Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 15th, 2023

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

You've already answered one of my later questions because that's exactly where I was going to go. I'm going to go a different angle now.

I have to be honest, when I read your report, the image I had.... I'm not sure if you're a sports fan or not, but you go to sports game and you see the Tim Hortons game where they put a marble under a cup, and then they move the cups around and you have to follow the marble and hopefully, if you can keep track of the marble, you win a prize at the end of the day. That's the image I had of what's going on here.

It seems to me that there's an accountability issue and that outcomes are minimized by having the targets and the goals constantly changing, or the time frames, or many of them set as to be determined years down the road. It's like it's a sleight of hand game. I have to be honest. I was a chairman of a board that had that same issue internally with our own management system, and we had to call that out.

Do you think there's an accountability issue that's created by these moving, changing targets that aren't consistent? There's nothing to shoot for if you don't keep the targets and you don't actually have the targets determined yet.

[Yves Giroux]

I agree with you.

I don't think it's done on purpose. I think public servants who come up with these indicators genuinely mean to have the best indicators. However, changing them regularly or frequently does not help for accountability and accountability purposes to track a departmental performance over time.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

I have one last question for you. I think I have about a minute and a half.

Mr. Desjarlais and I sat at public accounts committee one day, and we had an Auditor General's report on emergency management services, I think.

We've had numerous Auditor General's reports. We have numerous reports from your office. We talk to people on the ground. All of us talk to people in the communities. There's this conclusion that some of these things are not working. They're not working on the ground to improve the lives of people.

We need to find a way to fix that. Yet, when we get the ministers and department officials here, they don't take responsibility for this lack of accountability. Instead, they double down. From my seat, it's like everybody sees that there's a problem, but we won't acknowledge it. We won't take responsibility for it.

I would suggest to you, sir, that truth and reconciliation begins with accepting the truth.

Would you agree with my conclusion that in order to bring about effective change, the minister and the top officials of these departments must be willing to accept the truth of some of the challenges that you so clearly portray in your report?

[Yves Giroux]

It's hard to disagree with that.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

That was a really quick answer.

I think I'm just about out of time anyway, Chair, right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. Vidal.

We'll go to Mr. Powlowski for five minutes.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I didn't know it was me, but okay.

[An hon. member]

Well, take your time, Marcus.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

You're helping me to waste my five minutes so I don't have to actually ask a question.

I'm still trying to get my mind around what you did here. You start off by saying that “The analysis conducted indicates that the increased spending did not result in a commensurate improvement in the ability of these organizations to achieve the goals that they had set for themselves set for themselves.”

By the goals, you mean the department results indicators, right? It seems to me that what you're doing is you have a bunch of these targets set up there and you're counting how many times the government hit those targets. Am I right? Some of the times, you actually didn't shoot at the target because you took it down beforehand. You decided beforehand that that wasn't going to be a target. On the other hand, you put up other targets that you haven't had a chance yet to count.

I'm not sure of the significance in this conclusion that the government is inefficient, we're spending more, we're not hitting the targets, when it seem like it's random. We didn't actually start off with these targets and shoot at these targets. Am I wrong with that?

[Yves Giroux]

That's one of the issues that we have flagged. Targets changed over time.

There are also issues where we identified that the goal, or the DRI, the departmental result indicator, has a target and a date to complete, but that has changed compared with the previous year. The department changed the timeline for completing or reaching the goal. There are also issues where there's a target but there's no timeline to reach it. We aim for this, but we don't have a timeline to reach it.

There are different issues, but the one you've identified is certainly one of them.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

When there actually was a target in a timeline and the target didn't change over the time, how did the government do with respect to hitting those targets?

[Yves Giroux]

It varied depending on the year. It goes from nine out of 24 in 2018-19 to four out of 14 in 2022-23.

Mark can correct me, or kick me under the table if I'm wrong.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

These were the targets that remained stable, so you couldn't say that this was a new target or an old target.

[Yves Giroux]

By and large....

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I looked at your report, and I couldn't see what actually are the targets and how they changed over the period of time.

[Yves Giroux]

We didn't want to have a very long report by listing each and every one of them, so instead we made reference to the departmental results reports or the departmental publications. They're referenced at the end of the report, in the notes, I think—yes.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Can you tell me what are some of the more significant targets? Looking at the body of.... I'm not sure exactly what kinds of targets we're talking about here.

[Yves Giroux]

Off memory, I think we're talking about targets such as the numbers for housing built or the number of reserves without a boil water advisory. I'd have to go back to the list to refresh my memory. It's a report we did a year ago.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

When you look at how the department changed the targets, can you comment on what seems to be the reasoning behind the changing of the targets? Perhaps over a period of time the government's goals have changed. Perhaps we've realized that we ought to emphasize different things, and perhaps what we were measuring didn't really accurately reflect what we wanted it to reflect. Can you comment on the changing nature of those targets?

[Yves Giroux]

I probably would need to go back and look at which ones specifically, but that's also a good question for ministers. They would be in a better position to determine why some targets changed.

I can have an indication. I can provide the committee with a list of which ones did change, but the reasons will be a bit more difficult for me to explain. I think the minister or senior officials would be in a better position.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Can you explain? You say at some point that “indigenous self-determined services...do not generally have targets specified for them." What does that mean?

[Mark Mahabir, Director of Policy and General Counsel, Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer]

Thank you for the question.

I think on that point it really depends on how long it takes to settle the claim or to become self-governing, so for that DRI, yes, it would be difficult to set a target.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Mr. Powlowski.

Ms. Bérubé, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Giroux, I'd like to come back to the public service's ability to adapt to additional investments. You mentioned that the public service had trouble meeting the demand. However, according to your report, there have been years when the departmental staff numbers have remained low.

The public service is not meeting the demand. In that case, why are the departments keeping their staff numbers low? Do you know why?

[Yves Giroux]

It's probably related to recruitment and staff retention. Expertise is in high demand in a number of sectors, such as health and social services and economic development. So the two departments are probably facing challenges recruiting a skilled workforce that can provide the very wide range of programs and services they have to deliver. It's also a matter of retaining key personnel, who are also in high demand. Those would be two good reasons.

So I don't have the exact reasons, but those would be very good questions to ask both ministers when they appear before the committee.