Public Accounts Committee on Feb. 18th, 2016

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes, I know. Listen, it's not the first group that's elected me chair so that I couldn't say as much as I normally would.

However, it is good to be back again, and back at public accounts.

Jumping straight into it, I'd like to touch on report 1. In a very brief summary, could you encapsulate why it's important and it matters to Canadians that we get gender-based analysis properly established?

[Michael Ferguson]

I think it comes down to the fact that this is something which the federal government made a commitment to do 20 years ago. It's dealing with looking at the way that policy proposals, legislative proposals, and program initiatives might affect men differently than women. That can help departments change how they're going to deliver a certain program to make sure that they're considering those effects on the different stakeholders. It's important from the point of view of that consideration. It's also important from the point of view that it's something that the government committed to do internationally.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

This, of course, encompasses both previous parties when they were in power. I mean, 20 years is an awfully long time. Of course, the first reference was back in 1995 at the United Nations world conference. When Canada signed the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, we made commitments. We made international commitments and then following that, we made commitments here in Canada. In a 2005-06 report, the government again was divvying out all the responsibilities and saying that this is how we're going to do it and that everything's going to be fine. That was in 2005-06, a decade ago.

In 2009—and I remember when this report came out—we had a previous audit from your department. At that time we weren't very far ahead, and the government made all kinds of commitments. I say to colleagues that this is the stuff that really sends me over the moon: when we have previous audits, and it shows the same results, and regardless of the party, the government of the day makes commitments vis-à-vis those Auditor General reports and then does nothing. That's exactly where we are. In 2009, a very similar audit was done, and in 2009 the government came up wanting. The government was not doing what they committed to do. They renewed their commitments in 2009, and doubled down on it, and here we are now in 2016 with another report that says it's still not being done.

You reach a point, colleagues, in these kinds of audits where it's just bloody clear that the bureaucracy, for whatever reason, doesn't want to do this. That's clear because they've been under the mandate of two different parties who've committed to this. I could blame both the parties and say they don't care, but I'm not convinced that's the issue when it spans more than two parties. It will be interesting what the bureaucracy has to say—I hope they come in—as to why two decades later we're still struggling for basic fairness among Canadians, between men and women, given that they're the majority, for goodness' sake. I look at these kinds of things and I can tell you that this is exactly when we need to bring in the deputies and the people responsible to start finding out why.

I'll just say to colleagues that we changed the rules a few years ago to make deputy ministers accountable officers. Very briefly, why that mattered was that when we used to get the deputies in here, we'd ask the deputies a question, and they would say, “Hmm, you know, that's really the purview of the minister. That would be the minister's responsibility, not mine”. We'd haul in the minister, which we don't do that often, but when we did haul in ministers and ask them, they'd say, “Well, you know, that's administrative. It's not my responsibility. That's the deputy's”, and we're chasing our tail trying to find out who's ultimately responsible. So we changed the law, and we said, “Ministers, you have this responsibility, which is already clearly set out in Parliament, but deputies, you now have added responsibility so that when you come to a committee like public accounts and you are asked a question, you cannot say, 'That's not my responsibility'. You can't just hand it off”.

In fact, we built in a whole process where, if deputies disagree with their minister, there's a process for them to protect themselves, because none of that was clear in the past. Those of us who have been ministers, provincially or federally, know that deputies make recommendations, but at the end of the day, it's the minister's decision that counts and the deputy can just be run over. They come to committees and they're dancing and staying quiet, doing what they can because they don't want to get their minister in trouble, but the truth is that their recommendation was overruled. Now we have a system where we can get at that. We can separate those decision-making responsibilities and hold the proper people accountable, whether they are elected people or deputies.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm pontificating, because I'm not trying to. What I'm trying to do in the few moments that I have is to bring 10 years of experience to you as to what I think is important. That takes care of that.

In the time I have left, which is probably not much. It rarely is—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You're right.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

How much time, Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have just a minute.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I want to refer to report 5 on Canadian Armed Forces housing.

This one launched me too, I have to tell you. We found out that the government can't buy planes, can't buy helicopters, can't buy submarines, and now we find out it can't even buy houses.

What really gets me is that it's not as if housing military staff is something new, like it was a new mandate, like we're moving them out of pup tents and we're going to put them into buildings, and this is the first time we ever thought about it and it didn't go that well. It seems to me we've been doing this sort of thing since about, I don't know, 1867 maybe. We've had some kind of responsibility for armed forces personnel. In my view it ties into the fact that, again, we spend a lot of time talking about boom, boom, war, war, bomb, bomb, equipment, equipment, but at the end of the day it's the people.

There are too many scandals around veterans, people who have gone off to war while the flags are all waving, the band is marching, and everyone is happy. They go off to war, and they come back broken, hurt, and they're not dealt with properly. To me, this is the same thing.

They may not be veterans returning from war, but they're still veterans and they're still wearing the uniform of the Canadian Armed Forces, and they deserve to be housed decently.

How the hell can it be after all this time that the Canadian Armed Forces still can't properly house our armed forces personnel? That's a question I hope we get to ask.

Thanks, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Christopherson. Thank you for giving the Auditor General a break to rest his voice.

Mr. Arya, for seven minutes.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

I would like to continue on the same report.

Mr. Ferguson, in your opinion, most of the departments have not done this gender-based analysis for quite some time, which you had also pointed out in 2009.

Is it some sort of systemic problem or is it deliberate? What is your opinion on that?

[Michael Ferguson]

We identified, I believe, in paragraph 1.58 of the report, what we refer to as barriers, barriers that prevented departments and agencies from imbedding gender-based analysis within the development of their policy initiatives. Those barriers were, number one, the absence of mandatory government requirements.

While the central agencies are looking to see whether the memorandums to cabinet indicate whether there are any gender implications of a particular policy, there is no actual underlying policy that says what you have to do and when you have to do it. There's the guidance coming from Status of Women Canada, but there aren't cabinet directives or Treasury Board policies for them to have to follow.

Something else—and even if there were policies, this is something that would have to be sorted out as well—is tight deadlines for developing policy initiatives. Sometimes a government is trying to put a policy in place within a short time frame and getting all of those types of analyses done can sometimes be a challenge in those types of time frames: how to prioritize, how to ensure that these types of analyses are done when dealing with short decision bases.

The other one was limited capacity within the department about knowing exactly how to do a gender-based analysis. That was the third obstacle.

We've identified those three, and those are fundamentally the things that need to be dealt with.

If I could just follow-up a little bit on the last question, I think it's often the case.... In this case we did an audit of this in 2009 and we found weaknesses. We've come back and we've seen weaknesses again in the way this is put in place. We have seen in the meantime that there has been some activity. Status of Women Canada has done more things. It has provided more guidance. There have been some activities done.

I think what's concerning about that is the activities aren't resulting in better results. They're resulting in more policies, more training, more things being done, but they're not necessarily resulting in this now actually happening.

It's important to deal with these barriers, but it's important to keep the focus on this. When we deal with these barriers, is that going to mean we're actually going to have better results and these gender-based analyses are going to be done, they're going to be done well, and they're going to be considered in our policy decisions?

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

For me, this is the first time in Parliament and the first time in committee. In your reports, will you look into your previous reports, recommendations or suggestions, that have been considered or implemented? Will you make a quick note of that?

[Michael Ferguson]

We do that in a number of ways. Sometimes we will do direct follow-up reports. We will look at a report that was done in the past and we'll look at the recommendations that we made. The audit objective in that is to say that the department has made satisfactory progress or it has not made satisfactory progress.

Sometimes we will do a direct follow-up audit like that. Other times we will look at the same topic but maybe from a slightly different point of view. We will bring back the things we identified in the past to remind people of that, and to try to see if there's progress.

I think our world is different now. We've been in this business for quite a number of years. There are probably very few programs now that we haven't audited at least once. Just about everything we do now has some aspect of looking back at what we did. And it's not just what we did; we'll also look at what an internal audit group did. We will look at committee hearings. We'll look at a number of different sources, and evaluations within the department, to try to bring all of that information forward to say, “This is the history of what's happened in this program”, so that people understand all of that.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

In terms of controlling exports at the border, you did mention that the Canada Border Services Agency is not doing its best in examining high-risk shipments. Is it the first place exporters apply, or does it first go to the international trade ministry before it goes to the next level, which is the Border Services Agency?

[Michael Ferguson]

I think the way we've defined it is that the Canada Border Services Agency is essentially the last line in the whole role of controlling exports. There are many other aspects to it. We found that essentially they were doing a series of activities, and some of those activities they were doing well. They were able to identify some shipments, through their targeting activities, that shouldn't have been exported, and stopped some of those. But the system was not a coherent one.

If you look at the system from the whole point of view of exporting something from the country, it's pretty easy to see that there are some significant weaknesses in that system, even though they might be doing some activities and having some success through some activities.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

My understanding was that under the controlled goods act, let's say, a different department initially assesses the risk involved and approves the shipments. Then the exporter applies to the Canada Border Services Agency.

At any rate, you mentioned information technology at Shared Services. I think that is something we are going to....

Do I have any time left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have 10 seconds.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Ferguson.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Arya.

We'll now move to the second round, and we'll go the official opposition.

Mr. Poilievre.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Thank you for being here today.

My questions relate to “Report 4—Information Technology Shared Services”. Your report points to numerous failings in the implementation of stated goals for the Shared Services Canada initiative.

I want to begin with a generalized question. When we look back over the last five to ten years, some of the biggest public sector so-called boondoggles have been in the areas of IT. Despite the contentiousness of the original policy, the cost of the long-gun registry was really related to IT cost overruns. In the electronic health records initiative, the Government of Ontario reached $1 billion, vastly over its stated budget. South of the border, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act was besieged by a major IT problem when the health insurance exchange was launched online. It took a month and a half to get anybody registered to purchase through that health exchange.

Why is it that we—across governments, across party affiliations, across country borders—seem to have such difficulty properly implementing IT projects in government?

[Michael Ferguson]

Obviously, this will be a personal opinion rather than anything we've seen in audits, and I will try to keep that limited.

IT projects are complex. I think one thing that happens is oftentimes users don't know exactly what they want in an IT system until they see it.

Here I'm going a little bit off your question. One thing we've noticed—and it's in a number of these reports—is that many times a system will be built, but then there is no quality control over the data that's being collected and put in the system. Again, organizations are building systems, but then they're not making sure they're getting the data they need to make the most use out of that system.

I think it's about the complexity: the complexity of the technology, the complexity of knowing the user needs, and being able to get that all programmed.

I think in the case of Shared Services Canada we've also seen again that here they were trying to put together 43 departments, 23,000 networks, 485 data centres, and that's a lot of things to try to bring together. It really takes extremely good project management and having very good control over what is going to be delivered and making sure that the scope of the project doesn't just keep growing.

I think it boils down to their being extremely complex and they have to have good oversight; they have to have good management, and they have to set realistic expectations. Then they have to be able to correct the course to be able to deliver something within a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Is the problem with the early definition of the projects or the execution throughout?

[Michael Ferguson]

Well, there are many stages in a project and each of those stages needs to be well executed. There need to be decision points at the end of them.

There is usually a process which says that in the first instance what it is you're going to deliver, and roughly what you think the envelope is going to be. Then you do more precision in identifying what the system needs to do, and that gives you more precision in the budgeting. All through those points you need decision points that say either yes, you're going to continue, no, you're not going to continue, or you will continue, but there are some things you don't need to do. It has to be a very structured, very disciplined project management approach, also with proper governance and oversight, because sometimes the people responsible for delivery just want to deliver, and there has to be that other level, essentially, of due diligence in the project management from an oversight committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Poilievre.

We'll now move to Monsieur Lefebvre.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Ferguson, for being with us this morning.

Your findings were positive in the case of a few programs. You said that resources and activities were being managed economically, efficiently, and effectively. And clearly, in a number of other programs, you identified weaknesses and areas for improvement.

What sets successful programs, meaning those that are being managed economically, efficiently, and effectively, apart from those that still exhibit weaknesses after your review?

[Michael Ferguson]

There are two things: there is what is trying to be accomplished and there is how it's trying to be accomplished. When departments have a focus on both of those things, then I think you end up with well-delivered programs.

Something I've said before is that we will often see situations where departments identify a piece of a program they can measure. I think the Canada pension plan disability audit that we have in here is an example of this. For example, the Department of Employment and Social Development identified that they can measure how long it takes to make a decision from the point in time they get an application for the Canada pension plan disability. Somebody provides them with an application. They've set a standard which, I believe, says that 75% of the time they would make a decision on that application within 120 days. They can measure that and they can report on it.

That indicator doesn't take into account everything that somebody has to go through to access that program. It doesn't take into account, for example, that there are 42 pages in the application that the person has to get through just to get to the point of being able to give the department an application so the department can start the clock ticking in terms of their service standard.

I think when departments are looking at things from the point of view of who they're trying to service and what that person has to go through to get the service, and then they're looking at making sure they have a program from beginning to end that is robust, that has the proper controls in it, that has the proper oversight so that they're doing the process well but they're also achieving the results.... Sometimes we just see the emphasis on the process.