Evidence of meeting #37 for Official Languages in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was provinces.
A recording is available from Parliament.
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis
Good morning, everyone.
Before we officially start the meeting, I have something I want to tell you. We had scheduled a meeting with Minister Foote on the morning of Tuesday, December 6, but she will not be able to attend. However, she could come on Tuesday afternoon, at 3:30 p.m.
8:50 a.m.
Conservative
Sylvie Boucher Conservative Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
I will be on duty then.
8:50 a.m.
Conservative
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
8:50 a.m.
Conservative
Sylvie Boucher Conservative Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
Maybe you are available on your side, but I will have to ask our whip.
8:50 a.m.
NDP
François Choquette NDP Drummond, QC
Mr. Chair, I will not be here next week in any event. However, there are colleagues to replace me. They will be available at the committee's normal time. So, if we make a change, it should be within the committee's normal time.
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis
We will come up with some other dates so that the committee can sit at its normal time, because this seems to be complicated.
Yes, Mr. Choquette?
8:50 a.m.
NDP
François Choquette NDP Drummond, QC
It is not possible for me, except at the committee's normal time.
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis
We got the message. We are going to try to see when the minister will be available at the committee's time. In any event, we want it to be before Christmas.
Go ahead, Mr. Arseneault.
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
8:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis
I will get back to you on it.
This morning we have a briefing on accountability measures for official languages. We are pleased to welcome Hubert Lussier, Assistant Deputy Minister in the Department of Canadian Heritage, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Director General of the Official Languages Branch, Carl Trottier, Assistant Deputy Minister at the Treasury Board Secretariat and Marc Tremblay, Executive Director of Official Languages.
Welcome, gentlemen.
We will proceed as follows. I will give the officials from Canadian Heritage 20 minutes. Then we will continue directly with the officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat for 10 minutes. There will then be a time for questions and comments.
I should point out that we have received notice that there may be bells around 10:30 a.m. If that is the case, I will be asking your permission to continue until 10:45 a.m., because 15 minutes is enough for us to get to the House to vote.
Mr. Lussier, the floor is yours.
8:50 a.m.
Hubert Lussier Assistant Deputy Minister, Citizenship, Heritage and Regions, Department of Canadian Heritage
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will kick things off, but my colleague Jean-Pierre Gauthier will give the presentation.
It is a pleasure to be here. We fully understand that this is a technical presentation on subjects that are perhaps a little obscure in a number of ways. We are going to look under the hood of our official languages vehicle. If ideas are too technical or too abstruse, we will be happy to try and clarify things.
We will be talking about the architecture of the roadmap, a concept you are working on. Though it is far from including everything that is being done, the roadmap is the flagship carrying the current years' priorities for official languages.
We are going to be talking about coordination and governance and how they come together behind this display case, and about evaluation, a major concept for all government programs. We also want to talk about responsibility and accountability and the need to report our results to you as parliamentarians.
We will also speak of the way we reflect the results to Canadians in general.
I will just add one thing before asking Jean-Pierre to continue with the formal presentation. Some of the things we're going to explain reflect the state of reality as of today with respect to the road map. We've learned over the course of the first two official languages plans how to do things maybe better or how to adjust our ambitions to the reality. Sometimes, therefore, what we will explain today would have been different, had we been here eight years ago explaining the first action plan and the way we did things eight years ago.
Jean-Pierre.
8:50 a.m.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier Director General, Official Languages Branch, Citizenship, Heritage and Regions, Department of Canadian Heritage
Good morning, everyone.
I propose to give you an overview of the presentation you have in your hands. In some places, I may go faster. I want to keep to the 20 minutes that I have been given in order to give you as much time as possible for questions.
Briefly, I am already on page 3 of the presentation. My colleague Hubert Lussier has already presented the first points that you see: the architecture of the initiatives, the governance structure, the evaluation, and the reporting commitments. These are the subjects that we will be spending time on in the next pages.
Basically, the components that you see are the same as those in the 2008 roadmap, but brought up to date. The structure, the aspects, that make up the governance or the accountability in general are therefore more or less the same. There will be a few little differences that I will bring to your attention at the appropriate time during the presentation.
The other thing is, the framework has been approved by the Treasury Board. We mentioned that last time, that the Treasury Board had a chance to review the whole package. It's a 44-page document actually, included in an annex to the board presentation, that highlights all that material, all these things. That's the source.
The other thing is, of course all the different partners of the road map also have their own respective governance structures for their own departments to oversee their own respective initiatives. It's kind of a building block.
The governance of the roadmap is presented as a horizontal entity. Each department also has appropriate governance structures and standards for its own initiatives. For the structure's horizontal design, we use those systems as our premise.
I am moving right away to the roadmap architecture, on page 4. It is shown as a graphic on page 5. The model is quite typical of program architectures in all departments. They all have one. This is a structure that the Treasury Board proposes to revise in the coming years. However, it is the model with which we are still working today, and it is certainly the model that we used as our basis in 2013 when we revised the entire governance structure.
On page 5, you will see that the diagram reflects the three priorities set out in the 2013 roadmap. The diagram faithfully reproduces that approach: education, immigration, and communities. Just below those headings of education, immigration, and communities, you will see text boxes containing the objectives for each group of initiatives that make up each pillar.
Right at the top, you can see the box containing the overarching objective that the roadmap seeks to achieve. Once again, the diagram is very representative of quite a classic program architecture found in all departments.
Each initiative is presented in one of the boxes with an arrowhead at the top. Each one has its logic model, its performance indicators, and its evaluation strategy. Administering each is the responsibility of the departments tasked with the various components. There is an element of complexity; basically, it looks like a set of Russian nesting dolls. I would say that is typical of horizontal initiatives in general. To keep moving quickly, I will go right away to page 6.
What does governance mean? Clearly, it relies on existing mechanisms for coordination and accountability. There is an important basic principle that is not unique to the roadmap. The intent is to give federal institutions full responsibility, to prevent the pursuit of objectives under the Official Languages Act from becoming the exclusive responsibility of one group, such as my branch, Marc's branch or any other group in the government. The obligation must belong to the entire federal government apparatus. That, moreover, is the way in which the Official Languages Act is written. Obligations are imposed on federal institutions in a concept that is quite broadly defined.
This principal is completely integrated into our governance structure and a factor when we build sub-governances with the oversight of the road map in our minds, as well as when we consider official languages issues in the federal apparatus in general.
Let me draw your attention right away to an issue that often comes up. You will doubtless have questions about it and, if so, we will do our best to provide additional clarification.
The 2008 roadmap provided for a series of expenditures for governance, for horizontal coordination, in the amount of $29.9 million over five years. That represented more or less the funding from Canadian Heritage to coordinate and finance the general activities of the Official Languages Centre of Excellence.
Those expenditures still exist, but the choice was made to not present them explicitly in the 2013 roadmap. It was simply a desire to present the roadmap with a focus on the initiatives targeted to the general public, and to remove expenses related to the federal government's internal operations. The amounts are still there. They are still part of the effort. Nothing has changed in that respect. However, in terms of presentation, they are not shown anymore. I know that that has raised a number of questions; people often talk to us about it because they want to understand what is happening. So I thought I would point it out right away. We can come back to it later if there are additional questions.
On page 7, entitled “Roadmap Governance Structure”, you will see the reference to the committee of assistant deputy ministers on official languages (CADMOL) that meets about four times a year in two forms. It meets in plenary once a year, in November. The meeting often takes place in the week around Remembrance Day, when the House is not sitting. A dozen assistant deputy ministers from different departments come together to review official languages issues in general.
There is also a smaller version of the committee known as the executive committee of assistant deputy ministers on official languages (EX-CADMOL). It meets another three or four times a year to deal with other matters.
There is also a forum for directors general that I head. We meet three or four times a year to consider various issues. The forum also allows colleagues from other departments to provide presentations and updates themselves. That is done regularly.
Colleagues from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and from Service Canada have given presentations, as have others. Mr. Tremblay also used the forum to given a presentation about what was going on at the Treasury Board. In this director general's forum, all kinds of issues are shared and discussed. We inherited the structure from the 2008 roadmap and it was restructured in 2011. Today, we always use it in the same format.
Page 8 takes a step backwards and provides a diagram showing what I have just explained to you a little more globally. You can see CADMOL, CADMOL-EX and the DGs' forum, the three committees I was telling you about, in the three large boxes in the middle. We also establish the context, with our federal partners underneath and the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the cabinet on top.
This is a simplified diagram. There are others where we identify committees like this one. We also identify the Commissioner of Official Languages, the provinces and territories, or even the minority communities. We have not done so in this diagram, but that is not because we are taking them out or that we do not recognize them. This is just a simplified version of the governance structure.
Moving on quickly.
What do we do exactly about this at Heritage? In essence, we coordinate this whole structure quite a bit. It includes, of course, providing support to the committee structure. They meet. They have agendas, material. The material is handed out ahead of time and so forth. This is one of our roles.
We also will collect all the information from the various departments to feed the reporting that we have to do under the departmental performance result annex that we fill out as the lead department for the horizontal initiative. We collect a lot of their actual data. We ask that that data be approved by their CFO and responsible ADM. That's another thing. We collect the data. We also set up annual consultations between the CADMOL and the community organizations. That's also part of what we do in relation to the road map.
Cruising along, I'll switch to page 10. The official management of the road map is one area specifically where we are providing a very concrete service.
In essence, we collect all the data in terms of the money spent by all the departments, by initiative, as we're required to do. We then put that into an overall table every year to say how much money there was to be spent and how much money was spent in real terms. Of course, there's additional information at the end of that table in the last column to explain what was done with the funding. If there are gaps either way, it could be a plus or minus, then the department has a chance to explain exactly what happened. That's very much, in my opinion, a key reporting tool that we do every year.
Again, this is very similar to 2008 in terms of providing that kind of information. It's the responsibility of the lead department of a horizontal initiative, and it's one thing we can come back to, if you wish.
The following page presents all of these tools in the activity column that I just mentioned, with a little bit more detail in terms of who's responsible for doing it and how frequently it is done. As I mentioned at the beginning, there is one thing that's kind of new, and I'll pinpoint it in the table. If you go to the second row, second column, at the bottom there are two comments. One is, “PCH coordinates and prepares the Roadmap component of the AROL”.
This is new, because we did hear from the previous report of this committee that people weren't always well aware of the fact that money we were receiving was actually road map money. I'm talking here about the 2008 road map. We decided to include in the annual report, the one that was tabled this summer and appeared a bit earlier this fall, information about the road map inside the annual report, on part VII, to try to provide a little bit more qualitative information to the finished information we were already providing. We were trying to go a little bit further. This is something new that we're trying to develop to provide a little bit more insight as to what's going on with the road map in general.
I am now going to quickly move to page 12 so that I can talk about evaluation. I am going to take a step back from the presentation you have in front of you. To give you an idea, there are basically three pieces, one big one, with multiple parts, and two others that are quite easy to describe.
The multiple piece means that the 28 roadmap initiatives will be evaluated. The evaluation can be individual or combined. For example, at Heritage Canada, we carry out 10 of the 28 initiatives, but we use one single approach to evaluate those 10 components. In other words, the 10 initiatives are established and examined together.
The economic development initiative, which is also part of the roadmap, requires participation from the regional development agencies and from Industry Canada. That means five or six partners. They also do their evaluation collectively because it revolves around the same objectives. Since the performance indicators are similar, the evaluations are grouped together, which provides a better reading.
Of the 28 initiatives, I would suggest that we have a dozen evaluations that we can call “individual”. Those evaluations are carried out by each department as an integral part of its internal evaluation plan. This is the first piece of the multiple dimensions.
The second piece is the evaluation of the coordination component. So someone coordinates the roadmap, and that someone is Canadian Heritage. We distinguish this piece from the implementation of the actual roadmap initiatives in order to get a precise reading of the way in which we have carried out our coordination work. It therefore evaluates that aspect only.
The third piece is the horizontal one. We have evaluated the components and the coordination. What remains is to bring it all together into a major initiative called the roadmap. What has it done? What results did it give? This is the 2008 road map, but it will give you the idea.
This approach to evaluation is not new to the 2013 roadmap. We used the same approach as we did in 2008. The evaluation is controlled by the senior verification and evaluation managers in the various departments. Since Heritage Canada is the department charged with the horizontal evaluation, its key manager coordinates evaluation initiatives with the other departments, including timelines and data sharing. We use the data and results from the individual initiatives to feed into the horizontal evaluation.
This coordination is led by the chief audit executive in the Department of Canadian Heritage.
I will stop the description of the evaluation pages there. A lot of other questions can be asked, but I wanted to give you an overview of the components of the evaluation. We can come back to them.
I would like to make it clear that the horizontal evaluation currently underway should be finished in the spring. Please understand that, when I say finished, I also mean published. Evaluations are automatically published on departmental websites.
On page 14, you actually have the governance structure for the evaluation that's taking place. I will skip that page. If you'd like to come back to it, we can come back. It's about how the committee is structured, who leads it, and so on and so forth. That is, again, for the purpose of the evaluations themselves. I'll just skip it for now.
The other piece that we have in terms of the governance framework for the road map is the risk management strategy. It's a collective work. It's basically all the various members of the road map that brainstorm together to identify the risks that we see could threaten or affect the delivery of the road map, and mitigation strategies are being developed. An assessment of the risk is actually done, and then the mitigation strategies are developed out of that. This is done collectively. This is reviewed every year, and it is reviewed by the working level colleagues to review everything. Then, we move it up to the CADMOL, and have the ADM have a final look and approve it. That was actually in November that the last update was done, about two or three weeks ago.
The last part—and I'll do it in a minute and a half, because I'm out of time—is basically the standard reporting that we do in terms of the annual report on official languages.
As you know, the Minister of Canadian Heritage has the obligation under the act to table a report every year as to what has been done under part VII across government, and that is that report. It's essentially something that was done last summer. We have another one that's being prepared as we speak that will be tabled in the months to come, which will speak to 2015-16.
In essence, I'd like just to spend a minute on page 17 at the very bottom, on what we actually do put in the report, and then I'll stop, because I could go on for 20 minutes just on this one.
We put four things in the report.
We want to provide some information on the road map. I mentioned that already when I referred back to the table a bit earlier.
We also want to report back on the official language programs that PCH is delivering. We have a large suite of programs with secured funding for official languages, so we report on those.
We also would like to spend a little time to report official languages in our department, because Heritage is no different from any other department. We have to ensure that the Official Languages Act is well implemented in our department, and that includes language of work, language of service, and all the rest of it. The minister will speak to that a bit in the report usually.
Then we spend some time on our coordination work, trying to convince, encourage, and support other departments in their implementation of part VII of the act; that is, taking positive measures to foster the promotion of official languages and the development and vitality of minority communities. We changed that approach about four years ago, when we moved from a select 40 to pretty much everyone. We basically take 170 institutions. We coordinate the data gathering with the centre of expertise at TBS.
I guess I'll stop here, because Marc will speak in more detail as to that process. You can just assume that, whatever he is going to say with respect to parts IV, V, and VI of the act, we have the parallel process for part VII. It's actually coordinated, so we asked for the institution to only gather data once as opposed to doing it separately. We try to coordinate as best we can.
Of course, if there are questions about this, I'll be more than happy to answer.
I'll stop there.
9:10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis
Thank you very much for your presentation, Mr. Gauthier.
We are now going to hear from Mr. Trottier. Or perhaps it is Mr. Tremblay?
9:10 a.m.
Carl Trottier Assistant Deputy Minister, Governance, Planning and Policy Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
I will start, if I may.
I am Carl Trottier, Assistant Deputy Minister, Governance, Planning and Policy Sector in the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer. The Official Languages Centre of Excellence is part of my area of activity.
The Treasury Board Secretariat is the administrative body that supports the Treasury Board in carrying out its duties and meeting its obligation under the Official Languages Act. For example, it provides the Treasury Board with strategic advice on the major directions to take in terms of official languages under parts IV, V and VI of the act. It designs the policy instruments adopted by the Treasury Board; it monitors the performance of institutions under parts IV, V and VI of the act, and it writes the annual report to Parliament on official languages.
Marc Tremblay, the Executive Director of the Official Languages Centre of Excellence, will give our presentation today.
Thank you.
9:10 a.m.
Marc Tremblay Executive Director of Official Languages, Governance, Planning and Policy Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
If you could please go to page 2 in our presentation, you will see a visual representation of all the constitutional texts and the legislation that govern the whole area of official languages.
We often refer to this as our house, notre maison. You can see there what my colleagues from Canadian Heritage have already described in situating Part VII in this whole. But, more specifically. you can see parts IV, V, VI and VIII that determine the legislative framework governing the matter that I am going to deal with today. This is the accountability framework that lies within the responsibility of the President of the Treasury Board and his department, the Treasury Board Secretariat.
The responsibilities of the Treasury Board are set out more specifically on page 3.
The Official Languages Act requires the President of the Treasury Board to submit an annual report to Parliament on the status of official languages programs in federal institutions on matters that pertain to the Treasury Board's legislative mandate. The report is based on information that federal institutions have provided to us about their accountability.
The policy on official languages, 2012, governs the reporting requirements for federal departments and institutions.
The Treasury Board's policy on official languages operationalizes the legal obligation. The requirements for monitoring and reporting mentioned in the policy on official languages make institutions responsible for keeping their information systems up to date and for monitoring their own compliance. The evaluation of the implementation of the policy and the associated policy instruments is based on reviews provided by institutions.
This policy framework therefore supports what my colleagues were referring to, that is, the accountability of the federal institutions themselves. The deputy heads are responsible for evaluating and overseeing the policy requirements within their own organizations.
In terms of accountability, you can see on page 5 that we have been reporting on the implementation of parts IV, V and VI of the act for a number of years. We have actually been doing so since the 1988-1989 financial year, when the President of the Treasury Board's first report was tabled. In March 2016, the President of the Treasury Board submitted the 27th report on official languages, for 2014-2015.
Every year, the Treasury Board Secretariat seeks out a subset of institutions subject to the Official Languages Act so that they can report back on official languages. This takes the form of a questionnaire with multiple-choice and open questions. In the report, the questions are grouped together in five categories: communications with and service to the public, the language of work, human resources management, governance, and finally, the monitoring of official languages programs.
All institutions subject to the act have to submit this data at least once in a three-year cycle. The number of questions has been reduced for small institutions in order to lighten their task of accountability.
The Auditor General of Canada has recognized the viability of this approach and of the collaboration between the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Department of Canadian Heritage, in an audit entitled “Required Reporting by Federal Organizations”.
I'll go to page 6.
Here you have a visual representation. The objective today is not to go into the details of the most recent annual report for 2014-2015, but to provide the committee with the type of information we gather. It must be noted that the institutions that submitted information were instructed to send a copy directly to the Commissioner of Official Languages and to the clerks of the two parliamentary committees on official languages, this committee and the Senate committee.
So you have already seen the graphics, like the ones presented here, in the annual report for 2014-2015, submitted by the President of the Treasury Board. Requiring federal institutions to send copies of their information to the parliamentary committees and the commissioner helps with transparency and with the accountability of the deputy heads in terms of the performance of their organizations.
We now move to page 7.
The report contains a number of statistical data tables. Data is extracted from various systems for the core public administration from the positions and classification information system, and for institutions outside of the core public administration, data is extracted from the official languages information system. These are publicly available databases. This data is presented in a series of tables that include a number of bilingual positions, level of second language proficiency, and compliance with other language requirements. Data is drawn from all federal institutions and presented every year, and this allows for year over year and statistical trend analysis on key indicators going back several years, to 1978, in fact.
We now go to page 8.
Data is also presented in a series of tables that indicate the representation of francophones and anglophones over time. Information is broken down by location, by occupational category, and according to the official languages responsibilities associated with bilingual positions.
Finally, on page 9, the annual report also lists and reports on the distribution of federal government offices, those required to provide services in both official languages, those required to provide services in French and those required to provide services and communications in English. The number of offices and points of service was taken from the public database called Burolis at the end of the financial year.
Institutions that are subject to the Official Languages Act update Burolis themselves. So the annual report provides the President of the Treasury Board with the opportunity to account for how the Official Languages Act is applied by federal institutions.
That concludes the presentation on the various methods and sources of accountability as parts IV, V and VI of the Official Languages Act are implemented.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis
Thank you very much, Mr. Tremblay.
We will immediately move to the time for questions and comments.
We will start with Mrs. Boucher.
The floor is yours, Mrs. Boucher
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
Sylvie Boucher Conservative Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
Good morning, gentlemen.
Thank you for being here today. This is very interesting.
Accountability is a little complicated for everyone.
We have heard a lot from organizations and witnesses who have asked us to provide better accountability. I know that it is complex. Could you explain a little how it is done?
Let’s take an aspect of education that falls under provincial jurisdiction. In the memoranda of understanding that we sign with the provinces, is there a specific item that clearly explains accountability? With these kinds of agreements with the provinces, whatever they may be, is it easy or difficult to do?
I have worked for Quebec. I know that it is not always easy to get accountability when money is given to the province of Quebec, because they want to do their own thing.
Is it the same for all provinces? Are there differences in the memoranda of understanding that we sign with provinces depending on whether it is Quebec, New Brunswick or Manitoba? Are the agreements uniform?
9:20 a.m.
Director General, Official Languages Branch, Citizenship, Heritage and Regions, Department of Canadian Heritage
We do have accountability mechanisms in education. They are written into the MOU, the overall instrument. To be precise, the clauses are 8.3 to 8.5. Basically, they say that provinces will provide us with annual reports of the financial statements, that is, the amounts spent in the financial year, and a brief statement of the progress made towards implementing their commitments in the agreement.
In principle, the agreements go in a five-year cycle. Every two years, actually in the second year and the final year, we have to have a more detailed report in which the provinces explain the progress made up until that point. Those reports are evaluated.
That flows from an action plan. When we have an agreement with a province, there is an appendix containing the action plan and a specific list of what will be done with the money they are given. From those outcomes, which are determined by each province, we are able to follow the expenditures and the progress made in respect of what they wished to do.
