Human Resources Committee on June 6th, 2019

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

On another subject, Mr. Ricard, you made reference to doing 26 entities and now you're doing 96. It was a comment you made.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Yes.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

How do you describe those entities? Just elaborate a bit more on that.

[Sylvain Ricard]

That's some work—I was answering a previous question that was just about the workload that we're doing in the office, and I referred to the fact that, recently, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development mandate, where she has to do some work on 23 or 26 entities, where she has to look at the.... There are sustainable development strategies. We have 20-some entities we had to review and assess before, through legislation. The requirement has now moved up to 93 or 96 entities.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

When did that requirement occur?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Answer very briefly, please.

[Sylvain Ricard]

It's also over the last year.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

So it's fair to say that the Office of the Auditor General is taking a much more comprehensive review and analysis of government operations in general than in the past.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Well, there are all sorts of up-and-down or movements; everything always evolves. I use that as an example of some additional work we got. We've also been tasked to audit—I'll call it the pipeline—the western entity that we—

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

But they're all public issues—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I've got to step in. I'm sorry.

MP Long, please.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your presentation this morning.

I think all of us as members of Parliament, certainly in my riding of Saint John—Rothesay, are inundated with people coming in the door frustrated with the system, with the centres. I don't think that's a political statement. I think everyone, regardless of party, has the same issue. My constituency assistant Jeannette Arsenault does a wonderful job. We talked about it this morning. Two more people came in this morning saying they're calling, not getting answers, being left on hold, nobody calls them back, and it just goes on and on.

With that being said, I have a great relationship with the employees of, say, the call centre in Saint John. It's a CRA call centre. I talk regularly to the employees who work there. They work for PSAC or UTE, and they're good people. They're frustrated. They go to work every day, and they want to do better. We all want this to be better.

Cultural shifts don't happen overnight; they happen over a period of time. Cultural shifts can happen for many reasons, but one of the reasons is an overall lack of support, funding, what have you. It's quite clear that what's happening with call centres didn't happen overnight. It evolved over many governments.

Your report is there for the record, but can you give us your thoughts on what it's going to take to fix this. It's one thing to say they're underfunded, but I think it's a bigger issue. I think you can say funding, but also how do you see this correcting, and over how much time? What's it going to take to change this culturally? Can someone elaborate on that?

[Sylvain Ricard]

We do refer in the report that the volume of calls clearly surpassed the capacity to answer them, that they don't have features such as option to wait, callback, so you need to resolve that part. I referred earlier to the fact that all departments gave us action plans, and that's part of the action plan that was developed following the audit to address the technology side of it.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, for us there are also service standards: establish service standards, be transparent, reach out to Canadians on what they want or need. This is the only way you can make an informed decision about what you should be aiming for. Once you establish that, and make the decision about what you are trying to achieve, you need to measure and report on it.

Again, when 25% of Canadians need phones to reach out to government, this has to improve. You can't get around that. They need that.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I want to jump in. I think one of the under-reported things about the previous government was the approach to IT. I think things were consolidated under Shared Services Canada. I don't think implementation was done very well. It was underfunded. I think it's been three and a half or three and three-quarter years, but I think our government's made major investments to fix these problems. We still recognize we're not there. We know it's a challenge.

Can you tell us how much responsibility for call centre performance falls on individual departments and how much can be attributed to Shared Services Canada?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I guess it depends on when one looks at the question. Shared Services Canada's responsibility is infrastructure on the technology angle, but obviously they can't walk into the department and force it on them. The department also has a responsibility to establish their needs to work with Shared Services Canada to ultimately deliver the operations of that call centre. That could be a question you could ask the department. I think that could be useful.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

The report looks at Government of Canada call centres broadly. There's clearly a variance among departments.

Can you tell us how Service Canada compares to Immigration, CRA, Veterans Affairs?

[Jean Goulet]

Exhibit 1 of the report talks about the differences among the call centres of the departments. The exhibit speaks for itself. With regard to employment insurance, only 52% of people who wanted to talk to an agent could talk to an agent. With the Canada pension plan, it's 49%. IRCC is 22%, and Veterans Affairs Canada is 79%. I don't think we have the numbers for CRA, but this is additional information we can get for you.

It's limited to those call centres because they were part of the scope of the audit, but they're a good representation of the different types of call centres we find within the federal government.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Kelly, you have the floor, please.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

I want to thank your office for the work you do. This is a bad report—it really is—but this is why we have your office. Your office exists to give parliamentarians information they need to demand better from the public service, regardless of who is in government and who is in opposition. This is why the auditor general is so critically important, as an officer of Parliament.

The report pretty much speaks for itself: call centres not focused on the needs of their clients, making decisions about the call centre, and departments' public reporting on the call centre sometimes overstated results. Departments are deluding themselves, either deliberately or not, about just how bad their service is.

Parliamentarians need this information in order to improve. It's great that we can take a report like this, shed light on a horrific state in our call centres and demand better.

You reported at public accounts recently that with the additional responsibilities you identified, in answer to both Mr. Barlow's and Mr. Morrissey's questions—the expansion of the commissioner of the environment, and audits going from 26 to 93 organizations, and the audits of the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Trans Mountain Corporation—you now do not have sufficient funds to audit things like cybersecurity and Arctic sovereignty.

A future committee this fall, whether it's public accounts or another committee, is not going to have the equivalent of this report to identify problems with cybersecurity. Can you comment on the importance of having a report like this, and the consequences of not being able to deliver these reports that we need?

[Sylvain Ricard]

As a matter of humility, I will be careful how I comment on the usefulness and impact of our reports, but we can't be in that business and believe what we're doing is unimportant. I guess I'll start there.

Obviously, when we select our audit, we try to select topics that will have an impact on service to Canadians. I keep referring to the former auditor general; he's been on the record many times. After that, it is about technology, then about service to Canadians and making sure that, ultimately, we audit entities so that they measure less of their own activities and more of the impact they have on service to Canadians. That's where we see the usefulness of our report: to bring that information to Parliament, and to MPs, so you can do your work.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Thank you.

On this report itself, can you comment on the responses you've had from departments? When you say to a department that they are flat out.... I quote:

The call centre for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not have a [time lines] target. This call centre had the longest average wait time for callers to reach an agent, of 32 minutes.

That's an average. For every person who had to wait on the phone for only, say, seven to 10 minutes, which is longer that a normal person would generally want to wait, you have someone who waited 40-plus minutes.

What was your response or reaction? Were they not aware of just how bad their response time was, or were they indifferent?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'll let Mr. Goulet add to this, if there are more specifics, or on how much of a discussion there was during the audit.

For us, the answer we have is the answer that we published in the report. They have all accepted the recommendations to their action plan. They are signalling that they will make the change and want to improve.

I will go back to the point I made earlier about the impact and the importance for Canadians. Call centres are important, and you need, as management, to have service standards so you know where you're going and you can measure against your performance, and react to it and deal with it.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

I've read many of your reports, of course, at public accounts. We're going to make progress, we hope, on call centres. That's the purpose of the report.

What I am worried about are the reports that we are not going to see—cybersecurity. We will not have a cybersecurity report, which your office has identified as an important area that needs to be studied. What can you tell Canadians about areas that they ought to be concerned about, for lack of audit and lack of information, and to let parliamentarians hold their government to account?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's time, but I'll allow for a very brief answer, please.

[Sylvain Ricard]

You refer to the public accounts hearing that we had on our plan for the upcoming year, where we indicated that the number of audits would go down, as was indicated by the former auditor general over the last few years. If nothing was happening with our capacity, the number of audits would not have matched our funding.

It will be what it will be. We have no choice. We don't have the capacity to do more, given the mandates we have right now.