Public Accounts Committee on June 5th, 2018

[Carol McCalla]

We had not previously done an audit on consular services.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

This is the first audit on consular services. Okay.

[Carol McCalla]

Yes.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you.

In paragraph 7.3 of the audit, it states that there has been an increase of around 21% of Canadians travelling abroad, which has created more demand on consular services. This was in 2015, so from 2005 to 2015 there was an increase.

Are you aware if there was a budget allocation to the consular services to address this increase, Mr. Shugart?

[Ian Shugart]

I don't believe there was a targeted increase. There was no formal, purpose-oriented budget increase that I'm aware of.

We could certainly.... Do you know offhand?

[Heather Jeffrey]

There has been a gradual increase in the cost of consular services being provided. Consular services are provided on demand. In our annual reporting to Treasury Board, you can see that there has been a consistent increase in cost.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

In the cost, but is it also in the budget as well?

[Heather Jeffrey]

Yes, that comes from the reference levels of the department.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

This is with respect to a theme we've heard from Mr. Garrison and Mr. Massé regarding Canadian individuals being detained abroad. The concern that I share with my colleagues is that the Auditor General's opening words advise us that in 2004, Justice Dennis O'Connor made the investigation with respect to the Arar matter.

In his report from 2004, he recommended that Global Affairs Canada train its staff to identify signs of torture and mistreatment and inform the minister as quickly as it arises. I'm looking at your recommendations, Mr. Ferguson, in the response. This is 2004 and we are now in 2018. The audit was from 2016-17. Basically it says that the response from the department, after being recommended by the Auditor General, was that more training be provided.

The response from the department says the department has already piloted and has a training program. It says, “A process will also be put in place to ensure that officers are fully trained, including in arrest and detention cases.”

We're looking at 14 years after a report came out to say that we should be better training the consular officers across the world.

Why do we have this gap? Why is this a recurring theme? Why is this still a problem today, 14 years after a report has come out telling you to address this?

[Ian Shugart]

First, I can't comment on that whole intervening period.

Secondly, Justice O'Connor's report certainly had an impact. It was a widely known. Its implications were very clear. There would have been on the ground much greater attention given by consular officers to the issues that Justice O'Connor raised.

I think the difficulty, from the point of view of an assurance audit, is that in the absence of a formal training initiative, the conclusion arrived at is a logical one. What we've emphasized is that we have already begun to implement and to pilot formal training in this area. We will be rolling out formally, across the network, that kind of precise training.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you.

I have only a few seconds left.

How can we ensure that this will be ongoing, that this is not a one-time “We've been told to do this. We're going to do it, and after that we're done”? How can we have confidence that you will implement this in your department, in consular services, as a recurring training that should happen every—you guys decide it—18 months, 30 months, whatever is required to ensure that this is constant? There's turnover of personnel, I'm assuming, just like everywhere else, so how can we ensure this will be addressed and will not arise again?

[Ian Shugart]

Management and consular officer formal training is an annual event in the department. This training program will become a formal part of that annual training. It will be going on in a few weeks. We're engaged in formal training of our outgoing heads of mission currently, last week and this week, and CO training comes immediately after that. Our training program will be available for scrutiny in that regard at any time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

I just have a follow up—and again, I can steal from Mr. Nuttall's time because he's from my party. I would never do that on the other side. He asks about the training, and you talk about it. Does Global Affairs Canada have an internal audit process? Consular services has never been under a full audit by our Auditor General prior to this. Do you have adequate internal audit processes?

[Ian Shugart]

Yes, we certainly do, Chair.

And I don't think you've stolen from Mr. Nuttall. I think maybe it's a repayable loan.

We have internal audit and evaluation. In fact, we've had an evaluation of the consular service done within the last year and that is posted on our website. Internal audit in departments is under the authority of the deputy minister. Currently we do not have an internal audit on the consular program, but it would be a fair subject. I don't think we would do it in light of the work the Auditor General has just done. The standing committee of the House is also doing a study on the consular program. As I said, we did an evaluation of the program, which is now publicly available.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Just so I understand this, Global Affairs has an internal audit process but not one specifically for consular services.

[Ian Shugart]

That's correct.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Do you think that would be a possibility? If you've had an internal audit prior to this, and it reaches somehow into consular services, were any of the concerns that the Auditor General brought out in his report recognized prior to his report?

[Ian Shugart]

I would have to check to see if consular services has been the subject of internal audit. I can tell you that the evaluation we did of the program...and evaluations are different from audits, as the committee knows. They don't have the same assurance element, but in many respects they're similar in that they often find the same things. There is a great correlation between what we found in the evaluation completed earlier this year and what the Office of the Auditor General identified in its report.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I would think that, not so much on the detention, but on the torture.... One concern the Auditor General brought out was that the timeline isn't adequate. I think he said in his report that in some cases where there may have been torture involved, you were deficient in getting information to the minister—or in some cases, the deputy minister—on time. Over the last few years, we've seen payouts to those who have undergone torture in other jurisdictions. If not for humanitarian reasons, certainly just given the payouts we've had there should be a little more internal auditing to keep track of this and get the data moving on.

Anyway, we can come back to that.

I'll now go to Mr. Nuttall.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I actually want to continue down the road we were going on before, if it's okay to kind of switch back.

If the numbers are showing something as widespread as what's been reported in the audit, the thing I love about this committee and about auditing is that usually the numbers don't lie. You can really tell a lot. You've said, Mr. Shugart, that you're starting to institute department-wide training to deal with this. Is this training aimed at the front line? Is it aimed at support services in the background? Is there at least dual custody in place for each and every person whom consular affairs or whoever it is on the ground is helping?

[Ian Shugart]

The training will be very comprehensive. It will apply to all consular officers. You understand that the circumstance varies widely in our missions. We have some very small missions. We have countries where the ambassador is not actually resident. He or she is accredited to that country and the mission presence is not there; it's in the other nearby country. Then we go all the way through to the major sites. Of course we, over time and in collaboration with our heads of mission, allocate consular resources appropriately. The increased data that we've committed ourselves to providing will help us to make more precise allocation of resources. Heather referred to that earlier.

The population covered by the training, either at mission or in headquarters, will be complete coverage to our consular offices. We want them all to have this specialized training, for example, on prison visits, which is very precise to that circumstance, as well as updated general training on all consular issues.

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

The problem is that, if you take the Auditor General's numbers—and I'm going off the top of my head here just recalling—if you take 70 and then you take another half of the remainder, there's 10 that never got contacted, and you take roughly half of them, which you said were not documented, even at that point you end up with 120 out of 190, 66%. It's just a low number. I'm not sure that training is necessarily the answer here. What I'm trying to get at is what the answer is, because with every single audit that's done, the department comes in and says, “Oh, we're instituting that; we're dealing with it already”. I think that's the way the process should work and hopefully it's not just lip service and there's actually action to follow.

Where I get concerned in audits is when the responses to them don't match actually the results that we've seen to date, because it may move it 5% or 10%. In some of these cases, the wrong case at the wrong time is a Canadian citizen in harm's way, severe harm's way, and that's what we're dealing with. What else is going to happen to fix this?

[Heather Jeffrey]

Yes, I can answer that. You're right, there are a couple of different parts to it. One is training, and that's training offered not just at headquarters but also abroad. This is specialized training in targeted missions where there are particular issues of mistreatment, and also online training and cyclical training. The audit found that 96% of our staff had been trained, but the problem is that our consular officers in particular spend large portions of their career abroad—they're not back in Ottawa—so we need to be more flexible in how we offer that training.

It isn't enough, however, just to have the front-line staff trained. Part of it is documentation, and part of that is refreshers on the kinds of things to look for, as well as the monitoring capacity at headquarters. This is a program that has a management capacity at headquarters. Our systems are not as modern as they should be, and we're in the process of upgrading them to provide the data and reporting and the real-time red flags that will pull up anomalies in the system, that will pull up patterns, and that will allow us to generate the kinds of analytics that we need to be able to have oversight happening across the world.

Right now in the two-year period, as we undergo this modernization, which has already begun, we will be putting on additional resources. We'll be doing sampling, monitoring, looking at the data put into the system, and doing it on an annual basis to ensure that this situation doesn't recur.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Arya.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank Mr. Shugart and his departmental officials for the excellent work they did yesterday. Yesterday, the Air Canada flight from New Delhi to Toronto made an emergency landing in Moscow. Some of my constituents' families were on the plane and they were a bit concerned. They contacted me and I contacted the department. The way the department handled it and kept the lines of communication open to us was quite good. There was good work done.

I have a question regarding permanent residents. Do they have the same access to services in various missions abroad?