Public Accounts Committee on Feb. 13th, 2018

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good afternoon, everyone. This is meeting number 87 of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

We welcome all of you here today. We remind you that we are televised. If you have a cellphone or any type of mechanical device, we would encourage you to please shut it off or put it on silent mode so we'll have less interruption.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108, we are looking at report 3, “Settlement Services for Syrian Refugees—Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada”, of the fall 2017 reports of the Auditor General of Canada, referred to the committee on Tuesday, November 21, 2017.

We're very pleased to have with us today, from the Office of the Auditor General, Nancy Cheng, assistant auditor general; as well as Nicholas Swales, principal.

From the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, we're happy to have the deputy minister, Marta Morgan; David Manicom, assistant deputy minister, settlement and integration; and Ümit Kiziltan, director general, research and evaluation.

We welcome you here today.

We will begin with Ms. Cheng.

[Nancy Cheng, Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our audit of settlement services for Syrian refugees. As you mentioned, joining me at the table is Nicholas Swales. He is the principal responsible for this audit.

In 2015, the Government of Canada committed to help bring approximately 47,000 Syrian refugees to Canada over two years. As of April 30, 2017, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada reported that almost 45,000 Syrian refugees had arrived in Canada since November 2015. This number is three times higher than the average number of refugees who have been admitted to Canada every year since 1995.

This audit looked at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada's $257-million initiative to help Syrian refugees settle in Canada. The audit focused on whether Syrian refugees received selected settlement services funded by the Department that were needed to help them integrate into Canada. It also examined whether the department measured the outcomes of its efforts to settle Syrian refugees.

This audit is important because the Syrian refugee initiative will succeed in the long term only if the people it brought to Canada integrate into Canadian society.

In the area of delivering settlement services, we found that most Syrian refugees received needs analysis, language assessments, and language training during their first year in Canada. More than 80% had their needs assessed, and 75% of those who received language assessments attended language classes.

We also found that the department identified the settlement services that Syrian refugees needed, and allocated funding to the organizations that offered these services. The department increased funding for services when it determined that refugees arriving under the initiative needed more settlement services than expected.

However, the department did not allocate all of the additional funds early enough in 2017 to meet the needs of the service providers. The purpose of these funds was to sustain additional settlement services established in 2016. When they did not receive funding, some service providers cut settlement services for at least three months.

In the area of managing information for decision-making, we found Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not have sufficient information to efficiently manage language training wait-lists for Syrian refugees. It also lacked information to ensure the consistent delivery of services to Syrian refugees in all regions. Although the Department expected the Syrian refugees to receive a standard and consistent level of service across the country, many of the contribution agreements we examined contained no service expectations.

These findings matter because many of the Syrian refugees who arrived in Canada needed extensive settlement services. It was therefore important for the government to have accurate and timely information about the demand for language training, and for it to set clear expectations for the services it funded to ensure that those services would meet the needs of clients.

Finally, in the area of measuring outcome, we found that although the department had developed a strategy for measuring the integration of Syrian refugees into Canada, it did not collect information from the provinces for some important indicators, such as access to health care providers and school attendance.

The department is responsible for promoting the successful integration of permanent residents into Canada. To assess whether the Syrian refugees are successfully integrating into Canadian society, the department needs to know that they have access to provincial services.

We are pleased to report that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has agreed with our recommendations.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Cheng.

Now we'll move to Ms. Morgan, please.

[Marta Morgan, Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting me to address this committee today on the issue of settlement services for Syrian refugees.

Since November 2015, Canada has welcomed more than 50,000 Syrian refugees. As the Auditor General's report highlights, in order to ensure that these newcomers can integrate into their new communities and ultimately succeed in Canada, it is crucial that they have access to the supports they need. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada thanks the Auditor General for his recommendations, which we accept.

The findings of this audit also confirm the results of our own early evaluation and research findings, which overall indicate that Syrians are integrating well and at the same rate as other refugee groups.

As you know, Mr. Chair, through our settlement program, IRCC funds various pre-and post-arrival supports for immigrants and refugees. These services help newcomers to fully participate in the economic, social, civic and cultural life of our country.

Some services are also provided specifically for refugees through the resettlement assistance program, such as meeting the refugee at the airport or port of entry; temporary accommodation; help in finding permanent accommodation; basic household items; and some health supports.

Once refugees and immigrants have arrived, they have access to a number of in-Canada settlement supports that are financed by the department and provided by local service provider organizations. These include language assessments and training; support to build networks in communities, including with other newcomers and community members, public institutions, employers, and community organizations; one-on-one and group mentoring with established immigrants or other Canadians; child and youth leadership and peer support projects; and information, orientation, and help in finding and retaining employment. Other supports, such as child care, transportation assistance, crisis counselling, and provisions for disabilities, are also offered to help newcomers access these various settlement services.

The department is pleased that the Auditor General found that Syrian refugees received a wide variety of these settlement services in their first year in Canada. It's also worth noting that Syrian refugees received settlement services at a higher rate than other refugees who arrived during the same period. Almost 90% of Syrian refugees received needs assessments, and 88% had language assessments. This compares to 80% of non-Syrian refugees who accessed needs assessments, and 78% who accessed language assessments during the same period.

As the committee is aware, the work of the Auditor General resulted in four recommendations for IRCC. These relate to the timely transfer of funding to service providers, service expectations in contribution agreements, the management of language training wait-lists, and updates to our performance measurement strategy. Let me go through these one by one.

First, to support the settlement needs of newcomers outside of Quebec, IRCC is investing approximately $762 million in total in 2018-19. This includes more than $58 million in supplementary funding for the Syrian refugee effort. This represents a 4% increase over 2017-18, and a full 29% increase over the past three years. This includes $25 million for pre-arrival services to ensure that newcomers arrive prepared to settle in their new community, as well as $32 million devoted to service delivery improvement, innovation, and experimentation to continue to find better ways to deliver our services.

To fund the delivery of settlement services across the country outside of Quebec, the department manages more than 700 contribution agreements with more than 500 service provider organizations.

IRCC remains committed to delivering services in a timely manner.

The department will review its practices to see where it can make further improvements to its planning and approval processes, particularly for urgent and unexpected program needs such as the Syrian refugee initiative.

This includes looking at the department's business processes to more effectively manage grants and contributions. The review will also examine the ways we engage and work collaboratively with all stakeholders, as well as provincial and territorial governments, in the delivery of the settlement program.

With respect to the audit's recommendation on language training access, first I wish to note that all refugees have priority access to language services, and this includes an initial assessment.

In 2016-17, IRCC invested more than $27 million to increase language training services for newcomers, including Syrians, at literacy and basic skill levels. Since then, more than 7,000 new language training seats have been added across Canada to meet the needs of Syrian refugees. In addition, more childminding spaces and transportation subsidies have been added to facilitate access to language classes for these clients.

Additionally, to ensure that services kept pace with the arrival of Syrian refugees, service provider organizations that serve a high volume of refugee clients received additional funding to help meet increasing demands.

With respect to outcomes measurement to ensure the integration of Syrian refugees across Canada, IRCC developed a strategy that included a rapid impact evaluation of their early outcomes. As the Auditor General noted, this strategy has not yet been fully implemented, especially with respect to measuring health and education indicators.

IRCC acknowledges that it takes time for all newcomers to integrate in Canada and this is particularly true for refugees, given their unique challenges. In addition to our own efforts to monitor and track the progress of Syrian refugees, research is under way in partnership with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Overall, IRCC is pleased with the progress that the recently arrived Syrian refugees have made to date in their settlement journey. Our evaluation of their early outcomes suggests that this group is already on the right path towards full integration. We look forward to the continuation of such a trend, as we continue to closely monitor their progress and make service delivery and program adjustments as needed.

We expect that Syrian refugees will ultimately succeed in Canada, just as other refugee groups have in the past, needless to say, with the participation of the whole community.

As you know, Mr. Chair, the success of this resettlement initiative was made possible due to the extraordinary support and co-operation of organizations, businesses, governments, and communities, and the compassionate consideration of Canadians. Collectively, they assisted with the arrival of these refugees by helping them get settled and established in their new communities, and in multiple other ways to help them start their integration journey.

The department has taken—and will continue to take—action to ensure that all newcomers, including refugees, are able to access the settlement services they need. But, if we want to ensure these refugees can further integrate and succeed in Canada, continued support from these various players will also be necessary.

My officials and I would be happy to respond to any questions the committee may have.

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

We'll move to the first round of questioning, which is a seven-minute round. We'll go to Mrs. Mendès for seven minutes, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

It's very good to see you back there.

Thank you all for being here.

I was looking forward to this study. First, you deserve congratulations, as you undertook a huge challenge in accepting the government's mandate to increase the number of refugees we were going to welcome in Canada. You delivered on it, in a quite exemplary way, and that is something that Canada can be proud of. However, nothing is perfect in this life, so the Auditor General had some issues to point to.

If you could just contextualize this for us, how many settlement organizations in Canada were involved in the whole process of resettlement, specifically for the Syrian refugees?

[Marta Morgan]

We have ongoing arrangements with about 500 settlement organizations across the country. Of those 500, 129 were involved in the Syrian refugee resettlement.

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

Of those 129, how many were impacted by the delays in funding when they proved to need more funding for the services?

[Marta Morgan]

What happened with the delays in funding was that the second full year of funding was to be extended at the same time as we were renewing all of our agreements with the 500 service provider organizations across the country that provide services to all immigrants and refugees.

We offered to the service provider organizations to front-load their base funding because that was all being negotiated for April 2017 for three-year agreements that we normally use with them. We offered to front-load that, and 88% of the organizations that were involved in the provision of services specifically to Syrian refugees were able to take advantage of that. They agreed to do that in order not to have any service interruptions.

As the Auditor General's report noted, for one reason or another 12% were not able to take advantage of that, or didn't feel comfortable taking advantage of that, and 88% of the organizations that were involved took advantage of our offer to front-load funding and thereby avoid service delivery interruptions.

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

Madam Cheng, do you know why they wouldn't be able to take the offer by the department to front-load the funding? Were there reasons?

[Nancy Cheng]

Do you want to...?

[David Manicom, Assistant Deputy Minister, Settlement and Integration, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

To my knowledge, it varied from organization to organization. For some organizations, their board had different standards of how much they wished to risk-manage their money. They have different financial arrangements. For some of them, the Syrian refugee work is almost all of their operation, and for others it's a small portion. These were individual decisions by each organization.

Because each organization was directed to prioritize refugees in their programming, no refugees were actually adversely affected, to our knowledge.

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

It still confuses me. I worked in the settlement organization milieu for 15 years, and I find it difficult to understand why an organization would not want to front-load the subsidies. I don't quite understand. You know that you have the clients; you have the people who need the services, yet you would risk interrupting the services rather than accepting the front-loading. I'm not getting it.

[Marta Morgan]

It's difficult for us to speak on behalf of the organizations, but I guess what I would say is that the large organizations that deliver the bulk of the services for the most part were able to front-load. As David noted, we didn't really see any impact on the refugee services.

We fund 500 organizations across the country. They are very diverse. It's a very diverse group of organizations. Some are larger. Some are smaller. Some deliver only one kind of settlement program, and others deliver a broad mix and might have more flexibility in terms of their funding models.

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

Ms. Cheng or Mr. Swales, do you have something to add to this?

[Nancy Cheng]

I might ask Mr. Swales to provide some more details.

We finished our audit in June 2017. At the time, what we saw was that, of the 129 organizations, 16 were not prepared to actually do the front-end loading. In essence, some of them actually laid off some of their settlement services, so they did not continue with some of their settlement programs and services. Training programs were cut as a result of some of that.

That's the information that we had at the time of the audit, and it's possible that the department has some additional information beyond the date of the audit, but I'll see if Mr. Swales has anything he wants to add.

[Nicholas Swales, Principal, Office of the Auditor General]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would add that front-loading represented, potentially at least, a risk for the service providers, because essentially what they were being asked to do was to spend against their agreement at a rate that would not allow them to make it through the whole year if they did not get supplemental funding. The risk to them was whether they were going to get the supplemental funding later on, when the agreements started to be renegotiated. That was the risk they were all facing by front-loading, and some said they were not prepared to accept that risk.

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

Okay, didn't we just say that you had negotiated the agreements with them and that they would be getting the three-year agreements signed, or they had been signed?

[Marta Morgan]

To re-emphasize, this was an extraordinary circumstance for the department and for the service provider organizations. We were in the process of renegotiating three-year funding agreements. These are significant agreements that are only renegotiated. In this case, the previous agreements had been extended for a year, so they had been ongoing for four years. We were doing a major renegotiation, plus extending this smaller amount of funding targeted directly at Syrians.

It was an extraordinary situation for the department, and for the service provider organizations as well. They needed to take decisions that suited each one of them within the boundaries of its own risk tolerance and its own management structures, depending on its own programs and what else was going on with it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We'll now move to our second questioner, on the opposition side. Mr. Nuttall, you have seven minutes.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the representatives from Immigration, as well as the Auditor General, for their presentations prior to our opportunity to ask questions.

To Immigration, I can certainly accept that there are going to be gaps and cracks, with the size of the program that was being instituted and the speed with which it needed to be done. I think that everybody around this table would recognize the incredible work that was done to meet a timeline and a goal that were thrust upon you in a very short time period.

I'd like to go to the report itself. On page 10, some bar graphs show the assessments and training, the services being provided, and the difference between government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees. The three sections are needs assessment, language assessment, and language training. Needs assessment is 91% government versus 75% private, language assessment is 85% to 76%, and the actual language training is 82% to 63%.

My question to the immigration officials is, when you're looking at those numbers, are some of the privately sponsored individuals provided services outside of what you would characterize as taking part in your programming or that of organizations you work with?

[David Manicom]

Mr. Kiziltan may have more to add, but this differential access to services is consistent with the general difference we see between government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees. No one is obliged to take our services. We offer them. Privately sponsored refugees, generally speaking—

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Sorry, to be clear, these aren't services overall. These are services provided by your service providers.

[David Manicom]

Yes.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Okay. It says, “Percentage of refugees who received services between November 2015 and March 2017”. When I first read this, I didn't understand that it may exclude people because they are receiving services elsewhere. An audit of this would be the service providers versus....

I'll give you an example. In my riding, a group waited six months. Three different families were trying to come here. The group finally ended up with a Syrian family. As soon as that Syrian family got here, the whole community rallied around them, and they had all the services. It was beautiful to see. I think we all have those experiences. However, they're not on this graph. Is that correct?