Evidence of meeting #34 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was documents.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Rosemarie Falk Conservative Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK
On that, Chair, I would note the precedent you had on this. There has not been grace to allow the context, so I would ask that the same be applied in this situation.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bobby Morrissey
Thank you.
Ms. Fancy, you have the floor. Stay relevant to the amendment to the motion being discussed.
Liberal
Jessica Fancy-Landry Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Thank you very much, Chair.
I was discussing how we can further legislation. When we have witnesses come here, they fly in. They prepare their documents and briefing notes. Sometimes it's frustrating for committee members and for witnesses. We want people to be respectful. That's what I was referring to.
We cancelled last week due to this motion and the discussion regarding it. It wasn't an emergency, but it was due to a technical issue. We're consumed by a procedural debate on this motion. That matters for the credibility of this committee as a whole. It matters for the integrity of the process in the committee and for the message we're sending to Canadians about how seriously we take our work.
When those witnesses take time to appear—
Conservative
Bernard Généreux Conservative Côte-du-Sud—Rivière-du-Loup—Kataskomiq—Témiscouata, QC
I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.
Conservative
Bernard Généreux Conservative Côte-du-Sud—Rivière-du-Loup—Kataskomiq—Témiscouata, QC
Mr. Chair, my colleague just implied that we aren't doing our job.
Frankly, we're not here to waste our time. We're here to study a proposal and amendments. I don't know why she's insinuating—
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
I'm sorry, Chair, but that is a point of debate and not a point of order.
Liberal
Conservative
Bernard Généreux Conservative Côte-du-Sud—Rivière-du-Loup—Kataskomiq—Témiscouata, QC
I don't know why she's insinuating that we're here to waste our time. I don't understand.
In fact, Mr. Chair, I raised my hand because I want to speak, so I look forward to doing that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bobby Morrissey
Thank you. For any further points of order, I will insist that you clearly reference the point of order. That was outside of that.
Ms. Fancy, you have the floor.
Liberal
Jessica Fancy-Landry Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I'm just furthering what my colleague had mentioned. That's not really how a committee should function. I'm agreeing with him on that point of order.
Let's turn to the motion itself, then. What this motion is actually looking for is the production of literally millions of pages of documents across multiple departments—millions of pages. It's not a really targeted request. It's not a really scoped request. It's a request of magnitude that is, quite frankly, pretty unprecedented within this committee.
When we're looking at some of these motions and trying to find out the actual scope of what they're looking for, you can't just say that you want every single click of a keyboard that's happened and want it all in a box so that we can peruse it.
Even though we heard, multiple times during question period, that our minister was asked this, and she gave a coherent and transparent answer saying that—
Liberal
Jessica Fancy-Landry Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Oh, that's also up for debate, but if I didn't say that, then you'd “point of order” me for not saying that.
The minister has already said that we have a 60-year-old program that we're trying to onboard. We have a couple of million seniors here. I believe that all together a little under 30,000 hadn't been completely onboarded due to paper.... The minister told us that if there are any MPs who have seniors right now who had missed payments to please contact their MP or their constituency office. Also, she's made note of saying that if there are any seniors out there who have not received payments to please contact her ministry.
When you have a system that is 60 years old, and they're trying to onboard it with technology, sometimes there are bumps along the way. She's been transparent with that within the department. We're saying that the number keeps going down as we go to try to get the seniors their cheques.
We don't need to speculate on that.
This past week, a similar motion was also introduced publicly to the public accounts committee. Members immediately raised concerns. I think they're still debating those motions as well. The scale of that request, once again, was also vast and cannot be implemented as written.
I think this should give us pause, because the same issues that are going on there are also applying here. Producing millions of pages of documents will cost millions of dollars. That's not an abstract estimate; that is an operational reality of what's being asked within this motion.
We have an almost two-page motion here with all of the different types of information platforms, electronic communications and risk assessments. If you're requiring all of these teams to comb through these enormous amounts of materials, Chair, like emails, briefing notes, technical reports, contract files and internal correspondence, that's just the beginning of what this could be.
Each document would need to then be reviewed line by line for privacy—because then there's the section about the redacted pieces for privacy—for legal compliance, confidentiality and national security considerations. Not only are we having literally millions of files, potentially, across six different departments, but there are five different types of documents within each of those departments, and then they have to all go through the line-by-line redaction for privacy, legal compliance and confidentiality before they could be turned over.
How long do you think that would take? Well, within this motion they're saying 30 days.
Then it needs to be processed. Then, on top of all of that, it needs to be translated, because we're a bilingual nation. Then it would be compiled, then delivered. You can see how many times I've said “then”.
This is not a matter of taking the file or the box off the shelf. This is a months-long, potentially year-long undertaking involving significant human and financial resources.
However, the motion here poses this timeline of 30 days, which does not reflect the reality of what they're actually requiring. I feel as though this is simply not feasible for our current departments or fair for our public servants, who have other stuff they need to attend to, such as onboarding some of those seniors who did fall through the cracks as they were translating into that new system.
I think it's really important that we clearly say...because these expectations matter. When we set expectations that cannot be met, we're not strengthening accountability; we're actually undermining it.
Now I'd like to talk about the actual impact on the public service of a motion like this. Think about this: Every hour that's spent compiling documents is an hour spent not delivering services that Canadians are relying on. It's not really rhetorical. It's literal.
The public servants who would be tasked with fulfilling this massive request of documents and motions are the ones who process the claims. They are also the ones who are administering this program. They are also responding to inquiries and ensuring that the Canadians receive these services that they depend on. When we divert those resources, there are also direct consequences. The consequences are that processing speeds slow down, the backlogs grow and responses take longer. Canadians feel that.
I'd also like to mention that throughout the whole process of our minister's being asked about the Cúram software and the onboarding, she also provided two dates' worth of technical briefings for anybody who wanted further information. None of this is in the motion at hand.
Chair, at a time when Canadians expect efficiency, responsiveness and timely service, I believe this motion would redirect significant capacity away from the public servants' normal job description and away from priorities toward a more administrative exercise on an extraordinarily large scale.
Everybody, the question we need to ask ourselves around this is, do we think this is the best use of public resources? Do you think that this is the most effective way to achieve an oversight that's already been discussed—the problem and pathways for remedy, and opportunities for people to learn about how and why it happened—or are we starting to create a burden that outweighs the benefit?
Oversight is absolutely important. As a committee, we have the right to request information. That's a fundamental role. It happens, but that right also comes with responsibility. I always used to tell my students that you sometimes choose what you do and then you choose consequences. It's very similar. When we're requesting information, it also comes with that responsibility. It's a responsibility that should be targeted and should be reasonable.
When I'm looking at whether it's targeted, there's no target to this. It's six different departments with five different interjurisdictional types of platforms. I even see that the amendment in c has four other different types of those in electronic communications. It's not targeted.
There's a responsibility to be reasonable. For all of these untargeted asks for documents from a department to be all wrapped up within 30 days is completely unreasonable.
We have a responsibility, as well, to ensure that our requests are proportionate to the objective we're trying to achieve. In this case, this motion doesn't really have any objectives for what's trying to be achieved. This motion, as it's written, doesn't meet the type of standard we have in our organizational sense as a committee. Instead, what's happening right now is they're trying to set a precedent for unlimited, unfocused document demands across government. I don't really think that's—
Liberal
Liberal
Natilien Joseph Liberal Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
Mr. Chair, can my colleagues across the way please be respectful and patient? I can see that my colleague is very irritated.
Conservative
Éric Lefebvre Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.
We're talking about respect. This computer system was supposed to cost $1.6 billion and ended up costing $6.6 billion. That's $5 billion in cost overruns—
Conservative
Éric Lefebvre Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
—and that is taxpayers' money, Mr. Chair; it is Canadians' money.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bobby Morrissey
Order.
We're debating an amendment to a motion, and Ms. Fancy has the floor.
That is not a point of order, Monsieur Lefebvre.
Ms. Fancy, continue.
Liberal
Jessica Fancy-Landry Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Thank you very much.
Through you, Chair, in terms of a precedent being set.... I can agree with my colleague that there is some seriousness happening here within this Cúram software. They're trying to onboard a program that was 60 years old, for which everything was on paper.
Unfortunately, as they were taking all of this paper information from millions of seniors and onboarding it to a more digital platform, yes, there were some people who fell through the cracks: under 30,000 people of the millions who had been onboarded. Our minister has very clearly stated that, yes, we understand that there are people who fell through the cracks with this. Yes, this is why it happened. This is what happens when you deal with millions of pages of paper. This is what happens when we're onboarding millions of people at a time.
They're saying to reach out to your MP if your OAS did not come through and if the onboarding didn't happen correctly for you, or to the MP's constituency office. Reach out to the department. Reach out to the minister. That has all been very transparent.
It's not a small thing, this type of precedent, because once this precedent becomes established, it does not exist in isolation. It shapes some of the expectations that we have going forward, not just within this committee but within standing committees as a whole. It creates a model that can be replicated across those committees, across departments and across different types of files. The cumulative effect of all of this, I would say, is quite significant. It would strain public service capacity.
We always say that our public servants right now are already at capacity or are working beyond capacity. Asks such as this...they take them, crossing that organizational boundary of what their actual job description is, to suffice something that we've already clearly been transparent about in trying to fix. Sometimes when you know that things went a little bit wrong, you become transparent, you clean it up and you let people know that “this is what happened” and “this is what we're doing”.
It diverts the resources across all these six different departments. It would fundamentally alter how the departments operate: shifting focus from delivering results to managing document production. I don't feel that it is a reasonable or a responsible oversight, Mr. Chair. I also don't think it's sustainable. I don't really think that it's what Canadians expect from us.
I'd also like to address, Mr. Chair, something that's often overlooked in these types of conversations or discussions, and that's the question of whether information is already being provided. As I said before, when all of this happened, our minister had two days of technical briefings that members were allowed to go to, to discuss this and why it is happening. When we [Inaudible—Editor] a motion like this, it seems that there's also a lack of transparency. In this case, there has been no lack of transparency. That is not something that's borne out by facts. Minister Hajdu has appeared before this committee. Minister Lightbound has also appeared before this committee. Officials from both offices have also appeared through this committee. Officials have been provided, technical briefings—
Conservative
Rosemarie Falk Conservative Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK
I have a point of order, Chair. This is just repetitive. We're hearing the same things over and over again. There are no new points being made.
Liberal
Jessica Fancy-Landry Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I haven't talked about Minister Lightbound yet.