by far the largest block is transfer payments. Below that is personnel. If you flow along for personnel, you can see the top four spenders of personnel are defence or security and justice-related, and underneath that, are professional and special services. So if someone asks what the Government of Canada spends money on, it's transfer payments, it's salaries—a good chunk of those salaries goes to defence and security and justice—and after professional special services. It really helps someone come to grips with the huge amount of activities that we undertake.

I won't belabour this too much, even though it's 100% my favourite part of this tool. I could go on. We've kept that same design aesthetic for tracking budget funding. So what we have here is—this is as of the budget—something we're going to be adding to substantively over the course of the year. In its current state, what you have in this first kind of candy-stripe column is the actual vote 40. This represents the $7 billion that lines up with what was in budget 2018.

The next column contains the budget measures. You can see, based on size, what are the larger budget measures, and then you can see the organizations that are receiving funding. Where there is more than one organization, you can just click on the little plus sign, and a diagram will open up and you can see. If you want, you can click on the particular budget measure, and what we did is we went in and tore apart the budget for the users, and where there was relevant text that lined up with tables 8 to 11, we got that text for the users and it's available in the diagram.

If you want to reorganize this, you can instead say “I want to see all of the budget funding that a particular organization is getting.” So here you can see that indigenous services is getting the largest amount of budget spending. You can open it up. You can see all the different initiatives. If you want, you can filter on a particular chapter within the budget, if you just want to see the initiatives that were in the growth chapter.

This diagram is as of the budget. Over the course of the year, we're planning to add an extra column and we're going to say that, as initiatives are improved by TB, we're going to capture data from TB supplementaries that are provided by departments, that says, “Of the money that's being approved for this particular budget item, these are the programs that are getting it, and this is how much each program is getting.”

It should be very useful for Canadians and parliamentarians to see exactly where budget money is being allocated.

There is a bunch more content, but I think I'm at the end of my five minutes.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You are. I'm just going to do one round of seven minutes, and that will bring us to five minutes to 1:00 p.m. I'm an hour behind schedule.

Mr. Jowhari, you have seven minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Actually, could you put that slide back up, the last slide that you had on the budget? I'm going to go to Mr. Pagan. I'm going to try to explain what I understand is happening with this $7 billion and how transparent you are, because there's been a lot of discussion, and I think this tries to explain it, at least in my mind.

I looked at the $7 billion as an approved line of credit for a project that I have for my home. I know what items I'm going to use that money for. Then, at the end, at some point, I come back and say, “I used this line of credit for this type of activity,” and I'm able to explain for whom, when, and how much I spent. I'm trying to bring that down for when I go and talk to my constituents and this question is raised. I'm trying to simplify it in such a way that I can talk to my constituents.

First of all, $7 billion is a big number. Second of all, everybody is concerned that this is going to disappear. Most of my colleagues have talked about that. There is no transparency.

Can you help put it into a language that I can use to go and talk with my constituents, to be able to explain it and then translate it into...? Now that I have a tool, I can go and tell them, “Look, this is what it is, and this is what's going to happen.”

[Brian Pagan]

Thank you, Mr. Jowhari. I'll try to put this in terms that you can use to explain this to constituents.

First, as I think has been made manifest here, this is an online tool that anybody in the country can access today. The information is out there, and it is very clearly aligned with the annex in the estimates and the annex in the budget.

You used the words “line of credit”. In fact, I would present it for what it is. If we want to use analogies of home repairs, it's an estimate of what it is going to cost to refurbish your home. In the budget the government has clearly said that it wants to spend money by department, by measure, and by amount, so we are taking these estimates of the program expenditures, because the estimates are “up to” amounts, and we're presenting for Parliament a very clear picture of where the government intends on spending money by department, by initiative, and by amount.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

So you're almost like a contractor coming to my house and saying, “You want to do this? Here is an estimate.”

[Brian Pagan]

We're saying, “Here is what it's going to take to deliver on budget 2018.”

Of course, the business of supply presents an ongoing opportunity to engage Treasury Board officials and departmental officials to understand how that work is progressing. The president has been very clear that these are “up to” amounts, and there will be instances where we don't spend the full estimate because there can be economies in departmental overhead or synergies with other programs. Any funds that are not spent stay in the vote, and they lapse in the vote. They are not repurposed or reused on any other part of—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I saw categories of spending. If I want to draw a parallel, it would be like a contractor giving me an estimate and then saying, “This is how much we're going to spend on the roofing. This is how much we're going to spend on redesigning the kitchen.” Are there categories in here so that I can draw the same parallel?