Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the Auditor General and your team for the incredible work that is being done on all of the reports and, in fact, for the message from the Auditor General.
I'd like to begin my remarks before asking any questions or making any statements by saying that we are incredibly proud of the public service that we have, of the work that they do throughout this process of understanding—or at least trying to understand—what happened with the Phoenix issue specifically. It is in no way an attack on our public service.
It's the opposite, because there are so many people within our public service who have been run afoul financially through the problems that were created with the Phoenix system. All of us have had people come to our offices, I'm sure, and hearing some of the stories and the issues it created was heartbreaking at times, especially around Christmas when there were, quite frankly, paycheques that just didn't show up.
Mr. Auditor General, I just want to say that this message, the introductory message to the audits that were completed, is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, document I've seen since I became a member of Parliament. I think that it represents what people in the public view as what is wrong with government, whether it's an individual or a business. It touches on the lack of measurables or the wrong measurables being in place for announcements, new programming, or spending. It touches on the amount of work that our public service has to do, kind of watching their behinds, and the amount of work that creates for people who are dealing with those government services.
There are a number of items I wanted to touch on. Before I do, your opening comments today on page 2, I believe, was, “Indigenous Services Canada made poor use of the education data it collected”. It goes on to say, “However, only 8 % of those enrolled actually completed this preparatory program. Despite these poor results, the Department did not work with First Nations or education institutions to improve the success rate.”
It is without reason why we're not taking these stats, which are abysmal—abysmal doesn't describe what they are—and not turning it into a process review to come up with a way to have better back-end results for the people who the Government of Canada, in whatever department, is serving.
We saw that message carried out in your message here where it speaks about Indigenous Services:
A long-term view has to dominate that file, but because it usually only brings political problems in the short term, government tries to stay in the safe space of administering payments instead of being an active partner with Indigenous people to improve outcomes. The measure of success has become the amount of money spent, rather than improved outcomes for Indigenous people.
Further down you say:
The result is an obedient public service that tries to eliminate risks and mistakes, which of course is not possible, so it has to try to avoid responsibility for those mistakes.
In this culture, for a public servant, it is often better to do nothing than to do something that doesn't work out. If, however, action can't be avoided, people search for plausible deniability—a way to deny responsibility for a mistake.
The culture that you speak about in this document, the culture of the entire government.... Yes, you are talking about some specific audits that took place in Phoenix, where you talk about the catastrophe that is Phoenix, but really, you talk about government as a whole, the culture within the Government of Canada as a whole.
The premise for it is that the politics are done on such a short-term view, recreating a long-term issue within government as a whole in terms of change management and so on and so forth.
You end this by saying that you don't have the answer, essentially, but hopefully by identifying that the issue exists, that will be the first step.
Could you provide us with a couple of instances of previous audits that you were thinking about when you were putting these words together, in which you have provided the audit, the process changes have either been put in place or not put in place, and yet we still have the exact same results?