Public Accounts Committee on June 5th, 2018

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We're pleased to have Mr. Garrison with us here today.

Mr. Garrison, you have seven minutes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here today. I also thank Mr. Ferguson for the work that's been done on this audit.

While I agree with most Canadians that the general record of consular services is very good, I have to say that I am quite disturbed by the findings regarding the treatment of Canadians arrested or detained abroad. I actually think this is an unacceptable finding, and I say that as someone who, before becoming a member of Parliament, worked as an international human rights observer. I have done prison visits in Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Canada, and I have been in a position of advocating for improved treatment and negotiating release for those unlawfully detained.

Therefore, I actually find some of the things in this report, even though they're presented in very mild language, quite disturbing. When you say that we have, maybe, 1,600 arrested or detained in a given year, and that fewer than half are contacted within 24 hours, and that most of them are not contacted in person, that means we have over 1,000 Canadians at some point in the year who aren't contacted within 24 hours—which is the critical period in detentions.

As well, if you go further into the report, it says that in the sample, about 5% were not contacted at all, which would mean we'd have up to 80 Canadians during the year never being contacted by their government when in detention. I don't think this is a very good record.

My first questions are to Mr. Ferguson, about the study.

In your report, you focused on one part of the contact for those arrested, but in section 7.37 you talk about consular services also meaning informing family members, advocating for fair treatment, and advocating for general well-being. Did you study the record on those, or were you focused on merely the first step of that, which is contacting the Canadians who had been detained? I don't see the evidence of that in the report.

[Michael Ferguson]

I will actually ask Ms. McCalla to respond to that.

[Carol McCalla, Principal, Office of the Auditor General]

We did focus on the initial contact in 24 hours and then on the ongoing contact for those who were imprisoned for longer than a week.

In order for the consular officials to then make contact with the family members and advocate on their behalf, they are required to obtain consent. We looked at those cases to see whether the consent had been provided and what the detained people asked for. In some cases, they didn't want the consular officials to advocate on their behalf until perhaps they were released. We did, however, look to see that the consent was provided.

We did have trouble locating that in many files, and we did have to do a significant amount of follow-up with Global Affairs officials to get that documentation. Again, that speaks to the quality of the documentation in the case management file, and that this should be something that is regularly reviewed and the performance should be monitored by Global Affairs officials.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Of course I do accept that the priority has to be on examining those contacts in the first 24 hours because they are critical, but I can imagine a world in which you might do better in all the rest of the things, but it's not the most likely world that you would actually live in. If you don't do very well on the initial contact, I'm worried about the record on the rest of these things.

Did you find that the same service standard was being applied in all countries where people were being detained or arrested, despite the very large differences in the amount of risk that detentions and arrests would constitute in various countries? In other words, is there only one service standard?

[Carol McCalla]

There is only one service standard. The 24-hour contact is the same regardless of what region of the world you are arrested in. We looked to see whether they made reasonable efforts. In some cases they were denied access by the local government, but we looked to see that this was document in the file.

We found a troubling number of cases where the documentation wasn't there, so we didn't see and couldn't assume that they even tried to make contact. That was what we wanted to bring attention to, but we did note that in a third of the cases they did make the contact as required.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

I do understand that it's difficult. I've been in a situation where the office we were waiting in had to be cleaned and all the furniture removed. We were told we would have to wait five hours, and at the end of the five hours, we were told there was no one in prison—all the cells were empty, and we were welcome to look—so I do understand that's not a simple task.

My concern is that we know that the risks of torture, maltreatment, and sometimes even just getting lost in the prison system are extremely high. I did interview people in Afghanistan who weren't sure why they were in prison, and no one could find their records. That's why it is so critical that we make that contact in those 24 hours.

I'm going to ask a question of the department. I find the recommendation in very polite language, very mildly stated, but the government's response is to say you're going to review the service standards. The problem is not with the service standards. The problem is with not meeting the service standards. It implies to me that you might say, “Well, since we don't contact them in 24 hours, we'll change that service standard.” That would be a disturbing conclusion, and I'd like you to reassure me that it's not what you mean.

[Ian Shugart]

Chair, I can reassure the honourable member that this is not the intent. The point of that is the observation in the audit that those service standards have not been reviewed. We completely accept the important recommendation on documenting these visits. Again, it is by no means an excuse or evasion of that recommendation to highlight that the lack of documentation does not mean that efforts were not made by consular officials. It means that it isn't documented. That's why we need to do a better job across the board of documentation.

The point about the service standards is to have greater precision and realism on the circumstances. Those service standards need to be more reflective of the environment where we are operating so that in the future, as we are better able to track our performance, a future auditor general and auditors will not say, “There continues to be a gap between your service standard and performance.” It is not lowering the denominator to an easier level. It is being more precise about the circumstances in countries to ensure that the service standards are precise and relevant to the circumstances.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Shugart and Mr. Garrison.

Mr. Massé, you have seven minutes.

[Rémi Massé, Liberal, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the Auditor General and his team once more for presenting us with the key findings of this report so that we politicians can have some light shed on major problems that must be fixed in order to provide Canadians with an ever-increasing quality of service.

Thank you, Mr. Shugart, for being here as well. I would also like to thank the team supporting you with your testimony. I know that a lot of work goes into preparing for parliamentary committee meetings.

My first question is for you, Mr. Shugart. The content and findings of the Auditor General's report, as well as his message when presenting all of his reports, point to a culture in the federal public service that must change. I am extremely curious to hear you talk about the strategy you've implemented, or plan to implement, in order to share this report's findings with the public servants in your department. They would then be able to recognize the positive aspects, but also those in need of improvement, so that each person, team and sector in your department can commit to a plan to resolve certain issues. We can go into detail on certain issues later.

My question for you is: What is, or what will be, your strategy for sharing these aspects in order to improve the services provided by Global Affairs Canada?

[Ian Shugart]

Thank you for your question.

I'll let Ms. Jeffrey comment, but, first, I will say that our consular officers' training is the most important and most efficient way to improve that aspect of their performance. I was about to use the word “culture”. It is a cultural issue insofar as we need to improve the discipline needed for preparing documents and evidence from the files, and all the other things we just talked about. I don't think that the cultural issue extends to the commitment of our consular officers, consular managers and heads of mission around the world, or to the way Canadians are provided with the most efficient services possible in specific circumstances.

In a few weeks—a few days, actually—one of my colleagues and I will personally meet with the members of the consular team here in Ottawa. I will encourage them to talk about their experiences, the internal challenges, the demands, the trends, all of their concerns, actually.

I have no doubt that our consular officers are committed to providing the best possible service. We have to give them the necessary tools, whether through communication or through training for prison visits, for example. We must help them provide the most admirable service possible.

[Rémi Massé, Liberal, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Perhaps, in this context, there are tools that can be provided to consular officers.

In his report, the Auditor identified performance gaps in certain missions. He noted that four of the ten missions with the highest volume of work did not meet their performance targets. These performance targets are to deliver at least 90% of passports—we are talking about passports—within 20 days.

We know that there have been administrative changes affecting Canadian citizens wishing to travel. For example, issuing the Electronic Travel Authorization has brought about tremendous pressure. When we compare these 10 missions, we see, for example, that the Hong Kong mission went very smoothly and met its performance targets, but the London one showed much poorer performance.

In your opinion, how can a mission like the one in London not meet its performance targets, when compared to the one in Hong Kong? I especially want to know which corrective measures have been implemented to make things right.

[Heather Jeffrey]

In terms of the performance standards on the delivering of passports within the 20-day standard, there is variation amongst our missions abroad. We've seen that the way we had resourced and staffed those missions was not agile enough to take into account the surges we saw. We know that with the introduction of the 10-year passport there now will be periodic peaks and valleys in passport demand abroad, and we have to adjust.

We've begun to already adjust our resourcing system so that we can respond with additional surge capacity. We're moving to a multi-year agreement with IRCC that will allow us to put in place longer-term resources to adapt to peaks and valleys, with surge capacity for summer staffing and other peak travel periods when we know that passport demand is going to surge.

In some missions they had enough capacity to redirect to try to absorb, and in some cases they moved that capacity from other types of services that they might have been providing. What we found in general is that it was more difficult abroad to have enough flexibility because of trying to find bilingual, trained people to deliver passport services, which are so important and need to be done in a rigorous way. We've put in place a new system to try to do that because we know that from now on, apart from eTA, there are going to be fluctuations in demand and our system needs to be more flexible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Massé.

Before we go to Mr. Nuttall, I'm wondering if you can give Canadians out there who are viewing this or who may want to come back to this.... We've talked about members of Parliament getting the call from family members. I've received that call on Christmas Eve or during the Christmas holidays. If you have a difficult time responding within 24 hours, are you always being notified within 24 hours?

Typically what we will ask families of someone who has been incarcerated abroad.... They'll say, “Mr. Sorenson, we have no idea what to do. Your office is closed. I'm sorry we called you at home.” We will ask, then, if they have contacted consular services. Sometimes their expectation is that because he's been arrested and incarcerated, consular services are the first to be notified.

Maybe you could just give us a bit of the process there. What should someone do? Are you notified immediately? Do you have someone on call within 24 hours? You haven't seen him, but have you always been notified?

[Ian Shugart]

That's a great question, because again it gives us an opportunity to reinforce a couple of pointers here. You're absolutely right that individuals in distress don't always know what the right avenue is, and the truth is that we are not always immediately informed.

Members of Parliament, as in the case that you give, Chair, are very well aware. Typically, at both constituency and Ottawa levels, staff in the offices of members of Parliament know about our emergency watch centre and so on. That contact is often made, but often not in the first instance.

Heather, maybe you could give a quick summary of what happens when that call comes in.

[Heather Jeffrey]

Our 24-7 emergency watch centre is staffed with consular officers around the clock. In terms of all the calls that come in after hours—if it's in the middle of the night in Thailand, for example—those calls are routed to Ottawa. They're answered. If it's necessary, the watch officers wake up the consular officers on the ground and then we begin our efforts to try to locate the Canadian.

When we refer to notification, there are two ways. Sometimes it's family members of Canadians who inform us that their family member has been detained. In other cases, certainly, we expect host governments to inform us when they detain a Canadian national. It's part of their responsibilities under the Vienna convention, as it is for us here in Canada. Not all countries, local offices, or police stations understand or respect those responsibilities. In many cases, it can take a long time for us to find out exactly where in the prison system the Canadian might be located. It can be a complex task, and we rely on all the information we can get to try to triangulate and reach people as quickly as possible.

The watch centre and that emergency officer should be the first port of call. They can access everyone they need to in order to reach people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

Moving to the second round of questioning, which is a five-minute round, we have Mr. Nuttall.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for joining us today to both respond to and provide more information regarding the audit that was completed by the Auditor General and his team.

I want to ask a couple of follow-up questions and then go from there. The comments just today from the Auditor General start out with a couple of things that were done at least to par and at least within the expectations that people would have, and then they bridge into the timing at which Canadians who are held abroad perhaps have to live with or live without in terms of being contacted by one of our consular representatives. The first question probably should be to the Auditor General and then I'll go back over.

Mr. Auditor General, when you say that detained Canadians were not contacted within 24 hours, is there a way to determine whether they were tried to be contacted, or was there no way to actually measure if there was any emphasis put on that by our people on the ground?

[Michael Ferguson]

Actually, what we found in 70 of the 190 cases was that the consular staff did contact the detained person within 24 hours. In 10 cases there was no evidence that they ever contacted the individual. In the other 110 cases, they didn't contact the individual within 24 hours, but in about a half of those cases they had documented that they had tried to get hold of them within 24 hours. Out of the 190, I guess you could look at it as 70 cases where they actually did contact them and 55 cases where they tried to contact them, and they documented the fact that they had tried to contact them.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you.

To Mr. Shugart and Ms. Jeffrey, the measurables are in place here of what your goals are to contact detained individuals. You have those internal expectations that you clearly communicated to your staff on the ground. How often did you use the information to either retrain or retool or move resources around? I'm not talking about in the case of a surge, maybe like what was happening in Honduras about 10 years ago, but just on a consistent basis. How often are we using information that you have to better prepare our people on the ground?

[Heather Jeffrey]

We are consistently using, at multiple points through the year, a resourcing model that we have that measures different kinds of demand and service standards and reallocates surge resources to those locations to try to meet increases in demand. That isn't just in the extreme cases like in an emergency crisis response where we have a dedicated core of responders, but also for more mundane types of surges related to particular travel patterns.

What the Auditor General has pointed out to us is that our resourcing model needs probably better quality data in many cases to be able to accurately measure that kind of performance target and make sure that we are providing resources where they are necessary. As a result, we're going to be revisiting that resourcing model and looking at more sophisticated indicators and tracking better quality data, and part of that is training. It's about communicating with our officers the importance not just of assisting that Canadian who desperately needs help, but in recording all the steps that were taken to do that.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

I have a problem specifically with just talking about the data, and I know I was talking about that. So it's 70 out of 190 cases, I think the Auditor General said, and I could be exaggerating the number slightly. That's not like a data miss in terms of our not using the data correctly to determine where we needed to be. That's a much more widespread issue.

Is there a funding issue? These are very important services that Canadians travelling in all parts of the world, but specifically in some hot regions, need to know are there for them.

[Heather Jeffrey]

Yes, there is an aspect of it that is a data issue. In many countries it is not possible to access Canadians, for example, in certain kinds of immigration detention or in certain places. In many cases, our officers were not documenting on the file when there were systemic issues that would prevent them from having access. They knew the local context so they wouldn't necessarily document the reasons why it was not possible to reach that person.

Not having the data means that we as the managers of the program can't effectively move resources where they need to be. That's why we need to do better on that.

The majority of our detention cases are actually in the United States, which is not surprising given that's where Canadians frequently travel. We do try to look at resourcing in terms of the much more complex nature of the interactions in a place like Afghanistan or in other insecure areas where visiting detention requires a lot more effort and you have to travel long distances.

Not all cases are created equal. Our system needs to be more sensitive to the kinds of demands that vary between regions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Nuttall, we'll come back to you.

Mr. Lefebvre, please.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Shugart, for being here again, in a different capacity.

I have a quick question for Mr. Ferguson.

When was the last audit of the consular services? I didn't see that in the report. Sometimes you put it in; sometimes you don't.