Public Accounts Committee on June 5th, 2018

[Heather Jeffrey]

The approach we've taken to communicating with Canadians is to look at the kinds of information that they will need in order to travel safely abroad, the kinds of services they can avail themselves of, and the kinds of information that they should factor into their travel decisions to allow them to have the safest and best travel experience that they can.

This is a communication effort in terms of providing up-to-date information on local context in an effort to provide preventative consular advice to Canadians.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Kusie.

Now we have Ms. Mendès.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a very quick question—and it is a personal one.

In May of 2015, my daughter and her family were in Europe and they lost their passports. My son-in-law doesn't really matter in this issue, because he was not a Canadian citizen, but my daughter and my grandson were—and this was a seven-month-old child.

They went to the Canadian embassy to get replacements and it ended up costing them close to $1,000, for my daughter and my grandson. When they arrived back in Canada, they had to replace them again. Then my daughter had to replace it again two years later because they wouldn't give her a permanent passport until she produced proof of citizenship. I had no idea where her citizenship card was. She was two and a half months old when she became a citizen. She was born abroad but I was a Canadian citizen, so she did have a Canadian citizenship card. I had lost it.

Anyway, just to make the story short, it ended up costing a fortune to replace those two passports, and I really don't understand why. Nobody was ever capable of explaining to me what those charges were for. As far as I know, it's still going on, that it costs five to six times the cost of a normal passport to replace the passport abroad.

[Heather Jeffrey]

I'm not familiar with the exact fee, so I'll have to get back to the committee about what the fee structure is for replacement and emergency passports abroad. Global Affairs Canada is a service provider for Passport Canada in terms of the provision of passports abroad. Domestically it is done by Service Canada under IRCC, which is the program authority. The fees are set, and we administer those on behalf of IRCC abroad.

I'm not familiar with the details of that case, but I will look into the fee structure and get back to the committee.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

It's not about that specific case. It's whether it is still the norm that when a Canadian needs a passport replaced it costs them five times or six times the normal passport fee. I find that just outrageous. It's enormous.

[Heather Jeffrey]

I'll have to look into what the exact fee structure is.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

As much as I do find the $25 consular fee too low, I do find this really quite outrageous.

Those are my questions, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you. I think it's a good lesson for all of us that the passport is a precious item and the loss of that passport.... There's just a whole range of things that people do with a lost or stolen passport. Yes, I think the fees still seem a little high, but it would be good information to at least know, although it's not fully your department. I recognize that.

Mr. Garrison, go ahead, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I have two questions that are quite unrelated. The first one goes back to a question that was raised earlier about the gap that the Auditor General's report found in reporting torture or mistreatment in a timely manner to the minister. We do know and I've had the personal experience that sometimes ministers can privately fix situations with other governments simply by talking to their representatives. Whether or not that's always the case is one reason why timely delivery of that information can be quite crucial. I wonder whether in the audit there was any indication of a cause for those big delays.

As well, to the department, what's being done about that?

[Carol McCalla]

We looked at the 15 cases in which allegations of torture or mistreatment were made during our audit period. In some cases we found that they would first need to assess the credibility, and we found that it ranged from a couple of months to six months for that assessment to be made. In most cases it was because they needed time to gather the information, and in some regions it took time to gain access to the detainee and they had to work through the foreign government to be able to do that.

According to Global Affairs' policy, it will only formally inform the minister when there is a credible case that it is likely that torture has occurred. I was very encouraged to hear that the department is now moving to inform the minister when an allegation is made.

What came out of the Maher Arar case was that it is important for the minister to be informed and to thereby be able to make decisions about what action could be taken, because it is very serious when a Canadian abroad is mistreated or there is likelihood that torture has occurred.

[Ian Shugart]

I would add that part of this is a question of written formal notice to the minister. I can assure the committee that in many, many situations in the absence of a formal notification, oral information is provided to the minister. From a documentary point of view, it is clearly a better state of affairs to have that documented. That's important and we will be doing that, but again the audit team was able only to deal with documentary proof for an assurance audit.

We have regular briefings with the minister's staff in order to review consular cases. Any situations of alleged mistreatment or torture would be high on that list and the minister would be informed. But the fact that it is oral is not adequate, and that will be documented.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Garrison.

That concludes....

Did you have one more? I'm sorry, go ahead.

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

I have just one more. It's my chance to be positive here.

In the last Parliament, I did make a request to the Minister of Foreign Affairs to add specific advice to the travel advisories for the LGBTQ community, and I wanted to commend the department for moving very quickly to do that. I do periodically check and the advice that's displayed there is accurate and timely, so I want to thank the department for doing that.

I have two small things to say about it, one is that you have to be pretty good at the website to get to that advice. Because it's in drop-down menus it's a little bit obscure and I wonder if the department could look at perhaps making it a bit more prominent, because it's very good information and again I congratulate them on this.

The second thing is very specific to the FIFA World Cup. There have been very explicit threats made publicly in Russia against the LGBTQ community, saying that these fans will not be welcome at the cup, that they will be attacked. In your travel advisory it's not mentioned in the World Cup part of it, even though those threats have been very high profile and very public. It's left to the general advice on Russia.

What I'm trying to say is that you're doing a good job.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

I would thank all of you for attending today. As a committee we are taken by this last...it was almost like a wake-up call to, not our committee but it should be to the public service. We go through this Auditor General's report and then, not so much just looking at the report regarding consular services but Mr. Shugart, as a deputy minister, I think there were other things in his report, and more specifically in his message, that if I were a deputy minister I would be paying very close attention to.

Although it originally refers to the Phoenix pay system and first nations, indigenous groups, he talks about “incomprehensible failure” in some cases of governments to deliver. He also speaks about the culture of government, which is the departments. This is not the culture of the government that's in power. This is the government, the federal bureaucracy and public service.

In former Auditor General's reports he has talked about not delivering the results that we really expect for Canadians and how the focus sometimes is on the short term but not the long term, so that Canadians can be benefited. We're pleased when we see that you have an action plan. We're pleased when we see incremental, first of all, acceptance of his report and then movement in your action plan. I would just encourage you to take that action plan, as I know....

Mr. Shugart, you've appeared here before in other capacities and we've appreciated it, but I would really encourage you to take the concerns expressed by our Auditor General about the culture of government and in some cases.... He talks about cases where, under the Phoenix system and indigenous systems, sometimes ministers were not adequately given the information in a timely process. To a lesser degree it may be pointed out here. I would certainly encourage you to take that message that he gives very seriously as we, not only in your department but in all departments, seek to better the culture of government.

That, I can tell you, is the goal of our committee, to enhance the culture of government and to be certain that Canadians are, first of all, served well.

We thank you for the way you that you serve.

I see you want to make a—

[Ian Shugart]

Could I make a short comment here on that last commentary?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Yes.

[Ian Shugart]

The Auditor General knows my personal and professional respect for him. I won't comment on the Phoenix audit. That's out of my swim lane, but I could indicate that I have had the experience of successful major projects and unsuccessful major projects. There are a wide variety of reasons for both. The delivery, for example, of the automatic enrolment of old age security recipients was a very successful project, a major one.

I can tell the committee, through you, Chair, that under both governments I have personally had the experience many times of giving ministers unwelcome advice and welcome advice, good news and bad. That is our responsibility, and deputy ministers are very well aware of that. It is not always a comfortable responsibility to carry, but we do understand and, in my experience, follow that basic responsibility to tell the truth to our political masters, to follow their direction but to tell them the truth and give them our very best advice. We will apply that commitment in this particular case, as in all others.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Shugart. We would expect nothing less, and we appreciate that answer.

We are now going to suspend. We have 10 minutes remaining. We're going to move into a very short period of committee business, so we will suspend and allow our guests to exit the room.

Thank you for your testimony today and for the answers to our questions.

We're suspended.

[Proceedings continue in camera]