Public Accounts Committee on Feb. 5th, 2007

[John Williams, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Chairman, there are a couple of questions I didn't ask. One is on the performance reports.

You tabled, a couple of years back, the criteria on which you would evaluate performance reports. How many reports are you actually evaluating? Are you still doing that?

[Sheila Fraser]

We haven't done it recently; we did it about a year ago. There is, I think, a real fundamental question about the use of these reports.

[John Williams, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

I think you have to do them, Mr. Chairman. I would like you to do two, at random, every year, so that every department knows that they can't put self-serving fluff in there; there has to be meaningful, accurate information. If they knew that they would be audited on that basis, then that would help to motivate them to tell the story as it actually should be told.

I would recommend that you give serious thought to that.

[Sheila Fraser]

That's noted, but, Mr. Chair, with all due respect, the reports have to be used by parliamentarians, and if there was actually a demand for this, and if parliamentarians were looking at them, I think it would probably help to improve the quality of the reports much more.

[John Williams, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

We are talking about the Parliamentary Budget Office and so on, and that could very well be in there. It would be bad if they came up with a sell order recommendation. That might alert us to the fact that they're reading it, Mr. Chairman. There's merit.

[Some hon. members]

Oh! Oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Williams. Thank you, Ms. Fraser.

Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair. I appreciate that.

I think that's an excellent idea that you mentioned, Madam Auditor.

Chair, you'll recall that we just finished, either at the steering committee or at the previous committee meeting, talking about that whole issue of beefing up our abilities, and we can make a good argument. It might be a lot easier to get money sprung to have analysis done that meets all members' needs, rather than trying to change the whole process from the other side. It's an excellent idea, and I hope we follow up on that. I think the person to do that would be Mr. Williams, as his final parting gift to parliamentarians on his way to a better life, I'm sure.

[John Williams, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

As if I have a writer who could handle that one.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's why it would be so valuable, John. There would be very little politics attached. It would be for the future. I'd ask you to think about it.

I want to pick up where my colleague Madame Brunelle was on the performance report and the hiring.... Apparently--and I don't have it in front of me--in the report you said that you wanted to increase the turnover.

[Sheila Fraser]

I hope not.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's what I thought. I'm giving the staff opportunity, if they want to jump in. I'm going by the staff report. I asked a few times if it was accurate, of course, and they said yes. Now they're on their way back.

[Sheila Fraser]

It was that we have to deal with an increasing turnover.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

There you go. There's the chart on page 20. At the bottom, your actual for 2004-05 for turnover...and your target was 10%. Why did you want to increase it?

[Sheila Fraser]

We're trying to keep it at 10%, and it was at 14.7%. It's higher than we would like.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm looking at, in 2004-05, 8% actual. We don't have 2006-07 actuals because we're not there yet.

[Sheila Fraser]

I'm looking at the table on page 27, sorry.

It's because we know, Mr. Chair, the percentage is going up. If you look at our departmental performance report on page 27, the percentage turnover of audit professionals, our target was 10%. The actual in 2003-04 was 9.6%. The actual in 2005-06 was 14.7%. Because of retirements and the pressure in the market, we know the turnover rate is going to go up.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay. I appreciate that. I assumed it was wrong somewhere, but who knows?

Again, to come back to questions asked earlier by a colleague, with such high satisfaction rates, why would people be leaving, especially in numbers that are beginning to be problematic? Is it just because they can be enticed away, given the marketplace?

[Sheila Fraser]

Yes. In part, it's retirements, and also, in large part, there's a very large demand. Most of the people will leave to go to government departments, and they can be enticed away for salary increases and higher—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

They'll take a higher management position within the department from where they were in your shop.

[Sheila Fraser]

There are increases in salaries that they get when they initially move into the department.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay.

In whatever time I have left, I don't want to go into other business—and I know the environment committee is still seized of the issue around the environment commissioner and so on—but you're proposing a change to the tabling of the reports.

[Sheila Fraser]

We were consulting, yes. We had presented to the chairs of the two environment committees, in the House and in the Senate.

I should go back. The public accounts committee a couple of years ago asked us to look at the timing of our reports, and we realized, especially this year, that tabling in late November or early December does a disservice to us all. So we have decided to move the tabling of that report up into October, which should give us more time in the fall to deal with that report. As we can see, this year we tabled in November; we're not through the hearings on that report, and we already have another report coming.

At the same time, we started to look at how we were reporting our environmental work, or the work done by the Commissioner of the Environment, and we're out consulting with them. There has been no decision made on that, and it was a consultation.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Let me just say, you know the respect and regard I have for you personally, and the work of your colleagues is stellar, absolutely stellar. But on this whole business around the environment commissioner and the way that's going, in the House that I spent a lot of time in, the environmental commissioner was an officer of the House, much the same as you are. I don't know when we may or may not be seized of that, but this looks to me like a further watering down of that. I'm just not convinced that it's the right direction to be going in. If anything, we ought to be beefing up that area as opposed to what's looks like watering it down.

I'll leave that with you.

[Sheila Fraser]

The proposal was certainly not meant in any way to diminish the role of the Commissioner of the Environment or that work. In fact, we were trying to find ways to strengthen it, to give it more attention, to increase the implementation of recommendations, which is significantly lower than our other work, and to try to give more visibility to it.