Government Operations Committee on June 5th, 2023

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

The rules you are talking about are a government creation. They are not a parliamentary creation, and Parliament's ability is not negated by a creation of government. I would draw your attention to a point made by Mr. Speaker Bercow of Westminster, where he said in relation to the rules that you are now citing, “They are, perhaps, a matter of great importance in the minds of Ministers, and in particular, I fancy, in the minds of officials; they are not important in my mind at all.”

Mr. Chair, I'm really quite flabbergasted that a senior official with Privy Council Office would not understand or respect the ultimate authority of this institution to call for papers from an unfettered perspective.

I'd like to ask Mr. Bédard, who is our law clerk, to confirm that Parliament has the ability to call for documents in an unfettered process, perhaps drawing on the example from last summer of Hockey Canada, even in cases of directing witnesses to, in some cases, go beyond what might normally be considered protected by solicitor-client privilege.

[Michel Bédard]

Through you, Mr. Chair, thank you for the question.

As I indicated in my opening remarks, the power to send for documents and papers is rooted in the Constitution. It is constitutional in nature, and will prevail over ordinary statutes unless there's an explicit provision that would override privilege. In the past, there were examples where there was initial resistance to produce documents. We can think of the vaccine contracts for the public accounts committee. This is part of the public domain, so that's why I'm providing this as an example.

Sir, you mentioned the study that the heritage committee was conducting on Hockey Canada. There was some resistance at first about providing documents that were subject to solicitor-client privilege, and after discussion, these documents were provided to the committee.

I will mention the fact that solicitor-client privilege does not prevail over parliamentary privilege, and this was recently recognized by the Superior Court of Justice in Ontario in the Laurentian University case.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you very much for that great clarity. I might add, as well, for further reading, many of the authorities of Parliament, including House of Commons Procedure and Practice, Beauchesne's and other such documents would include much of this information. Would they not, sir?

[Michel Bédard]

Yes, indeed.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you.

I would commend to our witnesses the reading of the authorities of Parliament on this exact matter.

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That is it, Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I thank you for your time, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

We go to Mr. Bains, please, for five minutes.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our departments for joining us today.

I echo a lot of the frustration that our members have shown here. Part of our role is to ensure that we do things better.

I know Mr. Leduc mentioned getting the best price possible. The cost is, of course, an issue in the work that we're doing here.

According to Treasury Board:

Based on TBS' preliminary observations of audit results from departments, the audits revealed no evidence of political interference, and broad compliance with values and ethics commitments. However, there are indications that certain administrative requirements and procedures were not consistently followed. Departments have developed management action plans to address their respective audit recommendations.

The question I have for all of you is this: Do any of you have an update on how these management action plans are progressing to resolve the issues identified?

We can start with Mr. Leduc.

[Michel Leduc]

I'm going to have to seek advice on whether that applies to CPP Investments. There are a number of provisions. I'll use an example: The Financial Administration Act does not apply. These were conscious decisions that were made at the time when we were established.

I'm more than happy to come back to you very soon after this hearing.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Sure.

Madam Fox.

[Christiane Fox]

Thank you.

We definitely take into account all information, advice and recommendations given by former auditors general or procurement ombudsmen. In the context of some of the action items, like looking at how restrictive some of the language around the contracts may have been, the department has undertaken to take a look at that and make changes around transparency and communicating outcomes.

To your point, I think we do track our responses to the action plan. We also leverage the expertise of departmental audit committees to challenge us and reflect on our processes internally.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

I'm going to go to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I'm sorry, Mr. Bains, I need to interrupt.

We have the bells ringing again. Colleagues, can we agree that we'll continue until seven minutes before the vote?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Wonderful.

I'm sorry, Mr. Bains. Go ahead.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

I'm going to go to Ms. O'Gorman, please.

[Erin O'Gorman]

Our chief audit executive did find issues relating to the documentation of the contracts from McKinsey.

I will make no assumptions that some of those gaps and weaknesses don't extend to other contracts, so in January I did ask for an audit of 100% of the contracts in my organization. A few weeks ago, in addition to the management action plan, I mandated two full days of procurement training for all executives who do contracting in the department.

We do have a management action plan being developed with regard to the specific audit that the comptroller general mandated. We're also doing broader issues around that. We will be tracking it closely.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Mr. Shea, did you want to add?

[Matthew Shea]

We had an audit done of our McKinsey contracts. It similarly found some issues around information management in particular—safeguarding the original contract and making sure that we had some of the evidence on hand.

Similar to my colleague, we won't assume that this is the same case for other contracts, but we can't say with confidence that it's not. We've actually undertaken to review all contracts for the last year to make sure that no similar issues have occurred there. Depending on what we find, we may go further back. We're taking a risk-based approach to make sure that we don't have any systemic issues. We've already looked at close to 400 contracts in that review.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Johnson.

[Mollie Johnson]

Thanks very much.

We did conduct an internal audit on the two contracts. One was from 2012 and one was from 2018. We posted the results on March 30. There were no issues on those.

We do continue to monitor our contracts as we go forward.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Lavery.

[Mairead Lavery]

Thank you.

We are currently participating in five audits of the McKinsey contracts. One has been completed, which I understand was the PSPC contract. We had no audit findings of that.

Our chief internal auditor is participating in all of the audits to ensure that, if there are any findings, we would incorporate them into any management action plan.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Mr. Matthews.