Mr. Chairman and committee members, thank you for giving us the opportunity to appear before you this morning. As you know, the minister will be appearing in a couple of weeks to speak about her priorities and the department's main estimates. I won't speak to any of that, with your permission. Since this is our first appearance before the new committee, and we will be back before you many times, I think, on important and complex matters, with your permission what I'd like to do, in addition to speaking briefly to the items in supplementary estimates (C), is to talk a little bit about who we are, what we do, and how we serve the Government of Canada and Canadians.
The Department of Justice has a mandate to support the dual roles of the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of Canada. We are a department with a long and proud history. The first minister of justice was Sir John A. Macdonald. The department was formally created in 1868, so we've been around for a long time. Since lawyers and the fear of lawyers drives so much public policy, we're involved in most of what government does one way or the other. We're a legal department, a program and policy department, and we support government activities from coast to coast to coast.
Under Canada's federal system, the administration of justice is an area of shared responsibility between the federal government and the provinces and territories. In addition to all of the work we do with the federal government—I'll speak a little bit more about that—we have a very close and ongoing relationship with the provinces and territories in respect of program and policy and delivery and in respect of law reform, to try to ensure that Canada's justice system provides the security, the fairness, and the access to justice that meets the expectations of Canadians in terms of the very high standards they rightly expect our justice system to meet.
We support the Minister of Justice in responsibilities for 52 statutes in areas of federal law, with a particular focus on ensuring a bilingual and bijural national legal framework. Our principal areas of focus, and what you'll hear most from us in the coming years, are in criminal justice, including justice for victims of crime and youth criminal justice. We're also responsible for family justice, especially the Divorce Act; access to justice; aboriginal justice; matters of public law; constitutional, administrative, and international law; and private international law.
We also support the Attorney General as the chief law officer of the crown, both in terms of the ongoing operations of government and the development of new policies, programs, and services. We have the joy and privilege of working with ministers and departments throughout government through some of their best and worst days—days when they are delivering things that are important for Canadians and are difficult and complex, and days when they are facing ongoing legal challenges, or new legal crises that emerge—and helping them work through all of that.
We provide legal advice to the government and federal government departments and agencies. We represent the crown in civil litigation before administrative tribunals. We also draft all government laws and regulations. Today we're responsible for approximately 45,000 pieces of litigation which are going on from coast to coast to coast. Those involve individual car accidents involving RCMP members, constitutional issues of the highest importance, individual tax filers who are challenging, employment insurance challenges, and things like that. We represent the government in all civil litigation and administrative matters. We're responsible for hiring agents. I can come back and talk more about the hiring of agents. The truth is that the justice department represents the government in the vast majority of litigation that's now done.
We're comprised of our headquarters and legal service units in the national capital and six regional offices. We have a presence in 15 cities across Canada. Canadians get to sue the Government of Canada where they live. Our regional offices mainly handle litigation. Canadians get to sue the federal government in tribunals and in courts, provincial superior courts and in the Federal Court. We appear in virtually all courts and federal tribunals across the country.
As of now, we have about 4,400 employees and a budget of approximately $1 billion, give or take. That budget is divided into a few main areas. We have a program budget of about $358 million. That supports programs in the areas of legal aid, youth justice, supporting families, victims of crime, aboriginal justice and aboriginal court workers, access to justice dans les deux langues officielles, and the Contraventions Act.
We have an operating budget of about $570 million, which pays mainly for employees. That budget is divided into two parts. Some of it comes as a direct appropriation from Parliament to the department—that's about $274 million—but we're fairly unique as a federal department in that we bill clients for legal work we do for them, so we have about $296 million in what's called net vote authority.
Our counsel and other employees who provide legal services are partly paid for by money that comes directly to us, and they are partly paid for by money that we get from clients for legal work. That's all approved by Treasury Board and governed by Treasury Board rules.
In these supplementary estimates we requested $8.07 million in voted and statutory authorities. That's divided into a few significant pots. The first is about $2.4 million for the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, to ensure that victims have access to the resources needed to exercise the rights that were provided to them for information, protection, participation, and seeking restitution. In the last Parliament, a bill was passed creating a new consolidation of victims' rights at the federal level. This money is to allow us to help implement that law.
There is $2.014 million to combat online crime by supporting investigative powers for the 21st century and ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime. This allows Canada to enhance its ability to fight cybercrime at home and to co-operate internationally, because cybercrime is a growing problem that does not respect international borders.
Also, $3.6 million of the supplementary estimates (C) is for division 9 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which is mainly for security certificate and related proceedings, especially involving security dimensions of immigration.
Finally, we're transferring a small amount of money to Status of Women to help support a national aboriginal circle against family violence in connection with the ongoing tragedy of the violence that's inflicted on aboriginal women and girls.
The Department of Justice has a long tradition of excellence, one we work very hard to maintain. We've been successful in delivering on government priorities while supporting client departments to deliver on their own priorities. As I said, we are in many ways not just a department that supports the minister, but we are department like some others, a central agency that supports all of government, because law and lawyers and the fear of lawyers drives so much public policy.
We're continually working to innovate and drive changes in the way we practise law so that we're keeping up with trends in the world and in Canada. We're trying to provide leadership on how we can be most efficient, and we're continuing to drive improvement and innovation in how we address the challenges we face today and the challenges we see coming in the future.
I'd now like to address some recent media reports alleging that the department's lawyers and others were overpaid. I'd like to take a moment to put on the record that this is simply not true. I can explain in more detail if the committee would like and I'd be pleased to come back to the committee to provide even more information. The reports indicated that the department, through some payroll error, had received $50 million in pay that wasn't owed.
What happened was this: We have an official pay system and we have another system that allows us...because we bill clients for almost $300 million in work, we have to keep track of how much legal work we do. We asked our people who were doing that to keep all of their time in that system. Unfortunately, we didn't connect the two systems. If they were entering leave in one system, it didn't automatically flow into the other. We also didn't apply the same rules to the two systems.
Starting in 2007, people dutifully started to enter their time in the timekeeping system, just as many of you enter your time in a personal calendar somewhere. I bet if you went back three or four years, you could find a day in your calendar that said you were away, and you'd say that no, you were supposed to be away but you actually did some work on that day; you were called in to do something. That's fundamentally a part of what explains what happened here.
The iCase system, the timekeeping system, was completed. We asked people to fill in 37.5 hours of their time. Some people who only work three days a week put in two days and said they were away on leave. They were getting paid three days a week. They're getting leave three days a week. That discrepancy is not an overpayment. Some of them entered leave in iCase and they said, “I'm going to be away on leave”, and it shouldn't have been entered into PeopleSoft because in fact they came into work. Some people entered leave in iCase and they were loaned to us from other departments and they entered it in PeopleSoft.
The original estimate, when we discovered it, showed that there could have been a significant number of differences between the two systems. I wasn't prepared to have the department accused of having defrauded Canadians of $50 million, so we launched a fairly significant exercise to try to reconcile the two systems.
Very quickly into that, about half of those discrepancies went away. They were easily explained by the kinds of examples I've given. Since then we've been working through the other changes so that very quickly it became clear that most of those discrepancies, about half of them, had no implications whatsoever. Some others did and we've worked through those now so that by a few months into this exercise, it was clear that some people had to go back and correct their leave, and sick leave or vacation leave had to be adjusted. For existing employees that's been done.
Where it hasn't been done is where employees are away on long-term sick leave or disability leave. I'm not going to hound employees who are away on long-term leave. However, as those employees come back from leave, we ask them to do the reconciliation, and that process carries on.
We are now on an operating budget of about $500 million. After we'd done the initial review, it became clear that we thought for existing employees we were talking about a discrepancy of around $2 million or $3 million. That number continues to come down as employees come back and they tidy up their records.
Why didn't they tidy up their iCase records? When you came into work, did you feel it important to go back and change your calendar? No, you just came in and you did whatever it is you needed to do and the calendar wasn't your official leave recording system, so why fix it?
Some of this was employees believing that the two systems had been connected at the back end and that by entering leave in one place, they thought it would be entered in the other place.
For some, the changes are simply a reflection that they're for different purposes, but I do want to affirm there was never a case of overpayment and that we have been very diligent. I advised the comptroller general. As soon as this came to my attention, I advised the external department audit committee. We've kept both up to date as we've unfolded this. We have worked diligently to try to ensure that the employees can hold their heads high and understand that the record-keeping problems that were found have been fixed and that nobody got anything they weren't deserving.
I wanted to put that on the record and I'd be happy to provide more information if you'd like.
With that, I will close my remarks and say we look forward as a department to supporting the minister and working with you, because there are important and pressing and complex issues that we'll be working through together over the coming years.
We welcome your questions, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you.
