Government Operations Committee on Nov. 8th, 2018

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for Madam Fox.

Prior to asking the question, I'm going to read a couple of quotes from the report. The first one is from the message from your office. The last paragraph begins:

Yes, that's a tall order, and achieving everything on our list is bound to be challenging with limited resources.

Now I'm going to go to page 13, where the report is addressing the number of resources—full-time equivalents—under “Planning highlights”:

The TSB faces important resource pressures that put the integrity of its programs at-risk. In 2018-19, the main priority for the TSB internal services will be to work with the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Department of Finance to find solutions that will ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the TSB and the integrity of its programs.

Now, with regard to those two quotes—to the fact that you have resource shortages and to the table that highlights that in 2018-19 you are estimating 50 full-time equivalents and the same in 2019-20 and 2020-21—my question is this: Why aren't you asking for more funding for resources if resources are a major issue?

[Kathleen Fox]

There's a lot in that question, and I'll try to break it down as best I can.

Our first priority is to seek and receive the funding that we need to sustain our current workforce and our current level of activity. One of the issues that we had in the past was that.... First of all, we don't control our workload. We don't decide or control when accidents and incidents occur, and we certainly don't not investigate because of a lack of resources. However, when we have a flurry of smaller accidents, or a large accident, it does put a lot of pressure on the organization to investigate and to provide timely information to the public.

That said, I think the first thing that we have to do is look internally. What efficiencies can we do? What we have done is change our current classification policy. We're actually going to be putting out more investigations because we're going to putting out more shorter ones for more routine occurrences, allowing us to focus our resources on the more complex ones, which take longer.

We've also amended our targets, so it will no longer be 450 days for all investigations. We've tailored our targets to adapt to the different types of investigations that we can conduct.

At this point, we believe that the resources that we have in place, especially if we can get the extra two that we would like, are sufficient to conduct business. That's not to say that this won't change in three or four years, but for now it's a reasonable number that will allow us to conduct our activities. However, we have been playing catch-up for the last few years.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Great.

In your report, you speak of a 50% increase in the number of investigations that were concluded. Has the number of incidents under all categories increased, and if so, by how much?

[Kathleen Fox]

I'd have to look at our statistics to give you specifics on that. We vary every year between about 3,500 and 3,700 reported occurrences. That's in all four modes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Okay.

[Kathleen Fox]

We have been able to conduct more investigations in this fiscal year because we cleaned up a lot of the backlog of old investigations in the previous fiscal year. We've also introduced a short-form report for more routine investigations, which allows us to get the information out more quickly. That's what has increased our capacity.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

What was the reason for the backlog?

[Kathleen Fox]

There were a number of reasons for the backlog. We had to look at our internal processes. For example, we have an earlier scoping of our investigations. Investigators are curious people. They like to go down a lot of different avenues of inquiry, so we want to scope them early on and make sure that we're focused on the key safety issues. Our processes weren't as efficient as they could be, so we've been working on—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Can you give me an example of a process efficiency that you've implemented that has helped you to use the same resources to solve more cases?

[Kathleen Fox]

Sure.

[Jean Laporte]

One example is simply rigorous project management methodology. For each investigation, we identify a team leader, an investigator in charge, who manages a team. However, those team members are involved in multiple investigations simultaneously, so there's the challenge of managing the workload of the team members and getting them to focus on the right priorities. As a result, we've changed our approach to get managers and the directors of investigations more engaged at different steps of the process, rather than just delegating to the team lead to resolve issues early and to resolve the priority conflicts.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

It's not as much about project management as about resource management. That's what I'm hearing.

[Jean Laporte]

It's about both of them.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Okay.

I understand that the $2.5 million or $2.6 million you're asking for is basically to make sure that you sustain current resourcing. What is the long-term plan? What should we expect? I know it's outside the scope of the estimates, but I'm trying to get a sense of where we're going after this.

[Jean Laporte]

In terms of the longer plan, we established a strategic plan in 2015-16, a five-year plan to modernize the organization and its business processes. We're halfway through that plan.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

By modernizing, what do you mean?

[Jean Laporte]

We're looking at everything. We've looked at our resource base. We figure that we need an extra $3 million to bring it to the right level for the next number of years. We've made that request, which we're discussing today. We've looked at the business process, the project management. We're modernizing that. We are looking at our investigator training and modernizing all our internal training programs. We're looking at the technology and making better use of technology to expedite the process to, again, get more efficiencies.

Everything we do, we're looking at.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Sorry; I have a 10-second question.

You're hoping that with all of that modernization, the length of time it's going to take for you to do an assessment of an incident is going to be reduced by how much?

[Jean Laporte]

We're looking at fully achieving the targets outlined in our plan, but we're going beyond that. Instead of saying that everything is 450 days on average, we're saying that there are five types of investigation, from simple to very complex.

We've now established—and you will see that in our next plan submitted to Parliament—targets for each level. We want to go faster on the simple ones and take the proper time to do the bigger and more complex ones.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Monsieur Deltell is next.

Mr. Deltell, you have seven minutes.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you for coming, my friends. It is always great to see you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your parliamentary committee.

I would first like to talk to Mr. Shea, the assistant deputy minister in the Privy Council Office. Let us recall that the Privy Council Office is the Prime Minister's department. So it has to respond to specific mandates. The issue that interests us here is the leaders' debate, more specifically its new structure that the government is proposing. First of all, Mr. Shea, you said just now that the Rt. Hon. David Johnston had been suggested for the position, but that he has not yet started work.

My question will be quite simple. What is his power as a nominee, compared to when he will be the official director of this new mandate?

[Matthew Shea]

I'm not a machinery of government expert, but right now, he's not been appointed and therefore has no formal authority. If he were to say, “I want to spend money on X, Y, Z”, he would have no ability to sign for that money.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Who is calling the shots now?

[Matthew Shea]

I'm saying the opposite, sir. It's not established yet.