Evidence of meeting #120 for Public Accounts in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was agency.
A video is available from Parliament.
5 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you very much.
We'll now move to you, Mr. Garrison. Welcome to our committee.
5 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the Auditor General's office, both for being here today and—if anyone has seen the stack of reports—for the obviously enormous amount of work you do on behalf of the Canadian public.
I want to ask a couple of questions about your Report 6 on community supervision and the Correctional Service, and then also on Report 5 on inappropriate sexual behaviour in the Canadian Armed Forces.
In your introduction, Mr. Berthelette, you talked about the Correctional Service having a delay in getting offenders into the appropriate facilities in the community, acknowledging quite rightly, I think, that for community safety the best outcomes come from supervised release in the community setting and that there's no plan to deal with that increase, which I think you said was nearly 20% between 2013 and 2018.
Wouldn't it also be true to say that it will actually cost the public more, since the costs for maintaining someone in incarceration are much higher than they are under community supervision?
5 p.m.
Nicholas Swales Principal, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, we did not specifically compare the costs. We do point out in the report that for about 40% of their population, they expend about 6% of their budget. Clearly, being incarcerated is more expensive than being in the community.
5 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Okay.
The second part of your analysis talks about not properly supervising those who are released and not having enough contact with the parole officers. I guess I'm going to criticize your report a bit, because here you left out the context of the 20% increase. When you read this, it seems to appear that somehow the Correctional Service doesn't see that it's important to have that contact or that parole officers aren't doing their jobs.
In fact, don't we have perhaps the same problem, in that we've had a 20% increase in the number of people being supervised without that same kind of increase in parole officers and the time they have to do that supervision?
5:05 p.m.
Principal, Office of the Auditor General
We didn't attempt to understand why the parole officers weren't meeting with the individuals in question. On the time scale, the Correctional Service establishes the frequency of contact requirements that it says are required to properly manage public safety concerns and also to enhance the integration of the offenders, so not meeting those, in our view, was not acceptable.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
I certainly agree with your conclusion about acceptability, but I would just say that when we have an increase in the number of offenders, it's not just the physical facilities that have to increase; it's also the human resource facilities we're dealing with that have to increase.
In the interests of time, I'm going to turn to Report 5 and congratulate you. It's the first independent report we have on a very big task that the Canadian Forces have taken on, and that's Operation Honour.
I do want to acknowledge the good intentions of Operation Honour and the very large task of changing the culture of the Canadian military. No one would deny that it's a big task to take on.
This is the first external report on performance. You've made some very specific recommendations on how we improve, but I have a question that backs up a step again. I wonder if you looked at whether adequate resources actually had been allocated to this program to achieve the very large tasks that it sets out for itself.
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, we didn't ask that particular question during the course of this audit.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
I do think that once we acknowledge how large the task is, that becomes an important question. Does the military actually have the resources?
One of the things you talk about is inadequacy in the training of those who are going to operate the services under Operation Honour. Quite often when you have a gap in training, it's a lack of resources that causes that failure in training, rather than a lack of knowledge. I wonder if there's any relationship there. Did you look at why the training might not be as extensive as it should be?
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, I believe the military used a train-the-trainers approach in their training process, and they ended up relying on their chain of command to provide the bulk of the training, so I don't believe it was an issue. It was not an issue of resources. It was really an issue of what the training was trying to accomplish.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
The recommendation, then, really is to look again at that system of training and see if it's effective?
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
Yes, Mr. Chair. We noted that the Canadian Armed Forces—this is in paragraph 102 of the chapter—has a new initiative called “Respect in the Canadian Armed Forces Workshop”. This training was developed in collaboration with experts and is being delivered in collaboration with experts and, in our view, provides a more complete way of and a more complete approach to providing training within the military.
We're recommending that they should, as we put it, “make it a priority to offer the Respect in the Canadian Armed Forces Workshop to all members in a timely manner” because it gets at the issues that we identified as being problematic within the training that was being provided.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
One of the problems you identified was that quite often victims weren't aware of the services that might be available to them. This is a question that relates to some of the work we're doing on the defence committee, where I sit right now. Is there a requirement that victim services be offered in every case, or are services provided on request to victims in this system?
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, I believe that when a victim is first interviewed at the start of a formal investigation, services are offered and the victim is made aware of the services that are available to victims. The offer is made.
I'm sorry. What was the rest of the question?
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
If an offer of services is made, then how can there be a gap in the information? In other words, if that's the practice—a victim is always told of the services available—then how do we get this problem of victims not knowing what services are available?
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I also should have added that it is what's supposed to happen, but what we found in the files was that in fact it didn't happen.
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
The victims were not being provided with this information. That contributes to the point we made, that victims did not know about the availability of the services.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you very much, Mr. Garrison.
We'll now move to Mr. Arya, please.
Mr. Arya, you have seven minutes.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would refer to paragraph 7.70 and exhibit 7.2. The actual work on the targets is too good to be true. Aren't the targets set at the beginning of the year or just before the year starts?
5:10 p.m.
Martin Dompierre Principal, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, they are set at the beginning of the year. They set the targets at the time of the—
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
In 2017-18 the target was $8.2 billion for additional revenues, and the actual amount was $11.6 billion. That is over by 40%, so has that been deliberately kept low so they can show better performance? Otherwise, is the agency not performing to its fullest extent—that is, in setting up the target, are they not actually calculating the capacity that is available to the agency to collect additional revenues? What is your opinion?
5:10 p.m.
Principal, Office of the Auditor General
In paragraph 7.72 we made some observations and said it could be that the “taxpayers became much worse at complying with the Income Tax Act”, the “taxpayers were able to underpay their income taxes in 2013” if you compare it to 2017, or “the Agency’s risk assessment process improved”.
We asked the agency to give us the methodology they used to set up these targets. They were not able to provide us the full explanation of how they came up with these targets. That's how we made a recommendation specifically to that extent, Mr. Chair.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
Thank you.
In terms of exhibit 7.3, as you know, a lot of files close during the last three or four months, especially during February and March. You mention that “targets may have pushed auditors to close files early”. You also say, “The Agency was unable to tell us the amounts of additional revenues reported that were actually collected from year to year.”
Do you think they're unable to tell you or that they don't want to tell you?