Government Operations Committee on May 18th, 2017

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Welcome back, Mr. Borbey. Congratulations on day two. Thank you for not wearing a Senators jersey and being more culturally sensitive to us Oilers fans.

You mentioned the good work the public service is doing. I congratulate your department, the previous administration and the current administration as well, on balance within the public service. Page 26 of the departmental plan says, “Overall, the public service is surpassing workforce availability in all four employment equity groups”, which is fantastic and I congratulate you on that. However, it then says, “but three of the four groups (women, visible minorities and Aboriginal people) are underrepresented at the executive level.”

Not right now, but can you provide us with currently where we're at and what the goals are for those groups? I'd like to see how close we are.

[Patrick Borbey]

Yes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Page 29, though, shows departmental results indicators for the percentage of executive employees, compared to workforce, who are persons with a disability. Last year it was 5.3%, but it has that the target is 2.3% ongoing. I can't imagine we're targeting to reduce the amount. Maybe you could just have a look at that and get back to us later.

[Patrick Borbey]

Let me start, and then I'll turn to my colleague for—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Just very briefly because I have other questions.

[Patrick Borbey]

Okay. In terms of equity groups in the executive category, again, we can provide that information. We actually have reduced the gaps, particularly for women. There are still some gaps—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

As I'm saying, the service is doing a very good job, so I want to say congratulations but if we can just get those numbers—

[Patrick Borbey]

We'll provide those separately.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Pagan, I just want to get to you. One item on page 24, has, in the very first line, “Percentage of departments that have assessed all internal controls over financial reporting in high-risk areas and annually realign, implement and monitor systems on internal control”. Mr. Brison started out, at the beginning, talking about how oversight of spending is what your department does. On page 1, it talks about improving financial oversight and the quality of the information we rely on, but your target is to have 10% of all government departments not fulfilling internal controls.

Does that strike you as wrong or appropriate, that only 90% of all of our government departments would have assessed all their internal controls over financial reporting of high-risk areas?

[Brian Pagan]

Just to be clear, the target is 90% of departments will review their internal controls. Are you questioning whether that's adequate?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Exactly, so it's not just 90%, but it's 10% of all government controls. Government is 44% of our spending GDP, and we're saying that 10% not doing this is acceptable.

[Brian Pagan]

Right. Thank you for the question.

This is a plan for fiscal year 2017-18. The office of the comptroller general works with departments to review the planning framework and the control framework on a regular basis. I imagine—and I would confirm this with the comptroller general—in this fiscal year they would be looking at 90% of the 130 departments. The idea of doing that—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It's perfectly fine to have 13 departments not having proper internal controls by next year. Not right now but a year from now, we're saying our goal is to have 10%.

[Brian Pagan]

Recent changes have been made to the policy suite. Departments are introducing new entity-level controls around IT, which President Brison spoke about, and business processes. They have a timeline to be able to implement that.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Sorry. I'm going to move on because we're short of time.

I'm going to disagree with you. I don't think 10% is acceptable. I would think a year from now it should be 100% but that's for you and Mr. Brison.

In the estimates, Mr. Brison talked about infrastructure. The PBO mentioned there is $7 billion of infrastructure, but $2.5 billion is missing from the estimates. Mr. Brison today talked about $7 billion in infrastructure spending and then talked about $4.5 billion of it. Where's that $2.5 billion?

The reason I ask is that the Senate came out with a report on the government's infrastructure spending. They said there was no strategic plan for the infrastructure and no measure of success for the spending, apart from dollars spent. Again, it goes back to the whole point of your department, which is financial oversight.

Again, in the president's message, main priorities, improving financial oversight and the quality of the information that we rely on.... We hear again and again that the Senate was quite critical of historic infrastructure spending. The PBO can't find $2.5 billion in the estimates. He's a lot better at this stuff than I am. I can't find it. He can't find it. The Senate says there's no strategic plan and no measure of success for $7 billion of taxpayers' money, apart from saying we spent the money.

[Brian Pagan]

There are two questions there.

First on the PBO report on the main estimates, we agree with the PBO that the information presented in the main estimates is not very easy to navigate to find information. That's the reason the president has advanced a reform, a proposal that would introduce a number of changes including purpose-based votes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

You still haven't mentioned where that $2.5 billion is.

[Brian Pagan]

On the question of infrastructure in the 2017-18 main estimates there's more than $7 billion of infrastructure spending: $3.2 billion of that for public transit and green infrastructure, $1.3 billion for federal infrastructure across 27 organizations, $1.2 billion for social infrastructure across 12 organizations, and $1.2 billion for the post-secondary institutions strategic investment fund.

The challenge here, Mr. McCauley, is that the money is disbursed across so many different organizations. One of the tools we're advancing and trying to promote is InfoBase. The idea with InfoBase is that you can tag infrastructure, ask a question as you can in Google, and it will present all the spending of government departments for that tag, whether it's infrastructure or youth or senior citizens.

Again, I agree with the PBO that the format of the main estimates does not lend itself to easy—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

The Senate report that—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much, Mr. McCauley. Your time's up.

Mr. Weir, you have seven minutes.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Borbey, I want to ask you about non-partisanship in the public service, specifically striking a balancing between that and the right of public servants as citizens to participate in the political process. I'm thinking in particular of the case of Emilie Taman, a federal prosecutor who was denied the right to run in the 2015 federal election. She did run and lost her job over it. Earlier this year, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the Public Service Commission had been wrong to prevent her from running.

In the wake of that decision, I'm wondering what your plans are to strike a more appropriate balance between non-partisanship of public servants and the right of citizens to participate in the political process.

[Patrick Borbey]

This is clearly a complex issue. I have been briefed on the decision. I'm still getting my head around it. I think, at the end of the day, the judge was not convinced that we had articulated sufficiently well the reasons we felt that the public servant who wanted to be a candidate would not be able to exercise her functions in a fair and impartial way if she were to return.

I think we need to spend a bit more time understanding the decision and seeing what it means with respect to future cases that may come to our attention. There were a number of cases, and permission was granted to run in the last number of elections, whether federal, provincial, territorial, or municipal. I note that two former public servants were elected. Clearly in many cases the decision that was made at the end of the day was a positive decision.

This case is complex. I will have to spend more time thinking it through and understanding the implications for future consideration of—

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

In Taman's case, is it your sense that the Public Service Commission made the wrong decision, or just that it provided insufficient explanation for what you still believe to have been the correct decision?

[Patrick Borbey]

All I can do is look at what the judge concluded, that there wasn't sufficient evidence in his or her mind to be able to determine that the commission had made the right decision.

Again, I need to get a bit more information on the case before I fully understand its implications and how we move forward from there.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Okay. I asked Minister Brison what I thought was a relatively straightforward question about whether he could provide a breakdown of the $140 million that the government intends to use to fix the Phoenix pay system. I'd like to ask officials whether it would be possible to provide a breakdown of that figure to this committee within the next couple of weeks?