Public Accounts Committee on June 13th, 2019

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It depends on how your questioning goes.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

It's very interesting.

As to the decision to be made between doing the respect in the workplace audit, the immigration audit, and student financial assistance audit, why was the decision made to prioritize those over the things that the committee and parliamentarians have made very clear are our priorities, which would be cybersecurity and Arctic sovereignty? I think if the choice were up to parliamentarians—and perhaps it should be—I think we would reprioritize your work plan.

[Sylvain Ricard]

The answer to that—and I'll ask Madame Thomas to add to this—is at the core of the discussion. It's a capacity issue, a funding issue. I'll let her explain those two specific files.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Ms. Thomas.

[Casey Thomas]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

We're an independent audit office that selects what we do and why and how we do it. That's critical to our role. We identify our audits based on residual risk, the impact on Canadians and the value we can add. We do not want to be in a situation where we are cancelling audits, but in the two that we're talking about—

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

That's interesting. You're then telegraphing, I guess, that you feel that the four you mentioned would present a greater risk to Canadians than the two you're cancelling.

They're not in the top four audits that you think need to be done.

[Casey Thomas]

With respect to cybersecurity, for example, I can talk to you a little more about how we ended up where we're at.

We have one team currently in the office that has the expertise to carry out that work. As you can imagine, that work is quite technical and we need an in-depth knowledge of the business there to be able to carry out that work.

The team that would have carried out that work was the team that carried out our two Phoenix audits. We had initially planned to do one audit on Phoenix. As a result of what we were finding in relation to its governance and other issues, we decided it was critically important to do a second audit on Phoenix. That second audit was tabled, and the team did not have an opportunity to gather the knowledge of business for the next audit, cybersecurity, which is still in their expertise, but they hadn't had the time to develop the expertise.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

So you're saying that, even if you had the money today, because the team isn't ready, you couldn't have delivered on cybersecurity anyway. It's really capacity within your organization over a long period of time that's preventing the cybersecurity audit from being done, because you don't have the team that's built up. This is really a longer term problem; that's my understanding of what's being said.

It doesn't really seem to be anything that's related to the current funding gap. This seems to be a problem that arises entirely because, over the period of time, you did not have two technical teams for IT audits.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I'll just go back to Mr. Ricard on that.

[Sylvain Ricard]

[Inaudible--Editor] there. Exactly, it's a capacity issue. We don't have the funding to be able to have a second team; to have a bit of leeway. We've talked at this committee over the years about the importance for us to be able to respond to requests that could come from this committee. In terms of being nimble, having a team to be able to quickly turn to another audit, we don't have that capacity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Your time is up.

I just want to very quickly come back to your point. The question I think Mr. Richards was asking earlier is the taxpayer side. As we've conducted our studies on the call centres, we find out that the taxpayers are very concerned about the fact of what is viewed by some as poor service through our call centres. That obviously was one that we felt, even as a committee, was in the committee's interests. We wanted to study it. The second one that they chose to do was on asylum seekers—a very timely study. I commend the auditors for their choices in audits, because I think that's where the taxpayers really are.

The third one after call centres and asylum seekers was RCMP security—again, a very vital one given some of the attacks we've had where there have been deaths, so I thank the auditors.

I think I speak for our committee. We absolutely believe that you must remain independent, where you decide what those audits are to be. I think maybe from the perspective that we come from, as a committee, dealing also with public safety and national security—I've served as chair of that committee—we also know right from that committee that cybersecurity is maybe not the conversation amongst the average taxpayers, but I think all committee members on all sides understand. I think even when you pick up a paper or any type of media, you'll see that cybersecurity is an issue that we face today that we haven't thought about in the last 20 to 30 years. It is a massive concern.

I don't want our committee to get too far off here. It's not one government or a different government. This is the mechanism on how best to fund parliamentary officers, or what Mr. Leswick calls departments, like the Office of the Auditor General. This is what I think we need to consider a little more here.

Where are we, Madame Clerk?

We'll go back to Mr. Davidson, please.

[Scot Davidson, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm back to this being an audit emergency. This government loves to use wording like that and, to me, we keep seeing all these words. Since 1977, you've had that ability to go in front of the House, but it's never been used. We're back to the idea that the Auditor General has never been underfunded and they've never cancelled audits. All the flags are up here, and I still go back to why the government has chosen not to fund this.

I'm just quickly trying to get a handle on the numbers I heard on this government's spending increase.

I will go to you, Mr. Leswick. Did program spending go from $250 billion to $329 billion? Was that the right number? I'm trying to work out the gist as far as the Auditor General's budget goes. I'm trying to work out the math on the massive increase in program spending. Is that 31%? Was that math right? Was it from $250 billion to $329 billion?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Leswick.

[Nicholas Leswick]

I'm not so sure about the base—

[Scot Davidson, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

In programming—

[Nicholas Leswick]

I don't have my statements actually in front of me, but yes, in and around, it has grown to $330ish billion.

[Scot Davidson, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

So that's from $250 billion to $329 billion in government spending.

[Nicholas Leswick]

I can confirm, but again—

[Scot Davidson, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Yes, we'd just love to hear the exact percentage increase. Our Auditor General is looking for $10.8 million.

Going back to the chair's question and comments, the Liberal government House leader's mandate letter explicitly called for an independent funding model—this is the Liberal House leader—for the Auditor General. It was a promise of the Prime Minister in 2015 and it was in the letter.

My question is to the Auditor General. Since the Prime Minister made a promise in November 2015, has the government House leader or her office engaged with your office on how this independent funding model is going to look? They've had four years to engage your office on that; we should be close to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I'm going to go to Mr. Ricard first on the former part of the question. Were you trying to signify...?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I was just suggesting that Mr. Hayes—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Then go ahead on both questions, Mr. Hayes.

[Andrew Hayes]

I grabbed the second part of the question more than the first. If I can deal with the funding mechanism, the late auditor general Michael Ferguson wrote to the Minister of Finance in 2018 setting out what he proposed to be an option for an independent funding mechanism. To my knowledge, that was the first time since 2015 that our office engaged on that issue with government. In January 2019, in one of the last letters Mr. Ferguson signed—he co-signed it with five other agents of Parliament—they asked the Clerk of the Privy Council Office about independent funding mechanisms. We've had preliminary discussions with our colleagues at the Privy Council Office, but those discussions haven't progressed very far right now.

[Scot Davidson, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

So after four years, we're not very far.

[Andrew Hayes]

At this point in time, we don't have a proposal; we don't have a new funding mechanism. We're aware that the government is thinking about it, and we are ready to engage and seek a solution.