Public Accounts Committee on Dec. 1st, 2016

[Michael Ferguson]

Actually, I think, Mr. Chair, that it's the responsibility of the people who are running the department right now to get the problem solved, so they are the people I think I would put the focus on.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Turning to the beyond the border action plan, you mentioned that several departments spent almost $80 million but that less than 1% of the shipments entering Canada are using this system.

They spent $80 million. Is the capacity developed by setting up the process to say that 50% of the shipments can use this and then only 1% of them are using it?

[Michael Ferguson]

I believe, if I recall correctly—and we have it in that paragraph in the actual report—that the original goal was something like 40% of all shipments within the first year, but in actual fact it was used by fewer than 1%. That was 40% of the shipments within the first year. The intention of this system is that it will be the single window that importers can use to essentially register their shipments with various government departments.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Arya.

Mr. Christopherson, you have three to five minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I obviously don't have a lot of time. I'll just focus on another example of the growing concern I'm having about the accuracy of what is being reported and the truthiness of what we're hearing. I gave one example with the submarines, and I think it's a pretty stark example of, if not misleading Parliament, coming about as close as you can to it without actually crossing the line. In this case it may have crossed the line, and that may be something that we look at when we're studying that report.

I want to draw your attention, sir, to page 9 in report number six. You don't need to jump to it; I'll read it to you from the report.

It's talking about the rate of claim settlement. Again, the government is bragging that they're doing certain things, but when you get in there and have a look, the story is a bit different. Subs is one example; this may be another good one.

You say, for example, that one claim you reviewed was first submitted in 1987. Probably some members here weren't even born then, something I'm getting used to when comparing theirs with my birth that year. However, I digress:

... one claim we reviewed was first submitted in 1987, and its processing time was just over 26 years before it was settled. However, the Department’s database showed that the claim’s processing time was just under 5 years.

Give me a bit more context for that, because again, that looks to me to be about as close to misleading Parliament as you can get and may indeed actually constitute misleading Parliament.

If you could, take just the moments left to give us a bit of the details, as you did on the sub deal. What's happening here? It actually took 26 years, but the government bragged it took less than five. What's the deal?

[Michael Ferguson]

When the justice at last program came in on October 18, 2008, sort of as the first date, the department went back and reset all of the start dates on all of the outstanding claims in their system. Then they measured how long it took them to resolve that under the justice at last program. That meant the information was no longer really about when the original start date was and how long this claim had been in process.

We also mention—and there's an exhibit 6.6 just above paragraph 6.76 in that chapter—that the report from the department said that there were 136 claims, for a total settlement of $2.260 billion, when actually we found that 89 of those claims for $2.209 billion were either essentially settled under the old process, or well down the road. In fact, 28 of them had been settled and compensated before justice at last, on October 18, 2008, but the department included them as settlements under Justice at last.

If what they were supposed to be doing was letting Parliament know what the impact of this new approach, justice at last, had been, then what they should have done was to say, “Here's how many claims first came in the door under justice at last and here's what we have done with them.” Instead, they counted all of that overlap period where a lot of work had been done before, and said, “Okay, we've settled over $2 billion through the justice at last program.” The way we looked at it, we felt that they had actually settled $51 million of claims that came in through that approach.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

We have a problem.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We'll now move to Mr. Simms, please.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

It's an honour. Thank you, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Welcome to the public accounts committee, Mr. Simms.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

The pleasure is all mine, more than it is yours, trust me, so we'll see how this goes.

I took great interest in report 5, and I'll tell you why. In my riding, we have the 103 Search and Rescue Squadron under the Canadian military. Several years ago, there was a rash of problems, including that we could not find pilots.

I want to turn to this part of the report, because I read it with great interest, regarding armed forces recruitment and retention. If we're going to look at buying the next generation of fighter jets, who the hell's going to fly them? That's really the deal.

I notice some stuff here which caused great concern for me. Files were closed in some cases while applicants were still interested. It almost seems like they had a process in place that was not adaptable to the current job market. If we're chasing after pilots, we have to go far and wide to find the people who have a lot of experience.

One thing I do want to point out, though, is the recommendation you made to them. Paragraph 5.52 states:

The Canadian Armed Forces should develop and implement a three- to five-year target with an action plan for each occupation to meet recruiting needs....

It was not so much the target numbers or revised target numbers they put out. I think there was a 10% variance to get up to their target. Their response was:

Agreed. The Canadian Armed Forces currently uses a five-year long-range planning model that factors in attrition and growth. That model is then analyzed in detail to produce a Strategic Intake Plan....

It almost seems like there's really nothing wrong at all, other than the fact that they acknowledge they should be more agile toward this.

How big is this problem? If we're talking about new equipment—and you also have a part here about maintenance—then there's a huge gap that will lead us to the future. Do they really believe that being a little more agile is going to help?

[Michael Ferguson]

I'll ask Mr. Stock to give you the details of that.

[Gordon Stock]

Mr. Chair, in response to the specific question on the target versus the planning model, they are in fact two different things. What we're suggesting within the recommendation is that they have a three- to five-year target, so that within the variation, if they don't get the number they need within the current year, the next year they should be picking up what they didn't get the previous year, and filling in what they still need for the current year.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Do you mean, on the specific job?

[Gordon Stock]

I mean on the specific occupation, so that they manage it by occupation, whereas the five-year planning model that is mentioned within the response is more in terms of establishing the needs.

The different environments—the navy, the air force, and the army—go through each occupation and figure out what they need, but in terms of actually making sure the target is met, we think there has to be a longer-term target to deal with the variations.

On the pilot side, just for interest, there is no difficulty in getting recruits through the door. The difficulty is in making sure they become trained, because it takes a long time to train the pilots—

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Exactly.

[Gordon Stock]

—and also in the retention of pilots. Depending on what is happening externally in the marketplace, they may lose many of the pilots.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

I'm glad you brought that up, because I was going to. The retention part of the issue is massive. I understand the private sector pressures on individual pilots who have been around for a while to move on to other things, and I appreciate that.

What I find striking is that here is a way for a young person to receive a free education, essentially a free career, at a time when post-secondary education costs are soaring in some of these sectors, especially for pilots and technicians and the like. I just don't find that there's a lot of movement here. It seems as though they're relying on old ways of doing things.

For instance, on wait times, why are these wait times so long?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Simms.

Mr. Ferguson.

[Michael Ferguson]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

One thing I want to touch on—and I'm glad you raised this particular recommendation and this particular response.... Fundamentally, what we are trying to get to is that the Canadian Armed Forces are 4,000 trained members below the number they need. In fact, the problem has become worse over the last couple of years. It was about 2,300, and now it's 4,300, or something like that, so it has become worse. These are the numbers that they themselves have said they need.

When the three environments—army, navy, air force—get together, they identify how many people they need and then they pass it over to the recruiting people, and the recruiting people say they don't have the capacity to do that and so they're going to recruit a lower number.

We made a recommendation here—and our recommendations are about needing to put the focus on the individual occupations and all of that type thing—and we get this type of response from National Defence. As you say, when you read that response, you get the feeling that they're essentially saying, “We already have this in place.” That's fine. You think you have something in place. How is any of this gong to be get you to the point of having the number of trained members you need to have?

The department can look at our recommendation and can come back with a response that says either what they're going to do or what they are already doing, but none of it is actually telling you whether any of this is going to get you to that point.

The wait time, if I understand what you're referring to, is the amount of time in the middle of a training program that a person has to wait around for the rest of their training.

Is that the issue? That's the issue that we raise, in terms of the waiting: somebody will come in, and they'll start their training program perhaps, and then they have to wait because the next stage isn't ready, and in some cases they'll wait many months. During that time, the Canadian Armed Forces find something else for those individuals to do. It may be first aid training or those types of things, but it's not training that's getting them trained for their actual occupation and ready to get into that occupation.

Again, they need to find ways of making the training more efficient so that there is less waiting time for the recruits coming in.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Just on that, is there any area—and this may be a question we ask them—in which budgets are put in place based on the expected number of new recruits coming in? I would wonder why they would put out an objective of so many recruits, if they feel that they probably can't meet it. They must have some idea of what's doable, of what's achievable.

Are there other budgets from which they can access more resources if they show the number of recruits as being higher?

[Michael Ferguson]

Again, I understand that national defence is a big, complex, piece of business, but there is a strategy. They have the Canada First defence strategy that lays out what their mission should be. To do those missions, they've identified how many people they need. Perhaps they've done work around what type of equipment they need. They've identified that they need 60,500 trained members, but then they don't have their system set up to get them 60,500 trained members, because the recruiting group doesn't have all of the resources it needs to be able to recruit the number of people they need. Again, if there have been targets and objectives set, particularly when you're dealing with something like national defence, then they need to make sure that they can figure out how they can align everything from there on so they can get those members in order to be able to meet their objectives. It could even go down into the support of the equipment as well and the contracts that they put in place there.

There are some constraints around the resources that they have available in the recruiting group. In order to fix this, they need to look at what level of resources they need at the recruiting level, number one. That may not just be more people. That may be people who know how to recruit people into certain types of occupations. How do they organize that group so that they will be able to recruit the number that the three environments say that they need?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Godin, you have five minutes.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We must not make things out to be worse than they are. Some organizations are doing well. Mr. Ferguson, you audited crown corporations such as the Pacific Pilotage Authority Canada and, a few months ago, VIA Rail Canada, and had good things to say. These are very solid and well-run organizations. We should follow their example.

Should we always choose the crown corporation model? That is an existential question, yet we must still tell Canadian taxpayers that it is not a disaster, that we are trying to improve systems.

More specifically, I would like to talk about the Canada Revenue Agency. Over the coming weeks, people will be celebrating Christmas and then a few months later they will have to file their income tax returns. We know this is quite stressful for some taxpayers and I think such lengthy processing times show a lack of respect on the part of the Canada Revenue Agency towards its clients.

In your presentation notes, it says:

We found that the agency's timeframe for a decision on straightforward files was about five months. For medium complexity files, the agency told taxpayers they could expect to wait up to a year before even hearing from an appeals officer.

Can this be interpreted as a way of discouraging taxpayers and thereby eliminating files by wearing people down?