Public Accounts Committee on May 2nd, 2007

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to welcome Ms. Fraser and her entire team.

Ms. Fraser, I would like to look at Chapter 5, which has to do with managing the delivery of legal services to government. You state in your report that the costs have gone from $200 million to $600 million a year. So they have tripled. On page 9 of the report, you say that the department is not required to follow government procurement policies when appointing legal agents. With respect to civil agents, in the contacts you reviewed, you found no documentation of an in-house search for qualified counsel prior to seeking outside counsel. No one checked whether a staffer could do the job. You found no documented rationale for the selection of the legal agent, no consistent information such as start and end dates, estimated number of hours of work, estimated total value of the work and terms of work in the agreement between the outside lawyer and the department.

When I look at all this, I do find it quite shocking. I do not know what the total value of all these contracts may be, but you say the department is not required to comply with the procurement policy, and, at the same time, there has been a rather lax approach.

Do you think it is normal that there would be no in-house policies that would guarantee transparency and compliance with ethical considerations?

[Sheila Fraser]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just before I answer the question, I would like to clarify one thing about forensic services. Only Ontario and Quebec have their own labs, not Alberta.

I agree completely, the situation with respect to civil agents is not acceptable. We noted in the report that there has been significant improvement with respect to the criminal prosecution service, which was very problematic at the time of our last audit. The department has made some significant improvements with respect to these legal agents. We are expecting it to use the same selection procedures, skills validation, follow-up on invoices and records analysis. In fact, we made this recommendation to the department, and its representatives said they agreed.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

They say they agree, they talk about an action plan, but will the action plan guarantee transparency and compliance with the code of ethics? We have no guarantees along those lines at the moment. I find this disturbing.

In the case of the sponsorship scandal, advertising firms were giving money to a particular political party. Could the same thing not be happening now? Legal firms also received contracts and contributed very openly to political parties. At the moment, contracts may be awarded to legal agents with no information available about the value of the contract, which can be quite high. So there could be a repeat of a situation such as the one that occurred before.

In my opinion, Mr. Chairman, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts should request follow-up on this, so that we can ensure that the rules of ethical conduct and transparency are being followed by the government. I have some concerns in this regard.

[Sheila Fraser]

I agree that this situation must be improved. However, I would emphasize that these contracts are different from the awarding of contracts generally, because the Solicitor General has the authority to appoint legal agents. However, since there must be a fair process, there must be some way of ensuring that legal agents have all the skills they require and that there is a good system for following up on the invoicing and the services provided.

As I said, we have seen an improvement in the case of legal agents for the prosecution service. We expect the same thing will happen for civil agents.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chairman?

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Two minutes.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Madame Auditor General, let us continue with chapter 7, which deals with the validity of DNA testing. This report states that there are quality problems and that full validity of certain tests cannot be assured, and these tests can determine whether a person is guilty or not.

In your opinion, could this bring about a situation in which an individual challenges his conviction?

[Sheila Fraser]

Apparently, Mr. Chairman, the problem with the automated system is that it did not detect any DNA, whereas the manual process did. We gather that in this case, it did not detect DNA and indicate that it belonged to the wrong person, rather, it did not detect any DNA at all. What would the consequences be? We can only speculate. Therefore, I am reluctant to answer this question.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

In other words, the DNA test did not turn up any evidence—

[Sheila Fraser]

You are right.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

—and if a conviction depended on this, there would be a lack of evidence.

[Sheila Fraser]

Yes, there is a likelihood of this.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Very well, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay. Merci, Monsieur Laforest.

Mr. Williams, for seven minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again my congratulations to the Auditor General and of course to her staff for their work in keeping Parliament and the nation informed about issues regarding our public service.

It may be painful to some, but it's very much part of the democratic process to keep people on their toes when they know that the public accounts committee, the Auditor General, and indeed all Canadians are watching and expecting a good response from the work they do. We fully acknowledge that the vast majority of Canadian public servants are great people doing a great job, but you keep them on their toes, and that's great.

It's unfortunate that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appearing before this committee are still in the news.

I'm looking at your chapter 7, paragraph 7.15, where you talk about how the justice and human rights committee of the Parliament of Canada heard testimony from two former RCMP staff members, casting doubt on statements made earlier by RCMP officials before the committee—a little bit of a déjà vu here. They made certain allegations about disputed evidence that had been given to the committee, and then I think you found that perhaps these allegations had some merit.

Did you interview the RCMP officials who had gone to the justice committee and provided this information to find out what answers they had, where the answers given to the justice committee did not tie in with the facts that you subsequently found?

[Sheila Fraser]

Mr. Chair, I believe that during the course of our audit we interviewed one of the people concerned. The other person had left the RCMP as we were completing this.

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

What did the person say? Did he or she give any justification for the fact that they appeared to have misled the committee?

[Sheila Fraser]

I would prefer, Mr. Chair, that the committee ask for those explanations directly from those people.

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

We may have some more work to do yet, Mr. Chair. Maybe the RCMP will be back on another issue. This is very unfortunate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

The plot thickens.

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

The plot thickens, deepens, widens, and does everything else.

However, we have the assistance of 2,500 lawyers in the Department of Justice here—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[A voice]

Thank God.

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

—and going back to the RCMP, remember that one witness referred to the fact that they used the services of the Department of Justice. This hasn't been fully clarified yet either.

But it seems rather strange to me that, for example, you point out that the Department of Justice has a hundred legal agreements to manage their relationship with eight departments. Now this surely must mean that lawyers have nothing better to do in the Department of Justice than to sit down and draft another legal agreement to cover another way that they're going to interact with the department.

What is going on here when we have legal agreement upon legal agreement, written by lawyers in the largest law firm in the country, with only one client, the Government of Canada, and they can't even interact with that single client without having a multitude of hundreds, if not a thousand, different ways to address it? What's going on?

[Sheila Fraser]

I think that's a very good and important issue. As we note, the financial arrangements would appear to be multiple. Departments are not always charged for the full cost of the services provided to them. There's a variety of different billing practices.

We believe there needs to be much more attention paid to the financial information, the management information. When departments are asked to participate or to give an opinion or advice, they should receive some estimate of the costs of that and receive the specific costs afterwards.

A lot of improvement is needed in this whole area. One of the things that preoccupies us is that there really is no incentive in the system to manage the cost of legal services.