Government Operations Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2020

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Oh, gotcha. Okay.

I have a question on it because, again, I think it's a very interesting tool. Can you provide a little bit of information on the PEAT? When did it come about? What drove its creation?

[Yves Giroux]

We decided to create that tool because personnel expenditure information is available on multiple platforms and in multiple repositories at the federal government. “Multiple” is the key word. At least to our knowledge, there's no one single window where you can have a picture of the historical trends by department on the number of FTEs and the expenditures. That's why we decided to collect that information in one tool, so that parliamentarians and Canadians can access it and use it.

Initially, we called it PEST. We came up with an acronym that made sense—personnel expenditure...something tool—but the acronym had a negative connotation, so we decided to go for PEAT instead.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you very much for that.

I understand that personnel or staffing represents a large proportion of the federal operating costs, obviously. Was this tool able to capture all of the departments? What percentage of the federal service was it able to capture, and what are some of the departments that maybe were excluded from the PEAT?

[Yves Giroux]

Well, you're asking me a detailed question for which I don't have the answer. I'll have to get back to you on that. It captures the vast majority of the public service and the federal arena, so to speak, but I don't think it captures the totality, so I'll have to get back to you with the details as to what is not included.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Okay.

The PBO projects that over the next five years the number of FTEs will continue to increase. I just wanted to ask you whether that takes into account staffing changes driven by COVID-19, or whether it is looking at broader trends.

[Yves Giroux]

It's looking at broader trends. COVID-19 could have an impact, but it's difficult to determine at this point because we're still in the pandemic. It's based on trends.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Okay. That's fantastic.

Mr. Chair, how much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

You have five seconds.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Great. I will generously share that with my colleagues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you very much.

That ends our first hour.

As we had indicated, the plan was to go to every party speaking for five minutes, and then to go in camera. They've been working hard, and they've been keeping me updated. I'll let Paul speak to this briefly. Unfortunately, they haven't been able to do that, so the plan is that we will go back to our regular schedule of questioning, but we will reduce it to five minutes, four minutes, two minutes and four minutes.

With that said, Paul, if you want to comment, please do.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Paul Cardegna]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The issue we're facing is that conducting an in camera meeting in Zoom requires us to change servers. The servers that we use for a public Zoom meeting are not the same servers that we use for an in camera Zoom meeting. The reason is that those servers are extra secure. Unfortunately, we have developed an issue where we are having problems contacting that extra secure server. As such, we cannot offer that we can set up an in camera Zoom meeting at this time. While our technical people have been working hard to try to find a workaround, it's not entirely clear that the workaround would work at this time, as they're still in the development stage.

Therefore, I recommended to the chair that we push off the in camera portion of the discussion until Monday, and the chair agreed.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Clerk. I appreciate that.

We will now go into the next round.

Mr. Paul-Hus, you have five minutes.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Giroux, I was shocked to read your report, just as I was shocked to learn, during your statement at the beginning of the meeting, how things were really going. For example, the Standing Committee on Finance is no longer kept informed. I also note that the word “usually” comes up a lot: you say that you usually have this or that report or that you usually receive information. So there is a huge lack of information. I consider this to be a very serious lack of transparency. We're talking about tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. As far as we're concerned today, we're talking about almost $100 billion dollars.

In your opinion, has Treasury Board completely lost control over spending?

[Yves Giroux]

I don't think it's just Treasury Board. It's probably an issue for all departments. Have they lost control of spending? We've certainly lost accountability for real-time spending. We can't get a clear picture of how much has been spent to date on a given program, such as CERB. We only have an idea of how much will be spent up to the end of the fiscal year. CERB has ended, I know, but there are still applications in process, late applications. It's the same for the programs that succeeded it. The disclosures give us an idea, but we have no idea of the total expenditures to date for COVID-19. The government used to provide this information to the Standing Committee on Finance every two weeks. We have lost this source of information.

The Treasury Board Secretariat has developed a website, the GoC InfoBase, which displays the maximum amount voted by Parliament for each of these programs, but it does not provide the current amount of spending.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

We are in agreement that this is not normal in a country like Canada. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent and we have no access to contracts or information. Even the Parliamentary Budget Officer does not have access to that information. It's quite surprising.

You have completed the analysis of appropriations in supplementary estimates (B). The committee is being asked to vote on these estimates which total $79.2 billion. Of this amount, $72.4 billion is for measures related to COVID-19. However, the details of these amounts are not available. How can anyone think that we are going to accept $72 billion in appropriations through a simple vote when we cannot know the details?

Of course, I'm not asking you to answer that question; it's a very political question. Let's just say that I wanted to make my point: I, for one, have a lot of difficulty voting for these estimates.

Before my time runs out, I'd like to ask you another question.

A report from the C.D. Howe Institute notes that at the rate the Liberal government is announcing spending, there will be a problem with some ongoing programs.

According to the Speech from the Throne, apart from the measures related to COVID-19, the various permanent programs that have been promised will require annual expenditures of between $19 billion and $44 billion on an ongoing basis. Right now we are not even in a position to fund that. Even if we were to raise the GST by two percentage points, which would allow us to claw back perhaps $15 billion, we would still be a long way off the mark.

What do you think of these figures put forward in the C.D. Howe Institute report?

[Yves Giroux]

That is certainly worrisome, especially since Monday's economic update showed that the public debt-to-GDP ratio, a measure that is being closely monitored, was going to rise more than expected. This does not include spending to stimulate the economy. If you add in that spending, the public debt-to-GDP ratio will be well over 50 % for several years to come, and that's only at the federal level.

Historically, the government's economic and fiscal forecasts have always tended to move over time. For example, while a $10-billion deficit was projected five years from now, the following year the deadline is pushed back. This somewhat worrisome trend could be repeated even after the COVID-19 crisis, so that the public debt-to-GDP ratio could also continue to rise well beyond this crisis.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

So, ensuring a ...

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Monsieur Paul-Hus, you have five seconds.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you.

We will go to Mr. Weiler, for five minutes.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would also like to thank Mr. Giroux, Mr. Stanton and Ms. Giswold for joining our committee today.

I'd like to pick up on the line of questioning that my colleague Madame Vignola brought up earlier, talking about the report you did on the JSS and the Asterix ships. You mentioned, in your report and in your answers earlier today, that you didn't look at the capability of the two ships in this study. However, you did mention that there was a difference in the capabilities.

I was wondering if you did a measure at all to assess how much it would be to bring the capabilities of the Asterix up to the capability of the JSS.

[Yves Giroux]

That would be a very interesting exercise. However, we have not done it. To do that, we would need an expertise that we may not have. I don't want the analysts who worked on the JSS and who will be working on other defence to feel that they're not the ones to do the work, but we would need a much bigger capacity in terms of expertise when it comes to navy and warships than we currently have.

We looked at the cost. We didn't look specifically at the capabilities. If we were to do that, we would need to use expertise that's outside of what we have in the office.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

I understand that, for instance, the Asterix would have the lowest cybersecurity set-up of just about any ship. For this, it would have to rebuild the entire cybersecurity systems from the ground up. I can imagine there are many other measures like this that would need to be taken.

I was wondering, Mr. Giroux, if you could confirm that raising the Asterix to the military capability of the JSS would in fact be costly.

[Yves Giroux]

I would certainly take that as a very reasonable assumption. You cannot have ships that are that different in costs having the same capacities or capabilities. For the Asterix and the Obelix to be that much cheaper, there has to be something in terms of capabilities, and there have to be differences for both ships.

The question is, are these differences material, or are the Asterix and Obelix sufficient to meet the needs of the Royal Canadian Navy? That's not for me to assess. That's for military experts. My office and I just provided the cost differences. We didn't venture into the capabilities of the respective ships.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

I'd like to quote a part of your report:

In keeping with our mandate, this report presents costs only and does not include a cost-benefit analysis. The summarized system characteristics for each vessel found in this report are for information purposes only. That is, comparing and analyzing the capabilities across ships relative to their respective costs are outside the scope of this report.

Therefore, would you agree that this study doesn't tell the whole story?