Public Accounts Committee on March 10th, 2016

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Exactly. I think this idea that organizations can put forward financial plans for approval at Treasury Board, which are ultimately voted on by Parliament in the estimates, and if they fail, they can come forward and say it's really not their fault that they broke their commitments, because the problem is that Parliament didn't give them more money than they asked for....

When you put forward a business case and you say you're going to save the money, it's your organization's job to save that money. It is not the job of the political level of government to reach into the taxpayer's pocket and find you an extra $56 million to meet the mandate that you failed to meet.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Parker.

[Ron Parker]

Chair, just to clarify in regard to the earlier member's comment, we cannot speculate about whether or not there was anything other than the business case behind this $50-million reduction.

In response to the member's comment about taking responsibility for the miss in savings, the department is taking responsibility for the miss in savings. It has reprioritized as required to stay within the levels of funding approved by Parliament.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

That's good, because the last thing we want is to signal to government agencies that if they fail to meet the financial commitments that they put in their own business cases, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer are going to just come to the rescue. In the real world that's not how it works. You go into the business world and you say, “Oh, I'm sorry, I missed the deadlines that I committed to in a contract and it's going to cost an extra $56 million. Can you spare that extra change?” You'd be laughed out of business. So I think that the government did exactly the right thing in insisting that the fiscal plan presented in the business plan be honoured.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Poilievre.

Ms. Shanahan, please.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I don't know in what world plans are actual results. That's the whole purpose of budgeting, having a plan, then having a follow-up assessment to compare with actual results, and then making decisions accordingly. That's where I want to go. Going forward, what is your internal evaluation process? What does that look like? I think we had a little taste of it earlier, but I would like to understand it more in conjunction.... I'm not a big deadline person; I'm a results person. I want to see this work.

[Ron Parker]

In terms of internal governance, there are many aspects. We have a senior management board that reviews all of the business plans and all of the projects on a regular basis. We have procurement review boards and we have project review boards that all feed up into the senior management.

We also have our internal audit function that is launching what we're calling systems under development real-time audits to help guide us through this so that we're not looking through the rear-view mirror as much as you would in a normal audit. They will be working with the teams and reporting to me on what they're finding in terms of accomplishments of goals or areas of risk that we need to deal with.

The audit team also is supplemented by the departmental audit and evaluation committee that receives the regular audit reports and with whom we share all of the ongoing affairs of the department. We seek their advice on the transformation projects and other areas that have been audited as well.

Moreover, we have four major projects. The Treasury Board reviews with regular frequency all of the major IT projects that we're running, and there is a regular annual report that we provide to Treasury Board as well on the transformation plan.

There is, up through all of the various levels, quite a system of governance and review.

[John Glowacki Jr.]

I'll add very quickly that we changed the organization's structure strategically one year ago in April. We are now very much organized like a business, where we have service lines where all the costs and all the interdependencies—everything—rolls in to one specific person. We have a single point of accountability that didn't exist before one year ago. When you have that and then it rolls into the governance Ron was talking about, things don't fall through the cracks as they did before. We have a much better picture than we did previously.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Okay, that's encouraging to hear, but every once in a while things do fall through the cracks, so now I'd like to hear from Mr. Messina what the Treasury Board will be doing to more than just review. We're counting on your department to keep an eye on this and ask those hard questions, because otherwise, it ends up in Mr. Ferguson's camp.

[John Messina]

Mr. Parker touched on a couple of things.

I think first of all, as I mentioned previously, having the IT strategic plan in place will really help Shared Services Canada in terms of its mandate and all departments understanding what it is we're trying to accomplish with them, and there will be a lot of collaboration as a result of that.

The second point, as Mr. Parker highlighted, is that we do provide oversight, and it will be on those major transformation initiatives. It is more than oversight in the sense that the teams participate on the governance committees. We will see if there are any issues and we'll address them right away, because they'll be escalated through the governance committees.

The other thing I would add is that we are working quite closely with Shared Services Canada on the revised transformation plan to ensure that we're also comfortable with the implementation of that, which will be a much more proactive situation as opposed to reacting when there are issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

According to the clock on the wall, our time is up.

I want to thank you for being here today, but I also want to make this fairly clear that we as a committee would like to see these plans. The Treasury Board needs to complete its IT strategic plan by March 31. I don't know if there's any need to send it to us until it's approved, because as a committee, we want to receive this thing in June.

As soon as that thing is approved, could you send us the plan, approved?

Now to Shared Services, this fall I think there's kind of a timeline for you in regard to the transformation plan. I may have these plan names wrong, but there are certain benchmarks that we expect, and we're going to follow up on this.

I'm speaking without the full committee meeting on this, but you can pretty well expect to be called back here within eight or nine months. Yes, you've given us your plan on time, and yes we have received the transformation plan on time, but how is it going now?

We have appreciated this, and I know how complex this is, and when you have complexities like this, there are problems, but we expect, the taxpayers expect and Parliament expects that we will see goals laid out that are achievable, and that you've met them. We know what the ultimate goal might be, but we want to see some achievable goals on the way to that.

Thank you very much, all of you, for being here today.

Give our best wishes to the secretary—

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

Chair, if I may, could we have a date for the fall, like October 31?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

They will hear from us; it will probably be about November.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

It would be wonderful if we could have it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We will get back to you.

Please wish a speedy recovery to the secretary of the Treasury Board on our behalf.

Thank you very much for being here.

We are adjourned.