If your notes were scattered, it was probably because my comments were scattered.
In terms of the performance indicators, I think what I would do is look at the audit we did on the beyond the border action plan, in which there was a series of 34 initiatives.
Government departments have spent $600 million, and the total amount they have dedicated to the action plan is more than $1 billion. What they were reporting on, though, was whether they had completed something. Did they build a system?
The action plan was all about improving security at the border and speeding up travel and trade at the border. For a department to say that they built a new system doesn't tell you whether the security is any better at the border, and it doesn't tell you whether people and goods are moving faster across the border.
That's the type of thing we mean when we are looking at the performance indicators. If you are going to put $1 billion into building a number of systems and a number of initiatives and you have a direct objective of increasing security at the border or speeding up travel and trade at the border, then how can you tell whether those initiatives have actually done those things?
I get that it's hard. We struggle in our own office with how to measure the value of an audit. It's not easy to measure the value of an audit. I think we need to at least keep going back to look at an audit to see whether we think we have provided value to Parliament and to the government from doing the audit, rather than just say that we'll measure how long it took or how much it cost to do an audit and then say that we have a measure. That measure doesn't get at what is important, which is the value coming out of the audit.
Similarly, in this type of thing it's not good enough just to say that they'll measure whether they have completed something or not. They have to find ways of saying that they spent $80 million on a new single-window system to track what's coming into the country and what goods are being imported into the country but that fewer than 1% of importers are actually using it.
What the department has said is that they're going to improve that rate, because they're going to shut down all of the systems and make this one mandatory. Well, making a system mandatory will increase the number of importers who are using it, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have importers who are happy that they are going to have to use it. How are you going to know that this is the right step to take because it is a good system?
It's all of those types of things that are our frustration when we look at the performance measurement.