Evidence of meeting #85 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 support.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Chantal Maheu  Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Plans and Consultations, Privy Council Office
Joe Friday  Commissioner, Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada
Wilma Vreeswijk  Deputy Minister and President, Canada School of Public Service
Kami Ramcharan  Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office
Jean-François Fleury  Vice-President, Learning Programs Branch, Canada School of Public Service
Éric Trottier  Chief Financial Officer, Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada

May 4th, 2017 / 8:45 a.m.

NDP

The Vice-Chair NDP Erin Weir

We will begin today's meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.

We have with us three organizations that are testifying on the main estimates for up to 10 minutes each.

I will begin with the Privy Council Office.

8:45 a.m.

Chantal Maheu Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Plans and Consultations, Privy Council Office

Good morning, Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting the Privy Council Office to review our 2017-18 departmental plan and the 2017-18 main estimates.

I'm accompanied today by Ms. Kami Ramcharan, assistant deputy minister, corporate services branch, and chief financial officer.

My remarks will be brief so that we may turn quickly to the questions of the committee.

As you know, the mandate of PCO is to provide professional non-partisan advice and support to the Prime Minister and ministers within his portfolio, and to support the effective operation of cabinet. As a central agency, PCO exerts a leadership role across government departments and agencies to ensure the coherence and coordination of policy development and delivery.

Budget 2016 provided $190 million over five years starting in 2016 and up to $26.7 million per year ongoing to PCO to support the department's changing and expanding role under the new government. These resources were approved under two main categories: government priorities and new and enhanced roles, and strengthening information technology, security and infrastructure.

Specifically with regard to the main estimates for 2017-18, the Privy Council Office is seeking $144.9 million overall. This is an increase of $24.2 million from the amount sought in the 2016-17 main estimates, which was $120.7 million.

This increase is mainly due to $26.5 million in additional funding to enhance PCO's capacity to support the Prime Minister and the government in the delivery of their agenda as announced in budget 2016.

It comprises the following: $6.5 million for improving the physical security infrastructure; $4.5 million for space modernization to achieve a more functional workspace for PCO employees; $3.7 million for the enhancement of PCO's communication approach and operational support for the development of the e-cabinet initiative; $3.3 million for a focus on outcomes and results for Canadians through a new results and delivery unit housed in PCO; $1.8 million for enhanced engagement with provinces and territories, as well as municipalities and indigenous groups, serving the Prime Minister as Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs; $1.2 million for active engagement with youth through the creation of a youth secretariat, serving the Prime Minister as Minister for Youth; $1 million for increased policy capacity to support the democratic institutions reform agenda; $1 million for the creation of a new non-partisan, merit-based Senate appointment process; $0.7 million to support a more open, transparent, and merit-based Governor in Council appointment policy; $200,000 related to a transfer from Employment and Social Development Canada to the Privy Council Office to support resources for the Blueprint 2020 initiative; and, $3.8 million for other initiatives to support the government's agenda.

These increases are partially offset by a decrease of $3 million related to the sunsetting of funds related to the Canadian Secretariat to the Canada-U.S. Regulatory Cooperation Council and Beyond the Border Action Plan, and a decrease of $600,000 for the implementation of the government-wide initiative to reduce spending in professional services, travel and government advertising.

The majority of the Budget 2016 investments have started in 2016-17, and if you compare the 2017-18 main estimates over PCO 2016-17 total estimates up to the 2016-17 supplementary estimates (C), the difference is $16 million less. This concludes my overview of the changes in PCO's 2017-18 main estimates as compared to the previous year.

I will now briefly summarize PCO's departmental plan for fiscal year 2017-18. This departmental plan represents a simplified report on our priorities. Formerly known as the report on plans and priorities, the departmental plan is easier to read with a focus on what PCO will do in the coming years and how it intends to coordinate the implementation of the government's ongoing agenda.

In 2017-18, PCO devoted significant resources to advise on and help advance policies that support growth for the middle class, open and transparent government, a clean environment and strong economy, strength in diversity, reconciliation with indigenous peoples, including the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and security and opportunity for Canadians.

Support will also be provided to the Prime Minister in the engagement of an international agenda focused on trade relations, promoting Canadian business abroad, and advancing core bilateral relationships, including the relationship between Canada and the United States.

In addition, in support of intergovernmental relations, PCO will organize bilateral and first ministers' meetings with provinces and territories on key priority areas, while in support of the Prime Minister's role as Minister of Youth, PCO will help advance the work of the Prime Minister's Youth Council, and support the development of a national youth policy.

Other priorities for the department will be to implement E-Cabinet, including training and support for all ministers and deputy ministers; support other government departments and agencies build a stronger focus on results; improve efficiency and effectiveness, and support renewal of the public service.

This completes the summary of PCO's departmental plan.

Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to provide this context. We would be pleased to answer your questions.

8:50 a.m.

NDP

The Vice-Chair NDP Erin Weir

Thank you for a very concise report.

We will now go to the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, with a witness who has become familiar to our committee through our study on whistle-blower protection: Mr. Friday.

8:50 a.m.

Joe Friday Commissioner, Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada

Good morning, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here and to see you and the committee members once again. I'm accompanied this morning by Éric Trottier, our chief financial officer.

The purpose of my appearance this morning is to share with you information about our plans and priorities to explain how we have worked within our relatively small budget to achieve these priorities and how we will continue to do so in the coming year.

Our 2017-2018 annual budget is $5.4 million, and we have a full-time team of approximately 30 employees.

I know you are familiar with our mandate, given the recent legislative review hearings, so I will not spend any time this morning providing you with information or background in that regard.

My priorities, as outlined in my departmental plan, can be summarized briefly.

The first is to focus on operational delivery and efficiency through ongoing assessment of procedures and approaches, which includes ensuring an up-to-date technology infrastructure.

The second is to continue to address the permanent challenge facing organizations such as mine: ensuring we are known and that people understand what we are able to do to help them.

The third is to ensure that we have the right people in my office to carry out our important work. This speaks to another ongoing challenge for a small organization such as mine: recruitment and retention.

A key feature of the plan is to instill a spirit of continuous improvement. The work we do is sensitive, and its impacts are broad, as we have discussed at this committee before. There will always be a better way to do our work, and we have to identify those opportunities to adapt and improve on an ongoing basis. Our approaches to our work can and must change as attitudes toward whistle-blowing change and as the culture of the public service changes over time as a result of collective will and focused collective action.

For example, in the coming year, we are going to be building on what we started two years ago as part of what we call the “LEAN” exercise. This is a thorough assessment of processes and procedures, with the goal of identifying ways to improve effectiveness, including timeliness.

You may have noted that two years ago, in 2015-16, our self-imposed service standards, in their second year of operation, were not being met. This was due not only to unanticipated staff turnover, but also to what I identified as an increasingly burdensome and time-consuming process. Following the LEAN exercise, I am pleased to report that we are back on track and will be reporting in our forthcoming annual report that we have fully met those standards in the year that just passed. I believe those statistics are in a document provided to committee members this morning. In the coming year, we will continue with this initiative, focusing more specifically on investigations, having worked on case analysis last year.

In terms of IMIT priorities, we are going to be working to update our infrastructure to improve, for example, secure remote access to operational files to ensure that staff are fully equipped with the up-to-date tools necessary to do their jobs, wherever those jobs take them across the country. In addition, we are going to be looking at options to our existing case management system, which is a core foundational technological tool and part of our infrastructure. In doing so, we are going to be recognizing that any options must put the protection of sensitive information as a top priority and that this information must be kept separate from shared or government-wide systems.

I have spoken about our communications activities in my previous appearances, but I do wish to underscore the importance of our continuing investment in this regard. Reaching out to public servants with clear, accurate and credible information about their options is not something that can be done only once; it is a permanent challenge and shared responsibility.

While we certainly see an uptake of interest in questions about our office and approaches to our office following the tabling of case reports in Parliament, our efforts to reach out have to be ongoing.

More specifically, with respect to case reports, as you know, I tabled two founded cases of wrongdoing in February. I can tell you this morning, Mr. Chair, that I expect to table another before the House rises for the summer.

Those two February case reports not only triggered significant media attention, but they also triggered an increase in general inquiries to our office and an increase both in disclosures and about reprisals, making the month of March the busiest of the past year.

I would also like to share with you here this morning that I will be reporting in my annual report that we launched 36 investigations in 2016-2017, which is a record number for my office. And we currently have 44 investigations underway. We are, I think it is safe to say, busier now than we ever have been.

That leaves me to touch on my final priority, which is to build a strong team capable of meeting our increasing workload. We're adding to our ranks of case analysts and investigators at this very moment. They are the heart of our operations. We're planning for further hiring in both the operational and the legal sections of my office.

I would like to share the observation that hiring and retention, as I mentioned earlier, are particular challenges for a micro-organization such as mine, given the impact of even a single departure on a small team and, further, given that opportunities for advancement simply don't exist as they do in a larger organization.

Mr. Chair, in conclusion, my office currently has a budget sufficient to carry out its work, including the ability to plan for contingencies. Those contingencies include adapting to new technologies, changes in accommodations to respect both government policies and a growing number of employees, and those expenses that I would say are unforeseeable, such as external legal agent costs, which we have had to deal with in the past, but not in the past fiscal year.

Having said this, I note that the coming year is expected to be one in which the technology- and accommodation-related contingencies actually materialize. My projections are that we'll be able to respond within our existing budget. It's also worth noting, I think, Mr. Chair, that these projections and plans are also consistent with the concerns and desires of my office's employees as they have expressed to us in ongoing consultations with the senior management team.

I will end my opening remarks there, Mr. Chair, and I will be happy to respond to any questions. Thank you.

8:55 a.m.

NDP

The Vice-Chair NDP Erin Weir

Thank you.

We will now conclude our opening remarks with the presentation from the Canada School of Public Service.

8:55 a.m.

Wilma Vreeswijk Deputy Minister and President, Canada School of Public Service

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning. I'm pleased to be before the committee. My name is Wilma Vreeswijk. I'm the deputy minister and president of the Canada School of Public Service. With me are my colleagues Jean-François Fleury, the vice-president of learning programs, and Elizabeth Tromp, the vice-president of corporate services and chief financial officer.

Because I don't appear very often before you, I thought I would go through our organizational context a bit to give you a frame of what we do.

The school is the common service provider for the public service in the area of learning. We equip public servants with the knowledge, skills, and competencies they need across federal organizations to fulfill their responsibilities in serving Canadians. In fact, our role is really to support deputy ministers and their HR and learning responsibilities for their organizations.

Over the past three years, we have been working on a significant transformation to make learning more relevant, more responsive, and more accessible. Most of the initiatives related to this transformation are now substantially complete.

In looking at the school now, you will see a standardized curriculum that offers learning opportunities at every stage of a public service career, including support at key transitions. From the foundations of public service, to specialized functional groups, and to the management of the executive and management ranks, the school supports the public service in serving Canadians with excellence.

We deliver this curriculum through an easy-to-access, interactive online platform. Our products cover a range of subjects, including policy design and implementation, financial and human resources management, and service excellence.

Our programming helps support public servants in delivering on government priorities, addressing such topics as indigenous relations, results and delivery, diversity and inclusion, and mental health.

Our curriculum ensures that public servants have access to resources that respond to their learning needs. And our flexible platform ensures that they can do so wherever they are, whatever their learning style.

As we have rolled out over the last three years new learning products, public servants have responded with enthusiasm. The total number of public service employees registering for school products across Canada has risen significantly over the last two years. GCcampus, our online, interactive learning platform, was created in April 2016. In this past fiscal year, 169,000 unique learners accessed that platform.

Across the country, we also offer three times more learning activities than we did previously, for a total of 300 learning activities across all regions on topics such as policy innovation, diversity, and inclusion.

We've also worked hard to ensure that the quality of our learning products is high and are pleased to report that the course evaluation results over the past three years indicate an increasing level of learner satisfaction. Just this past year, we were registering 87.5% satisfaction from learners reporting a positive learning experience at the school.

We have been able to dramatically increase our reach by putting technology to work in new and innovative ways. Over the last three years, 95% of public servants have used the school's learning products.

We are introducing more new learning opportunities, informed by extensive stakeholder consultations, such as our leadership and management programs for supervisors, managers, and executives, or the indigenous learning series that we are developing in consultation with the national indigenous organizations and which responds to the call to action on public service learning from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While achieving these improvements, the school moved from a blended funding model based on appropriations and cost recovery to one primarily funded through appropriations.

At the same time, the school's base funding has gone from $92 million in 2015-2016 to $77 million in 2017-2018. That is a reduction of close to 16%.

We have taken a number of steps to manage with these tighter financial resources.

We've reduced our staff complement by 13%. We've used IT-enabled learning to reach more public servants in a more efficient way. We have progressively streamlined business processes to keep our corporate functions as lean and as efficient as possible.

The school is now a significantly leaner organization, achieving better value for taxpayers.

It has not always been easy, but we are proud of what we've accomplished. Despite reduced resources, we have made significant improvements in the responsiveness, accessibility and reach of our products, as I have outlined.

We will continue to work with our partners in the coming year to refine the school's curriculum and infrastructure, ensuring that the school stays nimble and responsive to the complex environment and the tighter financial context.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I welcome your questions.

9 a.m.

NDP

The Vice-Chair NDP Erin Weir

I thank all of the witnesses for their concise and informative presentations.

We'll now get into questions from MPs. We will begin with Mr. Whalen, from the government side.

9 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all of you for coming today. It's great to have this opportunity to discuss not only your particular main estimates, but also maybe a bit about the estimates process, which we are also in the process of considering how to reform.

In this regard, my first question is for Ms. Maheu. Really, it relates to the difference we see between what shows up in the main estimates and what shows up in the department's plan. I guess we see a delta of about $37 million. Maybe you could explain to us why and how that extra $37 million will be spent, and why it doesn't appear in the mains. We could then get into a discussion on the appropriate use of those funds.

9:05 a.m.

Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Plans and Consultations, Privy Council Office

Chantal Maheu

Thank you for the question.

The main difference between what is in the main estimates and what is in the department's plan is the expected expenditure for the commission of inquiry on missing and murdered girls and women. Our expectation is that this funding for $34.1 million will be secured through supplementary estimates (A), so we are planning it in our departmental plans, but it wasn't approved yet or submitted for the main estimates.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Okay. Although it was our understanding that the murdered and missing indigenous women inquiry was authorized in September, it's still in the planning stage. How is the planning of that being financed within the department?

9:05 a.m.

Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Plans and Consultations, Privy Council Office

Chantal Maheu

It's currently being financed within internal resources, and actually, it's more than the planning. For the inquiry, the work has started.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Okay. How much in internal funds from PCO do you feel have been expended on the murdered and missing indigenous women study to date?

9:05 a.m.

Kami Ramcharan Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

If I may, Mr. Chair, I will respond to that question. We haven't quite closed all our books yet, but we're looking at roughly between $3.5 million and $4 million in terms of spending in 2016-17.

Initially, the expectation at that point in time was that because we didn't get our resources allocated last year, we had existing resources within our existing reference levels to be able to fund that, so not coming to committee to seek those additional resources....

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

There was no need to seek them under supplementary estimates (B) or (C) because you had savings elsewhere.

What were the differences, then, in terms of spending on other projects where we had authorized quite a large sum of money? You haven't told me the number, but I'm assuming it's in the order of magnitude of $16 million or $17 million.

9:05 a.m.

Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

Kami Ramcharan

We would have gotten resources in through estimates (A), (B), and (C), so we—

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Yes, but that was not particularly for murdered and missing indigenous women.

9:05 a.m.

Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Right, so how much did you spend on murdered and missing indigenous women last year?

9:05 a.m.

Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

Kami Ramcharan

It was roughly around $3.5 million to $4 million.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Oh, okay. You had that just from general savings from other areas.

9:05 a.m.

Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

Kami Ramcharan

Yes, from other program funding that we would have received throughout the year, or A-base resources that we wouldn't have spent.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Great, so can you give us a sense of where that $3.5 million might have come from, of what programs were underspent? Or is this all within the margin of error?

9:05 a.m.

Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

Kami Ramcharan

The whole thing is that we haven't completely closed our books for 2016-17, so to give you a very specific answer, I'm not able to do that, but as we produce our public accounts, we'll be able to see.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Wonderful.

9:05 a.m.

Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office

Kami Ramcharan

What I can say, generally speaking, is that we had an increase of significant resources over last year. A lot of it had to do with staffing of people. As my colleague mentioned in his opening remarks, it's very difficult sometimes to get people in and to retain them and keep them in the organization. A lot of those savings could have come from a number of projects that we would have been funded for, but it's probably mainly related to people who we weren't able to keep on board for the entire year.