Public Accounts Committee on April 21st, 2016

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I too was very disturbed by this report. I don't want to belabour the obvious, but the fact that there were real lives at stake while all of this was being sorted out is not only a shemozzle, not only a mess: it was a hot mess.

I am most concerned about.... I appreciate that many improvements have been done administratively and so on, but what is happening now?

As a former social worker in the province of Quebec working with la Régie des rentes, which is far from perfect as well, I can say that there certainly was a give-and-take and that there was contact among the professionals while we were accompanying patients, clients, citizens in this process.

I would like to hear from the clients—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Hold it.

I'm sorry, Ms. Shanahan. We were having trouble with translation. It's fixed now.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Okay. Should I repeat from the beginning, or—?

Did you get “hot mess” in there?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

It's just the last couple of sentences. I don't know whether you can hit replay and go back two sentences, please.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

My colleagues have amply explored the administrative issues and the transition planning and the optics and so on, but for me, a disability pension program should be in the business of awarding pensions and not denying them, so I am hopeful that this is going to be the case going forward, especially in a plan like this, which people—employers—contributed to.

It's not like money coming out of somebody's pocket; this is really money that belongs to the citizens who are applying for it. Indeed, someone who is applying for it is at a very vulnerable time, and with the application process being as complicated as it is, I'm concerned about the accompaniment part and what role the new service has in doing so.

I can appreciate that in our new world, call centres are the norm, but there are call centres and there are call centres. I would like to hear more about that ongoing contact, because, as we saw in the Auditor General's report, people were left for months, if not years, without any contact, without any knowledge whatsoever of what was going on. I don't know how they were living in the meantime, but that's what was happening.

[Ian Shugart]

Mr. Chair, I think the committee will understand that we are charged with the administration of the program under the terms of the legislation, and the legislation sets the standard of “grave and prolonged” as the test.

That is a very high standard, and there are in fact situations in which that test is not met by the applicant on the basis of the medical information that is provided. The adjudicators are charged under the terms of the legislation with making a decision on the basis of the medical evidence according to that test.

I need to be clear that those are parameters. It is indeed a very strict test, and has been since the beginning of the CPP legislation.

To answer your question about the experience of the client and the engagement, this in fact is one of the areas in which we are, I think more demonstrably, going to be adjusting the system. We have already begun a process—which I indicated, and it will become continuous and much more interactive—of engagement with clients and the stakeholders who work with these clients, to learn from them the implications of their lived experience for the administration of the program in terms of such things as real-time exchange of changing medical information and so on. That will become part of the process, and out of it will come, on a continuous basis, new tools for improved adjudication of these cases.

Whether through call centres or in person, as Mr. Godin indicated, we will be improving our training of staff so that they are in a better position to interact with clients and be as helpful to those clients as we possibly can be.

The application process itself is a substantial move in that direction. Benoît has indicated that of necessity it is no simple, ordinary.... It's not like an application for a driver's licence; it is dealing with a completely different order of complexity. However, we have reduced it to roughly a quarter of the earlier complexity of the application process. That is progress, and we're committed to being as engaged with the clients as we possibly can be.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Shugart. Our time there is far expired.

Now we go back to Mr. Christopherson.

You have three minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

First off, I want to say to the deputy that I appreciate very much and respect the fact that you've stepped forward and taken the blame, and that's not easy. People need to understand that deputies don't particularly like to have files they've been responsible for with a great big “failed” on them, and there is good reason to want to avoid that. I appreciate very much the fact that you weren't....

I want to say this to mitigate your circumstance somewhat: having been a minister, I understand the limitations. I have great respect your restraint in keeping the blame all yours, but the fact of the matter is that any time you're dealing with a government that was that headstrong in austerity programs, I can only imagine the kind of pressure that you were being given, and I say, partly tongue in cheek, that it can't be easy taking direct orders from my shy, retiring colleague Mr. Poilievre.

You mentioned also that the reason for the audits was to find these kinds of things. I would like to overlay that by saying that one of the reasons we do these audits, this whole process, is not just to make your life hell for a day, although that's part of it, but also to change behaviour so that other deputies are looking right now and saying “Thank goodness that's not me” and making sure that they aren't in that situation, and that the associate deputy ministers are also understanding that they have some responsibilities here.

In whatever little time I have left, I'd like to swing over to the Auditor General to ask what should have happened at the front end to ensure that this didn't happen. Where was the oversight from Treasury Board or somewhere else? Where were they in all of this? How could this get so far out of hand?

Those are two questions. At the front end, what could they have done differently to avoid this outcome? Secondly, was there anybody else responsible for some oversight here who needs to be held to account?

[Michael Ferguson]

Mr. Chair, this is the way I would respond to that. I think what needed to happen was perhaps just some more monitoring along the way by the department itself to determine whether this program was on the rails.

For example, we identified in here that in 2011 the department had completed an evaluation of the program and had found that both applicants and department employees saw the application forms as long and complex. Employees suggested combining the application form, consent form, and questionnaire into one form, but they didn't do that at that point in time. There were some things already being identified, but action wasn't being taken.

The types of issues we raised were raised by going in and looking at some things. It was essentially like a quality assurance type of program. We referred to the fact that the department didn't have that feedback loop of learning from why something was being overturned later on, and from that, whether it could learn something that would help it to do a better job at running the program.

On the transition to the tribunal, the deputy has said that they were too aggressive with their assumptions. Unfortunately, I don't think that's necessarily something that has only happened in this case, and I'm not just referring to this department. I think that's something that happens fairly often. When they are planning a large change, they need to make sure they're building in sufficient time to deal with the unknown sets of circumstances that come around.

If I were going to try to sum it up, essentially there wasn't enough attention paid to understanding how well this program was working within the department, I would say, because there would have been some things they could have done to make the program work better.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Ms. Zahid, please, for five minutes.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for Mr. Shugart. While CPPD benefits are important to all recipients, they are particularly important to those with terminal illnesses or grave conditions. As a member of Parliament who deals with those people who walk into my office, and as a person who has worked in a constituency office for a long time, I have dealt with this on a daily basis. It concerns me a lot.

You recognized this by promising a higher service standard, yet, unfortunately, you are falling well short of meeting it. According to the AG's report, as indicated in paragraph 6.53, only 59% of applicants with grave conditions are being processed within your 30-day service period. It even trends down for those with terminal illnesses, with just 7% processed within the promised 48 hours.

Your response, in paragraph 6.55, says:

Employment and Social Development Canada will complete the review of the service standards and develop an implementation plan, which will include mechanisms for monitoring and reporting on these standards by March 2016.

What did you achieve by March 2016, and how are you going to move these performance numbers up?

[Ian Shugart]

Chair, I have a couple of points in that regard. I did refer to the service standards. We have completed that work, as we indicated. We have not published them yet. We intend first to review those service standards with clients and stakeholders. I want to engage with my minister on those proposed standards before we publish them, but the analysis work has been done and was completed by the target date. The numbers will be published in a reasonable time frame.

I would add to the comment of the Auditor General—and this is in answer to your question—that one of the failings we too frequently have across government is doing things according to the law, according to the best procedures we have at the time, and in good faith, but without the systems in place to report as we go on how well we are doing.

In other words, we do our job, but too frequently we don't know how well we are doing it because we don't have in place the internal systems to give the assurance—to use the Auditor General's language—that the performance is in place. That is one of the things in this program we will be putting in place, so we can know, in real time, how well we are doing relative to those performance standards.

The benefit is obvious. You have in real time, every day, for the officers and their managers, a little bit of an Auditor General's report. It's the performance against the standard. At the moment we do not have those assurance mechanisms in place, and that is one of the things we are putting in place.

On the question of the quality assurance framework, we did provide the Auditor General's office with information that in fact we had developed elements of a quality assurance framework. We did, for example, strengthen the mechanisms for communication with medical adjudicators to ensure they had better up-to-date information on the medical dimensions of these conditions they were looking at. We also identified over 30 grave conditions, which would be in the category that you referred to, which should, when they are encountered, lead to expedited decision-making.

There is no doubt—although, for reasons I just stated, I can't prove it to you today—that those elements of that quality assurance framework had a beneficial impact on the clients. I do accept the observation of the Auditor General that a robust, thorough quality assurance framework, although it had been developed in part and implemented in part, was not robust and put in place.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much. Our time is up.

We'll move to Mr. Poilievre, please.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Thank you.

In paragraph 6.77, the Auditor General found:

We also found that the Tribunal did not decide appeals in a timely manner and that the period that appellants had to wait for a decision continued to rise. The tribunal explained that this was partly due because of the Social Security Tribunal Regulations which required appellants and the Department both to indicate they were ready to proceed before the Tribunal could hear appeals.

In 6.96, the Auditor General found that only in December 2014 did the tribunal establish performance expectations of 10 decisions per month for each tribunal member.

We also found that the average number of decisions tribunal members actually competed was significantly lower, 6.5 decisions per month in 2014-15.

In 6.97, the Auditor General found:

Furthermore, we found that CPPD appeals that could be summarily dismissed, such as when an appellant did not meet the CPP contributory requirements, were still taking a long time to resolve. Of the 137 appeals that were summarily dismissed in 2013-14 and 2014-15 fiscal years, almost half, 66 appeals, took more than 800 days to be concluded.

These instances cannot be blamed on the fact that there were backlogs handed down or that there was a scarcity of resources. This is a measurement of the use of resources that were in the possession of the Social Security Tribunal. It indicates that the members of the tribunal are not concluding an adequate number of cases per month, that they are off the Social Security Tribunal's own target by 35% per member, and that cases that should be obvious and easy to dismiss—that is, someone who hasn't made enough contributions or doesn't meet the age requirement—cases for which there is no medical or complicated legal interpretation required—are taking 800 days to be concluded.

The deputy minister has taken responsibility for the department's role in this matter. Will you, Madam Brazeau, take responsibility for any of the problems that are associated with this backlog?

[Murielle Brazeau]

As I mentioned earlier, when we opened our doors, we received 7,000 disability appeals, and we were not able to assign these appeals immediately because the parties had one year to confirm they were ready.

The Auditor General concluded that this situation increased the backlog, which increased the time it took to hear appeals, and thus the 800-and-some days. As soon as the tribunal could schedule cases and assign them to the tribunal members, we did so. In 2014 we did assess a performance measure for our members. We indicated to our members that our expectations were they would conclude 10 cases a month.

As the Auditor General found, in the first year they were concluding about six cases a month on average. In 2014-15, I'm happy to report, they were concluding 11 cases a month.

What that confirms is that it takes time for our members' capacity to ramp up. It has taken time for them. This is a complex issue. As my colleague indicated, they have to establish that their medical condition is severe and prolonged. It means our members have to look at the case and consider and assess the evidence. It is a complicated matter, and it is taking them time.

We are comfortable with 10 cases a month on average. Some of our more experienced members are doing more. The less experienced are doing fewer cases, but on average it is going well.

I am taking responsibility for their performance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Poilievre, you may have a very quick question, please.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

To the Auditor General, to clarify, in paragraph 6.97 you write:

Of the 137 appeals that were summarily dismissed in the 2013–14 and 2014–15 fiscal years, almost half (66 appeals) took more than 800 days to be concluded.

When did the clock start ticking on that 800 days? Was it from the time the hearings were eligible to begin and both sides had indicated they were ready to commence, or was it from the time of the original appeal submission?

[Glenn Wheeler, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada]

Mr. Chair, in this case it was from the point in time when both parties indicated the case was ready to proceed.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Just to conclude one point, then, the 800 days cannot be explained by the delay in the time it took both parties to be ready to appeal. It was 800 days from the time both parties were ready to appeal, right?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We'll have to get that answer next time.

Mr. Christopherson, please.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I have three questions.

First, to Madam Brazeau, how could it be there were 7,000 cases that were your responsibility and that your tribunal didn't know about? I'm having trouble understanding how you opened up your doors and all of a sudden 7,000 cases appeared that you didn't know were your responsibility.

You may not be able to answer. That may be as much as you know—that they landed there. Do you have any idea why you were blindsided? You must have been concerned.

[Murielle Brazeau]

When I started, I was informed. One week before, we knew there was a significant number of cases coming in. We weren't sure exactly what the number was, but we knew there was a backlog because the tribunal that had just closed its doors was not able to conclude all those cases, so they were transferring the remainder to us.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's understood, but how could you not know the number was 7,000?

Deputy, can you help? Am I asking the wrong person?

[Ian Shugart]

Yes, I can. We did not know of those cases.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

How is that? Help me understand.