Evidence of meeting #45 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 offenders.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
By the fall of 2017, you're going to get recommendations from the subcommittee.
Director General, Specific Claims Branch, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
I think the reference there is to the joint technical working group, which I sit on. Ideally, by next fall we will be in a position to make recommendations to our minister. The first nations have their own political organizations that they would need to get feedback from. It's that sort of thing.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
Then there is recommendation 6.47:
[INAC] should update its website to reflect the full range of negotiation practices for all types of specific claims.
I come from the private sector. If a website needs to be updated and if somebody tells me it takes one year to update the website, that's absolutely unacceptable to me. I see you mentioned something to do with the shared services, but I guess there's the technical part. I think what OAG is suggesting is the content.
Director General, Specific Claims Branch, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
I don't want to speak for the Auditor General, but the issue has been that first nation groups would dispute the way we characterize certain parts of the way we're doing it. The real work is to try to get to a common understanding of what it means when we call a file "closed".
The way it's been explained to me is we called them “closed” because we're not working on them anymore, because we don't see progress or they've gone to some other forum. However, the first nations say, “But the claims haven't gone away. They're still out there, unresolved.” We need to find a way of communicating so that we understand that we're comparing apples to apples.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
Mr. Ferguson, can you kindly explain the recommendation? I'm still confused.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
It was simply that we saw a number of negotiation practices, which have been talked about today—sending the letter and some of those things—that the department had implemented, but the department had not communicated this way handling those claims to the first nations. We simply felt they should make the first nations aware of how they are handling the claims—that is, explain how the claims are being handled—and the obvious way to make that available would be to put it on the website, document what they were doing, document how they were actually handling those claims, and let people know that's how they were doing it.
Maybe the first nations wouldn't agree with it, but the starting point would be to let them know that this was how those claims were being handled.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
That was my understanding. I'm quite surprised it will take one year to do that—more than one year, for that matter.
Director General, Specific Claims Branch, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
Again, we're trying to do things collaboratively. We have been accused in the past of doing things unilaterally. We would post things to which the first nations said they'd had no input, and then that undermined the credibility of the reporting. That's how I understand it. We would like to do it as quickly as we can, and that is the timeline we're trying to work to.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes
We have 20 seconds left, and it's 5:30.
Thank you very much to our witnesses today, Mr. Gagnon, Mr. Wild, Mr. Ferguson, and Mr. Berthelette. This is obviously not an easy subject to discuss, and we may very likely call you back. We probably haven't finished, but I'll have to discuss that with my colleagues.
Thank you again for your presence.
The meeting is adjourned.