Public Accounts Committee on April 15th, 2008

[Hélène Laurendeau]

Unfortunately, I do not have those figures.

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Does the department know the cost of locally engaged staff?

[Leonard Edwards]

I missed the first part of the question.

I do not know. We have nearly 5,000 locally engaged employees and the salary budget—

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Did you say 5,000?

[Leonard Edwards]

Yes, 5,000.

[Marcel Lussier, Bloc, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Ms. Laurendeau, I would like to pick up where Mr. Williams left off about your foreign service directives. The difficult conditions in Afghanistan have been mentioned. Are there any other countries that are being looked at now? I am thinking of Haiti and Darfur. Are these countries being looked at now?

[Hélène Laurendeau]

It is important to understand that the foreign service directives include five levels of security against which all countries where people are deployed are evaluated. The evaluation looks at issues such as access to care, the quality of that care and, obviously, whether there are any problems in the country. The steps that were taken specifically for Afghanistan go beyond the top level, level five, for specific reasons, because Canada was considered to be at war in that country. The other countries where there are serious security issues are already covered by the current foreign service directives.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Lussier.

Mr. Lake, you have four minutes.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

There are lots of things I could ask questions about, but I'm just referring to your opening statement today, Mr. Edwards.

In the fifth note that you make when you're going through the different things the Auditor General found in terms of the assignment process, you say, “Acting assignments can be, in my view, an important tool to develop promising officers and fill specialist needs, especially in a rotational foreign service.” In my view, there would be a difference between strategic acting assignments that would be based on learning and improving your staff and competencies, versus emergency placement acting assignments that would be the result of bad planning on the department's part.

When you talk about the acting assignments as they have been in the past, which would you characterize them as?

[Leonard Edwards]

I think I would characterize them as a mix--a mix of the first kind, which, as you say, are good ones. They are the ones where you provide promising officers an opportunity to perform at a higher level to see how they can perform, to be exposed to a mentor, or something like that. That's part of that plan. Indeed, we plan to continue with that quite deliberately through one of our promotion programs that would be developed for a small number of officers.

The second area is when you're in a position where you have an event. In the foreign affairs and international trade department, there are a lot of events. Often we have to pull together task forces and set up special teams and so on. In finding people available at that particular moment there may well be cases, and there are cases, where we have looked for the most competent people who may not be at level and put them into jobs. So there's that sort of situation, which I think is pretty hard to avoid, and, in fact, where you need to act promptly. Those are the sorts of situations where I think the flexibility we have in the foreign service, or the rotational service, is actually a major strength for us in dealing with emergencies.

The third one is, as you say, bad planning. That's what I think we have been dealing with here in the Auditor General's report. Setting aside those other two instances, there simply has been inattention to promotions and recruitment, the sorts of things that would ensure we have at level the right number of people to fill the same number of level jobs in the department, and then to be able to rotate them around. If you have a platform like that--and I think that's what the Auditor General has been asking us to do--then you can build in these other two mechanisms to deal with emergencies or to build in some kind of learning plan.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I want to move to your comments regarding the Auditor General's finding that the department cannot fill its needs on a timely basis through promotions. And there's a whole lot of EX-2, EX-3, EX-5, and whatever, that I don't totally understand. You say, “Thus we have significantly exceeded the target in our Strategic plan for 2007-08 of 34 new EX hires.”

I guess the first question I would have is, how is the target determined? And secondly, how much have you exceeded it by?

[Leonard Edwards]

I'd have to look at the figures on the second question. Michael, maybe you could tell me what those figures are.

In the original plan—this goes back to when the plan was being developed—34 was the number we thought was realistic. Obviously it is not. So in light of the Auditor General's Report and the fact that, as a new deputy, I felt something needed to be done on this score, we accelerated our promotion—

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I guess the natural follow-up to that is, if you exceeded it, obviously the target wasn't ideal. I think you just mentioned that. So what is the new target? What is the ideal?

[Michael Small]

Based on projected retirements, which you can never completely predict, the average growth in the government, which is small now, and projected departures, the plan we'll distribute to all members gives a five-year projection out from 2006 to 2011. In the EX category, we calculated 34 new hires we needed to fill for this past year--so that's new people joining the EX category--and 42 for next fiscal year.

This past year, we undertook this particular process, alluded to in Mr. Edwards' remarks, of looking at people who were already acting and performing at level, and we have made 45 appointments and 15 more. So we've overachieved that target, and we're taking a harder look at the number of acting assignments.

For next year we have a goal of 42. We'll be revising these numbers based on our iteration.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

You indicate, though, that you're lowballing your target?

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay, we're going to move on.

Mr. Cullen, four minutes.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses today. Ms. Fraser, it's nice to see you again.

With respect to this plan that's being put forward by the department today, when did we first identify that this was a problem? How long ago in this country did we take notice of the issues you raised in this report?

[Sheila Fraser]

Mr. Chair, I believe we first raised the whole question of human resource planning at Foreign Affairs in an audit in 2000 and then in a follow-up audit in 2003.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Have there been any human resource plans made in the interim, between when you first raised it and the presentation today by the deputy minister?

[Sheila Fraser]

As we noted in the report, the department had started working on developing a plan at the time of the audit, but the plan was not complete and was only completed after the audit.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

So from your first indication in 2000, it is not until now that the response to your audit arrives. Something I've raised with you before as an auditor is whether you have been able to find.... I assume when you first raised it, the government committed to doing something about this. They didn't dismiss your audit.

[Sheila Fraser]

That's correct.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Have you been able to find any consequence to anyone involved at the time or since then for having not performed it over those seven years?

[Sheila Fraser]

That is not something we would have looked at. I presume that might have been a consideration, could be a consideration in performance reviews, for example, but we do not specifically look to see if there is any consequence for not doing that.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

To you, Mr. Edwards--and I mean this question with all respect for the position and the difficulty you face in terms of arriving at this--has it ever been part of any contracts, either yours or your predecessor's, with government to deliver this type of plan? It seems that it's highly critical, that this is a bottleneck. This is important to how Canada conducts itself abroad. Is it ever part of that performance review?

I'm trying to find out if there's any consequence to it having taken seven or eight years.