Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 15th, 2023

[Yves Giroux]

To my knowledge, that's never happened. That information isn't available in the data we looked at either. The departments, which will likely be appearing later this week, would surely have more details on that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Ms. Bérubé.

Ms. Idlout, you have two and a half minutes.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Qujannamiik, thank you, Madam Chair.

It's strange to speak English in this room when I'm with you people. This makes me appreciate my interpreter, who couldn't be here today, even more.

Thank you so much for appearing before our committee and for looking into what you did based on a motion passed by this committee.

I want to direct my questions to a statement you have on page 15. It says that INAC and Health Canada “exhibited a capacity to achieve the objectives that they had set for themselves.” You noted they have the capacity to set objectives and meet them. You also reported that there's been a failure in their meeting these targets, because they keep asking for not enough, or they keep moving the target. It's no wonder they are struggling to meet their targets, if they keep having a moving target over all these years. You end up saying in your report that they “performed poorly at specifying and maintaining a given objective.”

I want to ask some questions about those performances. Could you explain or describe, first of all, this poor performance?

[Yves Giroux]

It's difficult to determine exactly what explains that poor performance in maintaining the same performance targets. It could be changing priorities, so the departments being subject to priorities that change. If that's the case, they have to change the performance indicators they track. Or it could be a realization that the targets they have are not appropriate to get to the desired outcomes.

It's difficult for us to determine that only having looked at the departmental results indicators, the targets themselves, and not having conducted a thorough study about why they chose these specific targets and why they changed.

We looked at their tracking of targets and the fact that some of them had changed, but we did not start the study with a view to getting full-fledged explanations.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Ms. Idlout.

I want to check with our witnesses as well.

You're doing okay? You have been on the hot seat now for quite a long time. Do you need a break or anything?

[Yves Giroux]

That's very nice of you to ask, but I'm good. Mark is good too.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you.

We will proceed now to Mr. Schmale for five minutes.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses. It's a very interesting conversation indeed.

I want to pick up where Ms. Idlout left off, in the area of the indicators and how we have seen in departmental plans through successive years that if targets in certain areas have not been met, the deadline for completion has just been pushed further and further away.

I missed the first little bit. Is it something unique to this department that you're seeing these benchmarks being pushed back? Is this isolated to these two departments, in your experience?

[Yves Giroux]

Sadly it is widespread across the public service.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

That's despite the increase in funding that this department has received?

[Yves Giroux]

It's irrespective of additional or stable funding that departments receive. It is in virtually—I can't say all organizations, but it's widespread.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Could it have more to do with the process, especially when you have communities endlessly applying for program funding, and the applications Ottawa takes in kind of go around the cotton candy machine and then funding is dispersed out? Could efficiencies be found in maybe ISC or other places in terms of having more direct decision-making power? This is more policy than anything, but the point is that what you're giving is more of a bottom-up and not a top-down approach to dealing with indigenous communities or really anything, I guess.

[Yves Giroux]

I think the issue of departmental results indicators moving from year to year is clearly not unique to these two departments. As I said, it's widespread. How do you fix that? That's a good question. I think it's up to ministers to set targets and to try to make their officials stick to them.

There is a committee of ministers, the Treasury Board. I think these ministers are empowered to impose targets on departments and to force them to stick to them and to have them explain why they can't meet certain targets. It certainly would be an improvement over the process in which these targets and these indicators themselves are determined by officials and almost imposed on ministers who do not have the right tools to challenge these and or to easily suggest changes from year to year.

It's a topic I have raised before. I'm not making any friends in the public service when I make these comments, but I'm here to tell you what I think when you ask me, and that's exactly what I'm doing again today and probably losing the only two friends I had left.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

I'm sure everyone at this table calls you a friend as well.

When you're talking about the mechanics of big government, when you have big government it's hard to have big freedom, so to speak. It's very difficult to move quickly on certain topics or certain priorities. It's a big boat to move.

To your point, rather than talking about endless program funding and endless feeding of this machine, a better way for tax dollars to have more velocity might be to give them to the community and have them decide what the priorities are there, rather than having this back and forth between Ottawa and the indigenous communities—or non-indigenous communities, really, if it's not this department but another department.

[Yves Giroux]

It's probably a very good point. I think the government is relatively good at doing stuff routinely, despite what people may think. It struggles when it's asked to do something different quickly. That's where we tend to hit a wall.

If you ask officials to do the same thing over and over again, they tend to get very good at it. However, when it comes to providing services to indigenous Canadians, it's not routine and the same thing day in and day out. Different people have different needs. That's probably where the rubber hits the road.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

That goes to the quote, and I think it was Reagan who said it, that the closest thing to life on earth was a government program. It pretty much explains that.

[Yves Giroux]

I have no comment.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Once it's in, it's hard to get out, because it's there forever.

Okay. Well, that I understand.

How much time do I have, Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

You have 20 seconds.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

I don't think I can get into anything in 20 seconds.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Mr. Schmale.

I'll now go to Mr. Weiler for five minutes.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank our witnesses. In particular, I'd like to thank Mr. Giroux for being here and for his reports on this and other topics. They're always really, really important for the work we do.

I want to pick up on a line of questioning that Mr. Schmale brought up. I may look at it from maybe a little bit less of a libertarian point of view than he does. I know, particularly from speaking to some of my good friends who work in urban planning and do a lot of work with first nations right across the country, that one of the big barriers for accessing government funding is some of the long application processes that are put together for many of these programs. Oftentimes, many nations do not have the capacity or sometimes even the knowledge of those programs that are coming up.

I'm wondering if in the process of putting together your report this is something that came up. Do you see something like that as impacting perhaps some of the results that are being realized from the work in ISC and CIRNAC?

[Yves Giroux]

It's not something that came up when we put together our report, but it's something that comes up almost every time we look at specific government programs. The reason generally tends to be that in government, every department wants to have a level of certainty. When they're designing a program, they want to ensure that the recipients are the intended recipients and that nothing goes wrong once the money is out the door. They tend to have an application process that screens out as much as possible applicants who are not eligible.

Then they tend to have accountability issues. They want to know what was achieved with the money they provided. It tends to be burdensome for the applicants. That's not specific to the federal government. It's very common to other levels of government. It's a struggle between giving money in a seamless and efficient way but also ensuring that the money is not wasted on ineligible recipients and there's some accountability as to what the money was used for so that the government can account for that and get results.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

You noted in the report, “Our analysis determined that the number of performance indicators increased after ISC and CIRNAC were created”, and you said, “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.” I think a few things can be taken from that. I'm wondering if you can maybe explain this to the committee.

To what degree is this not actually making progress in making improvements on the ground, or how much of that is just not reaching what you judge to be much higher goals that these departments are setting than were set in these plans from before?

[Yves Giroux]

I don't think departments set much higher goals over time. They probably have increased their ambition, but that's not what struck us as being the main issue when government departments failed to meet some of their targets. I think it has more to do with just a lack of capacity to generally meet the targets they had set for themselves, not because they had a very ambitious agenda. That didn't strike me.

Again, Mark can correct me if it's not the case, because he was closer to some of the details of the report, but I think it was a general lack of capacity to deliver on all of these programs rather than targets that were set at too high a level at the outset.

He's nodding, so that's a good sign.