Evidence of meeting #60 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 employees.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Canada Border Services Agency
I have some updated information, if I may, Mr. Chair.
President, Canada Border Services Agency
Completion rates have improved since the time frame of the audit. As the Auditor General himself said, this was at a point in time, so on any one given day you're never going to see 100%. But that said, as of March 31, 90.5% of officers have completed the values, ethics and disclosure of wrongdoing course, up from 60% in the report.
Seventy-two percent have completed the security awareness course, up from 58% in the report. For superintendents, 92.9% have completed the values, ethics and disclosure of wrongdoing course, and 62.9% have completed the security awareness course.
I would also mention that in addition, last October we promulgated a new course on insider threats, a mandatory course. As of March 31, 60% of my employees have competed that course.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
That's proof positive that the Auditor General public accounts system works. Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Christopherson, for that vote of confidence.
Ms. Mendès.
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to make a little comment, and this is not for theatre.
I do take objection, Mr. Ossowski, to the comment on maternity leave. Why would you give maternity leave as an example and not sick leave period? That just puts it on women.
President, Canada Border Services Agency
Well, it's just a simple fact. You could be off for a year and you wouldn't get captured.
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
You could be on sick leave too. It's just part of the mentality to put it on women to be at fault for whatever is....
President, Canada Border Services Agency
Well, I might just add that I took parental leave when my son was born.
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
I'm sorry. It just rubbed me the wrong way.
If I may go back to my comments on immigration, my favourite topic, of course, could I ask you what progress has been made with online applications for temporary visa permits? I know this has been going on for over 10 years. The Auditor General has looked at this numerous times. We still don't have it. Whereas Australia has a phenomenal system, a very efficient and quick system for temporary visas issued online, we're still not there. I'm asking the question because it takes out a lot of the arbitrary controls that people have when issuing visas or making decisions on visas.
Conservative
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
No, but it sort of falls out of it, because it takes away all the involvement by people in the decision-making.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
I'll start, and then Mr. Orr may want to add to what I'm saying.
One of the things we did this year was to put in place the electronic travel authorization for travellers who do not require visas—and that is a fully electronic system. It's a light touch. It allows us to push out the border and provides a platform for future initiatives in this vein. Two things are at play here. One is allowing online applications, but the other is more automatic processing, and I think the question, Mr. Chair, goes to both of them.
With respect to lighter touch processing, our ETA is like the front end of the Australian visa system, which provides one electronic input, but then the visa itself can be more or less time consuming, depending on the triage it goes through. We're not there yet. We still have a visa system that requires decision-makers to look at visas, so we're not quite where the Australians are, but the Australians also have a back end to what the person who's applying sees, which does involve people having a look at those that are triaged into their more visa-like visa, as opposed to their more ETA-like visa.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
I don't have any other questions from our members.
I do have a question for our Auditor General, or perhaps for other department heads. Our Auditor General has done this audit, and I know we've talked about international professional standards. I guess that other countries undoubtedly look at the same types of information you looked at in this audit.
How would we stack up in comparison to some of those countries that are undoubtedly auditing the same types of things?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, we didn't do it in this specific case. It's always difficult to do because we can't audit the numbers of any other country we are comparable to. The best that we would be able to do on a lot of these things would be to try to determine whether another country is reporting numbers in a similar fashion, and then we have to be able to determine whether we could rely on it.
Again, I would give the example of our going through the 19 million records of vehicles that came across the border and identifying the anomalies in the database. That's not the type of information that we're going to see other countries reporting—and even at that, it was the function of the audit that identified that sort of problem in the way the information was being captured.
Overall, while the comment made earlier was that the results were not bad, what we were looking at here is a critically important area. I think when I look at this audit overall, I'm very concerned about the results that we found, including the missed lookouts or there not being an appropriate rationale for issuing temporary resident permits, or the 300,000 vehicles coming across the border, or not having all the mandatory training done. I'm very concerned about all of those things.
I think the good part of this is that every one of the things we found is fixable, and fixable fairly quickly. The departments can look at the types of information we looked at and can give you updates, and we've already seen progress on mandatory training. It's difficult for us to make that comparison with other jurisdictions.
I think the issues that we identified, including the instances of controls not being followed, are very concerning, as opposed to a lot of different audits where we will come here and report problems that, quite frankly, are very difficult to fix. In this case there are a number of issues we've identified that can be fixed very quickly, and some probably already have.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
That's good news, I guess. I fully understand what you're saying. You are concerned about the numbers, but the problems are fixable and we see action, as shown by Mr. Ossowski, already with increased numbers of people having received their mandatory training on some of these issues.
I have a wife and a daughter who are registered nurses. It seems there are always updates, seminars, or conferences they're required to attend, or they're always dealing with safety or health-related issues. Although these are mandatory, do you have similar types of things where you remind some of these guys abroad that although they've done their mandatory training, they need to be refreshed on it?
President, Canada Border Services Agency
Thank you. That's an excellent point, Mr. Chair.
I believe those regular conversations that you have at the beginning of shifts and/or conversations between a director or a port manager and his staff talking about values, ethics, and leadership are just as important as any online training or courses that you might attend. It's the reminder. It's the constant narrative about the importance of values and ethics.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
One of the things we are really excited about in our new professional conduct standard is the monthly plan for each program manager. Every three months out of 12 we have required supplementary training related to fraud, values and ethics, and codes of conduct. The idea is that the program manager will tailor that training to the needs of that particular mission.
I was at one mission where, as part of their training, the locally employed staff did skits on values and ethics issues that could come up in their work and how they would deal with them. So they are communicating with one another about the issues that could arise and how they would address them. That's just one example.
Our goal is to require the manager to do it systematically but to utilize the knowledge of the locally engaged and the Canadian-based staff to do it in a way that makes sense for that environment.
Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
I want to add that we also offer training for heads of missions before they leave Canada. One of the things we reinforce with them is the importance of values, ethics, fraud, and creating an environment of well being, looking at the mental health of employees and making sure that employees are allowed to raise, and feel confident raising, any issues with mission heads if they see anything happening. This is done very collaboratively with other federal departments.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you.
I want to re-emphasize what Mr. Chen said. As members of Parliament, we continually get individuals coming in whose family members have been denied a visa. There are all types of accusations made about fraud, or about employees hired in some countries whom the relatives weren't willing to pay, or who weren't willing to do those things. Your being here today is very important, so that we all understand we are committed to a standard that is above reproach. It's just part of what we have to communicate better and work toward.
I want to thank our Auditor General for this audit, and each one of you for your responses to it. Typically, to be quite frank, departments show up and rubber-stamp the report and check all the boxes and say they accept all of the recommendations of our Auditor General.
We do follow up on them, and so we are pleased already. I can tell that we've seen some improvement in some of these numbers on mandatory training. Hopefully, when we come back to this in a few months, we'll continue to see improvements.
Thank you all for being here.
The meeting is adjourned.