Evidence of meeting #72 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was commissioner.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Thank you very much for being here.
Mr. Chamberlain, have you read the Auditor General's report of 2014 regarding the 2010 allegations in a review of the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner?
9:30 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
I have, a number of years ago as a member of the advisory board for PSIC. When I was onboarding, I did read it. I would comment that I think the culture has changed greatly at PSIC since that report was written.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Thank you. You answered my question. My question was, do you think that you would now send your members to the PSIC body?
9:30 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
I do send them now. I didn't prior to 2014.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
My second question is this: when you have made recommendations such as a guaranteed staffing priority for transfers, how do you change the culture? Let's say I was the whistle-blower and I was transferred from department A to department B or to another ministry. How do you change the culture so that somebody doesn't say that I'm the snitch who has come over?
9:30 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
The beauty of the staffing priority system is that the hiring managers don't know the reason you're on the list. There are many reasons you could be on the list, including prior military service or returning from disability, things don't have any stigma attached to them, so it's not necessarily that their reputation would follow them.
Also, I think there are many good places to work in the public service where doing the right thing is valued, not suppressed.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
There's a last question I want to ask you before I go to the AG.
You've said that there should be a single system. Explain what you mean by that. I thought there was a single system with the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner.
9:30 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
What I mean by that is the departmental structure. It's an option now, one or the other. We don't need that structure.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
9:30 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
That's dysfunctional. It's not independent. The only structure we need is a strong, independent office.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Okay.
Mr. Ferguson, I used to be on the public accounts committee, so I know that the AG is always very busy and does cyclical value-for-money auditing and performance auditing. Do you have the capacity to do audits to...? You did the audit of the Public Service Integrity Commissioner because there was a complaint, but generally, would you utilize forensic accountants? Would you have the capacity to do these one-off audits?
9:30 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
What happens normally is that when we get a complaint, we first of all have to assess it. If we deem that we need to do an investigation, we do an investigation, not a performance audit. In 2010 we had three complaints that we deemed to be valid complaints that needed to be looked at, but we didn't have the authority we needed to do those investigations under the PSDPA, so we turned them into performance audits.
Since then, we have completed three investigations under the PSDPA, and we have one under way right now. Those are investigations, not performance audits. We do those primarily through the legal group that we have in our office rather than through our audit, although the methodology that our legal group uses is informed by how we do performance audits as well.
What we do are investigations using our legal folks. In the brief we provided, we note that it has cost us anywhere from $136,000 so far this year, and in 2013-14 it cost us $876,000.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
For someone like me who wants to blow the whistle, I'd be totally confused with those two systems as to whether I should go to the AG or to the Public Service Integrity Commissioner. What should I do? I look at the Auditor General and say that he has 42 departments to audit and he has to do this and do that. Where do I go?
9:30 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Remember that you can only come to us under the PSDPA. You can only come to us if you are a public servant, first of all, and if you have a complaint about the way PSIC conducted one of its investigations.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
9:35 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
That's right. Under this act, we can look only at how PSIC conducted its investigation and whether they used the appropriate processes in conducting their investigation. We can't look at their decision. We can't question their decision. All we can do is look at the process.
You can always come to us with a complaint about something. We may decide to do a performance audit on it or not, but if you do that, you don't have the protections that exist under the PSDPA.
February 21st, 2017 / 9:35 a.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chamberlain, I'm sorry if this is sounding like a broken record, but I want to get back to the reprisals. We heard from Public Works in their opinion survey about how uncomfortable people feel about whistle-blowing, and I think it's similar across the whole public sector. I think she said that of the 22,000 people in Public Works, 55% said they had a fear of reprisals and were not comfortable going forward on that.
Even if we had a reverse onus and a staffing priority, how do you think it would be best to tackle this widespread...? I mean, it's not just a culture; it's beyond a culture. It's ingrained in our public service, it seems.
9:35 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
In the general public service area, I think more like 38% were confident. In our own internal study—we've done some surveys—it's about 39%, so it validates that.
Honestly, they need to see results. They need to see other whistle-blowers bringing something forward and being rewarded for it, or at least not suffering dire consequences because of it. It will take time. It has taken 10 years for the PSIC to get its feet under itself. A wholesale change is ill-advised, because I think the trajectory is in the right place.
Mr. Ferguson's office is “internal affairs” for PSIC, essentially, for lack of a better term. They're filling the gap when people have a complaint against PSIC.
I have people raising issues with Phoenix and military procurement. There's almost always a paper trail with my folks. They're accountants, so they're dealing with spreadsheets and documentation. It's not complicated. It's all about that fear.
I don't have a magic bullet. I have five recommendations that I think will improve it. I think the PSIC commissioner's recommendations will make a very large change.
I know there's been a lot of negativity here at the committee, but if you look internationally, Canada is still on the cutting edge. This is relatively new legislation everywhere around the world. Canada is performing well, and we can do much better. I honestly believe that with the changes we're recommending, more people will be coming forward. I will certainly be recommending more people coming forward. I can already tell you that in the last year we've sent five or six. We would have sent none the year before. We are sending people now.
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
You have a good sense of confidence in the direction in which PSIC is going?
9:35 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
Yes. I think Commissioner Friday and his staff are very committed to ramping up, if I can put it that way. I know that they take complainants seriously. I know that they feel very constrained in terms of their mandate. I think you can see that in their recommendations. I think they're ready to do the right thing as well, given expanded jurisdiction and powers.
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Great.
When you talk about rewarding whistle-blowers, what do similar jurisdictions do? I know that in the States they have a very robust system. Is it a percentage, or is it a...?
9:35 a.m.
Director of Labour Relations, General Counsel, Association of Canadian Financial Officers
Often it's for unique information that results in recovery. We have something similar with the....I won't call it a snitch line, because that's the wrong word for a whistle-blower advocate to use, but the informant line for the CRA. The securities commission is experimenting with this as well. They're doing it because it's successful in other jurisdictions. Usually it's 10%. The highest I've heard is 30%. That's in the United States, and only if the person takes care of the whole prosecution, which rarely happens.
