First, the final result should be an increase in employment among those groups throughout the country. However, how will we determine that that increase is truly the result of the programs?
Here is what we can do, and the situations where we expect it to be difficult to perform our verifications. Let's take the example of a person living on the Eskasoni reserve in Nova Scotia, who has registered in his community for a program offered by a partner organization funded by the department. If that person stays on the reserve and takes other training courses there, our partner organization will be able to follow that person's progress over the course of the year. However, if the individual leaves the reserve and goes to Halifax, for example, the partner organization will not necessarily be able to follow the person's journey.
Consequently, it is difficult for us to track things over a five-year-year period, which would be interesting. It would also be interesting, as the Auditor General suggested, to see the evolution of results over time.
As for those who leave their communities, it won't be easy to follow their individual journeys, except through data collected by the Canada Revenue Agency, CRA. In order to protect the confidentiality of that information, the CRA cannot give us their salary, which it would be interesting to know, in order to follow their progress over two, three or four years. By using the SIN, the social insurance number, we cannot know what happened to the Eskasoni former resident. However, the SIN allows us to link up the various data anonymously and determine the person's level of income after three or four years, once they have taken that type of training.
It is our global methodology to check overall results. Auditing a person's progress over five years is a real challenge. If people leave the community, as they often do, to go to Alberta, for instance, and take another training course in which the department is not involved, it is difficult to collect that information. We found a way of doing that in an aggregate way with individual but anonymized data, that is to say data we cannot access. Those anonymous results will be made available to the department as well as to the communities and researchers who might be interested.