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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Michael Ferguson  Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Don Head  Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada
Anne Kelly  Senior Deputy Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada
Joe Wild  Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
Stephen Gagnon  Director General, Specific Claims Branch, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

5 p.m.

NDP

David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for your attendance today.

I would like to take a moment, while we have the opportunity of being televised, to revisit something very briefly, Mr. Chair.

By the way, if the Auditor General feels it's important enough to comment on the question I asked earlier, that's fine. I only get one shot at this, so I'm going to get my stuff out and then I hope to leave some time for comment.

I want to refer to the last status report of Auditor General Sheila Fraser before she departed.

The heading is “Conditions on First Nations reserves”, but it speaks to attitude and approach.

She said this:

Between 2001 and spring 2010, my reports included 16 chapters addressing First Nations and Inuit issues directly. Another 15 chapters dealt with issues of importance to Aboriginal people. I am profoundly disappointed to note in Chapter 4 of this Status Report that despite federal action in response to our recommendations over the years, a disproportionate number of First Nations people still lack the most basic services that other Canadians take for granted....

On the surface, it may appear that the government simply needs to work harder to make existing programs work better. However, after 10 years in this job, it has become clear to me that if First Nations communities on reserves are going to see meaningful progress in their well-being, a fundamental change is needed....

In a country as rich as Canada, this disparity is unacceptable.

Mr. Ferguson issued his report, an interim report, halfway through his 10-year term. These are Mr. Ferguson's words to us last fall:

Another picture that reappears too frequently is the disparity in the treatment of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. My predecessor, Sheila Fraser, near the end of her mandate, summed up her impression of 10 years of audits and related recommendations on First Nations issues with the word “unacceptable.” Since my arrival, we have continued to audit these issues and to present at least one report per year on areas that have an impact on First Nations, including emergency management and policing services on reserves, access to health services, and most recently, correctional services for Aboriginal offenders. When you add the results of these audits to those we reported on in the past, I can only describe the situation as it exists now as beyond unacceptable.

[There] is now...a decade’s worth of audits showing that programs have failed to effectively serve Canada’s Indigenous peoples.... Until a problem-solving mindset is brought to...issues to develop solutions built around people instead of defaulting to litigation, arguments about money, and process roadblocks, this country will continue to squander the potential and lives of much of its Indigenous population.

Now I'll move to the report that's is front of us. I'm just going to read some highlights, because my question to Mr. Wild is going to be about how things have changed.

My specific concern is the attitude. The attitude of some of the decisions that are made here is very troubling. I was very angry by the time I was done with this report. I probably won't get through them all—I'm going on again.

These are snippets of different issues from the report, summaries from the Auditor General. On page 11, it says:

In 2011, without input from First Nations, the Department developed a separate process to expedite the negotiation of small-value claims. In our view, the following characteristics of this new process introduced barriers to negotiations that were inconsistent with Justice at Last:

That was with no input from first nations.

It continues:

We noted annual funding to First Nations for claims research decreased by 40 percent from $7.8 million in the 2013–14 fiscal year to $4.7 million in the 2014–15 fiscal year. According to Department officials, this funding decrease was undertaken as part of the Deficit Reduction Action Plan.

... We found that the absence of methodology resulted in funding cuts that were arbitrary and unevenly distributed.

Here is another one:

For example, we found that the Department arbitrarily set the maximum amount of a loan that could be provided to a First Nation at $142,500 per year or $427,500 over three years. We found a departmental study that suggested annual funding of $240,000 for a First Nation to negotiate a specific claim.

It's insulting.

Here is another issue:

After 2008, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada no longer shared the report with First Nations before sending it to the Department of Justice Canada. Consequently, after Justice at Last came into effect, First Nations were not made aware of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada’s analysis and interpretation of the claims submission. It is our view that this awareness is necessary to understand the factual basis for a legal opinion and help....

Again, there is that attitude.

I'm on page 18. It says, under “Incomplete reporting”:

. We found that some results were either not reported publicly or not reported clearly. The Department’s public reporting of results was incomplete and masked actual outcomes. In our view, parliamentarians and Canadians would, therefore, have difficulty understanding the real results of Justice at Last.

There's more and more. I'm running out of time.

Here is another one: “In our view, parliamentarians and Canadians have received an incomplete view of how long it takes for a claim to be processed.”

Help me understand. Every time, we hear “This is the moment there's going to be change”, and there's never change.

Mr. Wild, give me some reason that my colleagues and I on this committee should believe that this time it's going to be different.

5:10 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

We are committed to the process that we've been jointly designing with the Assembly of First Nations and other first nations organizations to work together to ameliorate the process. We know there are problems. We know there are a lot of problems. I don't think it was ill-intentioned . I just want to be fair to the public servants who work in the department and have worked on this file over the past decades. I don't think it was ill-intentioned.

I think that in the balancing act of trying to figure out how to move a large volume forward, mistakes have been made in doing that in a process that has reconciliation at its heart.

I think the government is clearly committed to moving forward in that spirit of reconciliation. I think we are committed to jointly designing policy and processes that enable us to move forward. That's what this action plan reflects, and that's the commitment that we have: to work together with the Assembly of First Nations and other first nations organizations to design a process that will better meet the interests of all parties, which is getting to negotiated settlements.

5:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes

Thank you very much.

Madam Shanahan is next.

5:10 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the panel for being here with us.

When I was reading the report, in the first few pages, by paragraph 6.7 and the description of this Justice at Last program, I had a glimmer of hope. It was something that was on the right track. We know that there are claims across this country. Each one of us in our ridings is affected by claims that have been simmering for decades, if not from the beginning of our Confederation.

The idea that we had a plan that would not only address the backlog of claims and their slow resolution, settle the specific claims, and compensate first nations for past damages associated with Canada's outstanding lawful obligations and then, in paragraph 6.8, in return for this compensation, provide an agreement from first nations to never reopen these claims seemed to be something that would really get us back on track.

What happened? What happened with that plan? What we saw in the Auditor General's report were obstacles that were put up, these “take it or leave it” offers for claims that were done with very little interaction with the first nations. There were significant unilateral cuts in funding to the first nations claimants for claims preparation and negotiation, and then very little use of mediation and negotiation, the very tool that I would think would have gone into the Justice at Last programming. We didn't choose mediation; in fact, we fell back on having to use the justice system, which already was problematic and expensive.

Why did we not use mediation right from the get-go?

5:10 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

I don't have an explanation as to why mediation wasn't used more frequently. I can put forward, I guess, a host of different issues that I think were there. It fundamentally comes down to whether or not the government at the time saw that as a viable tool for resolving claims, just as it last did—

5:10 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

Could you just repeat that for us, Mr. Wild?

5:10 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

Sure—

5:10 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

We had this program, Justice at Last, that was specifically set up to use mediation, but that maybe there was a political decision.

5:10 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

I'm not saying necessarily that there was a political decision; I'm saying that I think there has been....

I'm not trying to promote this as an excuse—I want to be clear about that—but I'm not sure that the culture of the government was ready for what it would mean to go down the path of using mediation. I think this has been a sticky point. There's a long learning curve, in that it's not a tool that people within the public service are necessarily comfortable with when talking about claims that have, at their core, compensation.

We are trying to find a way to become more comfortable using mediation, and there is work being done around looking at what we need to do to train public servants so that they better understand how to use the tool.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

Okay.

5:15 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

The best way I can put it, I guess, is that there's a culture change issue that we have to unpack and get our hands wrapped around.

Again, I'm not trying to put this out as an excuse. I think it's taking us time to get there.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

I understand that. I appreciate what you're saying.

I'd like to go to Mr. Ferguson, then, to just give us an idea.

Part of our function here is of course to review how the public monies are spent. Mr. Ferguson, could we have a quantifiable estimate of how much time and money would have been saved if INAC were using more of a mediation approach, as was originally intended?

5:15 p.m.

Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Michael Ferguson

Certainly I wouldn't be able to put any estimate on it. You'd have to be able to identify exactly how many of these cases would go to mediation.

One thing I want to point out is that what we were concerned about on mediation was the way the department implemented it. As we say in the audit, they set the mediation service up within the department, so almost by definition the first nations weren't going to see it as an independent way to resolve those differences of opinion. Certainly the—

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes

Mr. Ferguson, I'm sorry—two seconds. The bells have started ringing. I just have to ask my colleagues whether they'll allow us to continue until 5:30.

Is everybody agreed that we continue till 5:30?

5:15 p.m.

Some hon. members

Agreed.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes

Thank you very much.

5:15 p.m.

Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Michael Ferguson

That was our concern. We felt that by virtue of their setting up the mediation service within the department, whether it was actually independent or not, the first nations weren't going to perceive the mediation service as independent.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

Okay. That's very interesting.

How much time is left?

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes

You have a minute and a half.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC

Okay. I'll give it to my colleague T.J.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

TJ Harvey Liberal Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Thank you.

I always believe that you can't evaluate what you don't measure. Paragraph 6.56 of the Auditor General's report says:

We found that Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada had a process to consider the impact of decisions from the Specific Claims Tribunal, but was unable to provide us with evidence that it had a formal process to identify improvements and make required changes. We also found no evidence that the Department improved the specific claims process by using formal feedback from internal and external parties on the specific claims process or information regarding First Nations’ concerns about this process.

If you go to the recommendations, the report clearly lays out what the recommendation is, but it says that the expected final date of completion is “ongoing”.

My concern with that assertion is that this has been ongoing since 1948, and we're still not gathering the appropriate information. If we haven't gathered it in the last three-quarters of a century, what are the odds that we're going to gather it in the next 12 to 15 months? It says that it's a “key interim milestone” of fall 2017.

I love these recommendations in reports. Mr. Christopherson knows that I love my dates. I like firm dates, like October 31 or December 1—definitive times at which we're going to have key measurable objectives that we're going to get to.

I want to know whether you want to reflect on this and what you think the appropriate timeline is to start gathering the information that's needed to move forward.

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes

Mr. Harvey, you have 30 seconds, please, for an answer.

5:15 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

Are you asking us, or are you asking the Auditor General?

5:15 p.m.

Liberal

TJ Harvey Liberal Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Do you want the Auditor General to put a timeline together for you? Do you think that's something the department should do?

5:15 p.m.

Representative, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Joe Wild

I'm sorry. I didn't understand the end of the question, that's all. Just to make sure that I'm following which recommendation you're talking about, are you talking about paragraph 6.66?