Human Resources Committee on April 17th, 2007

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Very well. What are the new measures?

[Peter Simeoni]

I'm sorry, I don't follow the question.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

There is also the matter of what is being done to correct the situation. You have answered this twice already. You said that we will have results by this fall. Is that right?

[Peter Simeoni]

Yes, we'll have the goals and our current performance in relation to those goals. Where we have not met our own goals we'll need to talk about what corrective measures we would take to close that gap to improve the integrity of the SIR, and some timetable for doing that. I would imagine it wouldn't be a very long timetable.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

That's all the time we have.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Chairman, I would simply like to make a comment that does not need an answer. I have the impression that things are right where they were last year. I just wanted to bring that up for your consideration.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lessard.

It must be reassuring to Madame Fraser that Pricewaterhouse came up with the same results and same actions that she did.

We're going to move to Mr. Martin for five minutes, please.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I'm going to continue on the same track, because I have a real concern about this.

I wonder if you looked at the issue of SIN numbers and how they actually work in terms of programs that need to be delivered out there to people. Ms. Yelich a few minutes ago said that maybe we need to give everybody a SIN number. Maybe in fact we do somehow, because a lot of the people I talk to and hear about who in fact haven't accessed some of the entitlements they had a right to are seniors, they are women, and many of them have never worked. If they didn't work they probably didn't get a SIN number. If they didn't have a SIN number, then they have no history, no track record, nothing to indicate that maybe they did qualify for something. Could that be a problem? Is this something that could be fixed?

[Sheila Fraser]

Obviously that was not an issue we looked at in this audit. The only area in which we would look at this would be if we were looking at a particular program, for example, old age security. We would look at how well the government communicates the availability of the program. Again in that audit, we indicated there had been progress, but there is still room for improvement.

But we would look at it specifically program by program. I don't know that government itself has done anything more on social security numbers in general.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I'd be interested in knowing if in fact the SIN number is sort of the thumbprint for all of us. There are literally thousands of people out there who have worked at home, looked after their children, and brought up their family. Because of this, they have not registered. How do we keep track of them? Is there any effort being made to put something in place that would keep track of them, so they don't fall through the cracks and end up living lives of desperate poverty in some instances?

[Onno Kremers]

If there's a specific program that is geared towards people in need, and that program needs authorization to use a social insurance number, then there's a process in place for that program to obtain one, either by applying through the existing Treasury Board policy or through legislation from a particular department.

That's the way you'd become an authorized social insurance holder, and that's why we have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 26 authorized users within the federal government.

So if there are specific programs that need to track, as you say, people in need with the social insurance number, that's the way they would obtain it.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

CPP is one of those, from what I understand from reading this report. So how do we connect the people who qualify for at least some part of this? CPP, OAS, and GIS are different programs, I suppose you were going to say.

So how do we get the people who don't register for CPP in the first instance by working and then don't get what they're entitled to in terms of OAS and GIS?

[Onno Kremers]

Within Canada, it's fairly rare that a person doesn't have a social insurance number, because you need it for taxes and to get your first job. You need it for a variety of purposes. It's very rare to find a large tranche of the population that doesn't have social insurance numbers. Certainly it's not a trend that we have witnessed.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Okay. There's been some research done in this, and some material has been written. My experience—and I guess that of others who try to serve their constituents—is that seniors particularly aren't accessing the programs they're entitled to, and many live in desperate poverty because of this.

Could I say to you, Auditor General, that this is something you might want to look into, in order to see why we're failing so many of our citizens with these good programs? In fact, if they were accessed, they have provided sufficient income for literally thousands of Canadian citizens. But there are still hundreds of thousands of them who don't get it because they're not somehow plugged into the system.

Could we check to see why we're failing these numbers of people who so desperately need this help?

[Sheila Fraser]

We can certainly consider it. We did look at it when we audited the old age security program to see what efforts the department was making.

One of the difficulties is that it requires someone to make an application. So how do you ensure that people are aware of the programs, and then how do you get them to make the application? This is part of the problem. I'm not sure that we can cover that. We can only look at the efforts that the departments are making to communicate this information to the population.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Obviously you did a review and the department responded. We still have over 100,000 people who aren't getting what they deserve. Could you do another review?

[Sheila Fraser]

As it is our matter of course to do follow-up audits, we can certainly look to see when that one would be scheduled, what follow-up we've done, and what they have done specifically in that area.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Because there's something wrong here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

We're going to move to the last questioner of this round, Mr. Chong, sir, for five minutes.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have four questions for Mr. Simeoni.

You noted in your remarks that the Government of Canada has concluded agreements with New Brunswick, Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta for provincial vital events information. I note as well that in the Auditor General's report she states that a review done in late 2004 said that up to 18 months would be required to implement this streamlined process for collecting information of vital events. We're now over that period of time--almost two years over.

Can you tell us when we're going to have the rest of the six provinces sign on with these agreements? Do you have any idea as to the timeframe? Are we looking at six months, 12 months, or years?

[Peter Simeoni]

Mr. Chair, I would love to be able to say that we'll have the rest signed up in the next 12 months, but it is a matter of federal-provincial negotiations. It's incumbent on Service Canada and HRSDC to sell the merits of the vital events agreements to the provincial governments that have not yet signed up with us. We have to show them that this is a win-win for the citizens of their provinces and the citizens of Canada generally.

We're hoping, and in fact it's one of my goals, to sign at least three more agreements in the coming year. If we can do better than that, it would be great. That would leave three more to go in the year after that.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you.

My second question has to do with the accuracy of information in the register. You've talked about the process by which you're going to ensure greater accuracy in the register, but do you have any timeframes with respect to that in terms of full implementation so that we do have processes and systems in place to ensure greater accuracy?

[Peter Simeoni]

Not knowing at this point where the problems lie exactly, we know overall that the integrity is quite high, because it doesn't tend to come up as an issue at all in program administration. But that doesn't mean that the SIR is fully accurate, by any means, and I don't mean to imply that. It would be difficult for me to say it will take us six months or 12 months to fix the problems that we're about to uncover. I don't know the magnitude of them, and I don't really know what the solutions are, except to say that if I can sign three or four more provinces in vital events agreements and get the birth and death data that come with them and the rest in the coming year, then a lot of our SIR integrity issues would automatically be solved.

So I say at the outside, if we can achieve those vital events agreements, we're two years away from having a database that has as much integrity as we can possibly have.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

My third question concerns the idea of flags on dormant SIN numbers.

I think I heard correctly earlier in the testimony in front of this committee, Mr. Chair, that while numbers may be flagged as dormant, it doesn't necessarily mean that the various programs that use the number actually pay attention to that dormant flag. Maybe you can tell this committee, through you, Mr. Chair, what actions, what steps, you're taking to liaise with other departments and programs to ensure that the dormant flag actually means something.

[Peter Simeoni]

Fortunately, and maybe unfortunately, these programs identified by the Auditor General are within HRSDC, which is what Service Canada is part of. They're our departmental colleagues, and we're working with them now to look at the results of the audit and to try to understand what problem this might be causing for their program administration. It's their view, and I think it's reflected in the audit report, that they understand the risk and they have mitigating controls. But I think the Auditor General is asking us to look very hard at whether or not we're managing the risk well, and that's what we're doing right now; we're studying the use of the dormant flags in these programs.