Public Accounts Committee on Feb. 13th, 2018

[Marta Morgan]

It would depend on whether the services they were linked up with by the families that sponsored them were services that were funded by IRCC through our service provider organizations, but it's hard for us to tell for any individual family. We are the major service provider of language training services, for example, for immigrants and refugees across the country through our service provider organizations.

The other thing we find is that privately sponsored refugees tend to come with better language skills and language ability in English, for example. That's one of the reasons why, overall, as a pattern, we see that they tend to avail themselves less of the services we provide.

Yes, those are the only services that are referenced here in this report.

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

Would you do an audit, or would you have any information to do a follow-up with the privately sponsored families to ask if they get language services, or do you just not collect that information?

[David Manicom]

Privately sponsored refugees do access our language services, and those are captured here. If privately sponsored refugees receive, for example, informal language assistance from a sponsor, that would not be captured here. People who access our funded services, however they get to them—through a private sponsor linking them or through the government directly—are captured here. However, this does not capture, for example, a volunteer assisting a refugee with informal language training or assisting in other ways. That would not be captured here.

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

Nor would it be if the family or somebody else paid somebody to teach, outside of the service providers you have. My point is that it really highlights the opportunity for gaps in the system if we don't actually know the real information at the back end. You know what your service providers are telling you, but you don't know the actual information on the ground.

I'll move to a second question.

In the internal audit, have there been any evaluations or comparisons with other countries in terms of how the resettlement services we are providing, the percentages, etc., align with other countries, which, most of the time, have been taking in many more refugees than Canada has?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Manicom, go ahead.

[David Manicom]

It's a very broad question, sir. As far as resettling refugees goes, there is only one country in the world that resettles more refugees than Canada does, and that's the United States. That is perhaps changing. I believe that what international studies there are show that resettled refugees in Canada integrate better with regard to employment, with low use of social assistance, and particularly with the educational outcomes of their children, compared to those in other countries. It's a very broad question.

I don't know if Mr. Kiziltan has anything to add.

[Ümit Kiziltan, Director General, Research and Evaluation, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

I'll comment just very quickly on the second question. Our services, in terms of both outreach to the resettled refugees and the quality of the services, based on OECD assessments, are always superior to those of the rest of the OECD countries overall, including those for asylum claimants who receive services from Germany or other countries where they access similar services to those we offer here to resettled refugees.

The other thing to register, related to the previous question but also to this one, is that when we did our rapid impact evaluation in August or September 2016, and we asked privately sponsored refugees and government-assisted refugees about language classes, we saw that about 40% of privately sponsored refugees, when asked why they were not taking language classes, would say that they didn't need to improve their English or French. These are very representative survey statistics. As Deputy Morgan stated, their levels are high. Another 40% would say, “I'm working”. About 50% were already working around August or September 2016, among the privately sponsored refugees. There were various reasons why they were behaving that way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, sir.

We'll now move to Mr. Christopherson for seven minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

As these things go, it's a pretty good audit. You know I'm a hard marker, and I tried to get something a little less than “pretty good”. However, all things considered, I think it is.

I have a couple of thoughts. First of all, this file had the benefit of being an absolute top priority for the new government, so it was getting a lot of attention. However, having been involved in the transition from one government to another, you don't have any systems in place. There are no mechanisms for any kind of routine or “We'll pick it up at this point with these people.”

The absence of that meant that an awful lot had to fall to the staff, to the public service, and I want to compliment them. You rose to the occasion. You were there to meet the need of an incoming government, regardless of the party, and you assisted them with a critically important, difficult, stressful file without a lot of political guidance.

I want to compliment you, Deputy, and all of your people, because you served us well. You did a good job. You really did.

I also want to give a shout-out to my former colleague Mr. McCallum, because my instincts tell me that along the way some pretty sophisticated political judgment needed to be made, again, without the usual processes and second and third looks, so compliments there.

I'm also mindful of Bob Rae, who liked to say, when he became premier, that becoming premier and learning how to do the job was like learning how to play the violin in public. He is a funny guy, and again, compliments there.

At the risk of being completely uncharacteristic, I want to add more compliments. I don't normally comment. They're supposed to do their job, and if they don't, I come down on them. However, this is really good. It's a great action plan. It looks like you went a step beyond, and I'm impressed. Usually at this point I say, “Having said that” and turn the artillery to something, but really I don't have much artillery.

I have a few questions, though.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Who has kidnapped David Christopherson?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I went one step too far and now you know it's not really me. Or is it?

I have a simple question. On page 12 of the report, at paragraph 3.63, the Auditor General says, “We found that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not establish service expectations”. I must be missing something, because I can't imagine that you'd be giving people money without telling them what you expect for it.

Can somebody help me here, please?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Ms. Morgan, go ahead.

[Marta Morgan]

Mr. Chair, first of all, I would like to thank the member for his appreciation. I was not the deputy minister at the time of the Syrian refugee initiative when most of the heavy lifting was done, and I wish that Anita Biguzs were here today to hear this. I'm sure she would really appreciate it.

However, David is with me, and he was one of the lead ADMs on the initiative, as was Dawn Edlund, our associate assistant deputy minister of operations. We do appreciate it. It really was a big lift for the department, and one of those seminal lifetime events, I think, for everyone who was involved with it.

We are committed to implementing the action plan that has been set out and has been provided to the committee. It was very helpful for us in terms of providing us with insights into what we can do better.

On the issue of service expectations, we certainly do have descriptions of the services that we expect will be provided, and we have now put in place service expectations for language training that are quite detailed. I think one of the challenges for a national program that is this broad and diverse is having a consistent set of expectations across all the various organizations that deliver the programs in various circumstances.

One of the commitments we've made in the action plan is to clarify our service expectations in other areas of programming that we currently undertake, such as welcome and orientation, and to roll that out over the next six to 12 months as we update our contribution agreements.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's a good answer.

Moving on, page 15 has the outcomes monitoring framework. One of the things I've learned from my many years at this table—and it applies to a lot of things in life—is that the more work you do ahead of time, the better the result is. You do as much of that thinking as you can ahead of time. I thought you did a really good job of going through this and attempting to get it right, but you didn't quite. When I read it through, my thinking was that you clearly did what should be done. You pulled all these people together and said, “We need to get a handle on being able to measure how this is unfolding in the short, medium, and long term. What are some of our gauges going to be, and how are we going to do that?” You did that through periods one through three, but clearly that wasn't enough. You still didn't catch it all.

I'd like you, Madam Morgan, followed by Madam Cheng, to give us your thoughts on how you can improve this for next time. Clearly, you did the right thing; it just wasn't as thorough as it could have been. Is there something that could systemically be put in place? Was there a department missing? Was there some obvious reason? When you're doing something this comprehensive at the beginning, and you're doing it right, what can you do to improve it so you get it to be as thorough as possible?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Ms. Morgan, go ahead.

[Marta Morgan]

One of the things we are really excited about is the potential for data linkage. One of the reasons we have such excellent data on the economic outcomes of immigrants of various sorts who come to Canada, including refugees, is that Mr. Kiziltan and his staff have worked very closely with Statistics Canada to enable us to link immigration and tax files anonymously in order to do that kind of evaluation and outcomes monitoring. This year, we are putting in place similar agreements with Ontario and British Columbia on the health side, as well as with New Brunswick and Manitoba, which will enable us to link up our immigration data with health data and get that kind of information.

My own view is that part of the secret sauce here is having those linkages and those datasets available already, so that they're there. Then, when you have new initiatives like this, you can test against existing benchmarks. It takes a while for departments to develop really good data that's reliable and that's linked up, particularly when working across governments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Morgan.

We'll now move to Mr. Lefebvre.

Mr. Lefebvre, you have the floor for seven minutes.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Christopherson and Madam Mendès expressed a lot of our admiration for the work you've done during this whole challenging and impressive process. I won't be as partisan as Mr. Christopherson was, but there are a lot of good things in this report from the Auditor General, and, as Mr. Christopherson also mentioned, there are a few things we should learn from.

I want to ask you guys a few more questions on the practical side. In my riding of Sudbury, we were also very fortunate to be able to host and to have private sponsors. We were not selected to have government-sponsored refugees. One of the question a lot of my volunteers in the area would always ask was whether the government-sponsored refugees in larger centres were getting better services than privately sponsored refugees in other centres across Canada, such as the more rural areas.

What is your perception as to the delivery of services for privately sponsored refugees compared to government-sponsored refugees? I'd like to hear from you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Lefebvre.

Mr. Manicom, go ahead.

[David Manicom]

In Canada, we have rightly taken a very broad-based community approach to settlement services. We have 700 service providers, which means we have service provision of various sorts not only in the metropolitan areas, but also in smaller communities. It is certainly more challenging in rural communities and very small towns to provide the full range of services that refugees in particular may need. That's why we don't generally resettle government-sponsored refugees in small communities.

We have 27 or 28 localities across Canada where we resettle government-assisted refugees, because we feel they can access—either through us or through the provinces—mental health supports, anti-family violence counselling, employment bridging, language training, and so forth, whatever they may need. Privately sponsored refugees go where the private sponsors live, and they have access to the community support and knowledge that their private sponsors bring to them, which overall produces even better settlement outcomes.

As for government-funded settlement services, it would be incorrect to say that they are as complete and as comprehensive in every small part of Canada. We are continuing to extend our reach through online-based language training and through rural strategies to link service providers in a region to each other, but it would be accurate to say that we still have work to do in that regard.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

That leads me to my next question. How do we collect the data in these outlying areas when they are privately sponsored refugees? Obviously, if they're government-sponsored, it's easier to follow and monitor. If they are privately sponsored, how do we collect the data, and how reliable is it?

[David Manicom]

How we collect data for those who access our services is relatively straightforward. We have an electronic system into which we require our service providers to enter data directly, as part of the contribution agreements. The harder part is measuring those who are not our clients.

Going forward, the gold standard on outcomes measurement will be our ability to have true comparators between the outcomes that we pay for and how those who aren't accessing our services are doing, and therefore identify gaps in services.

Information sharing agreements with the provinces will also help us with the information coming back to us. How many new arrivals are there actually living in town X or Y in a given province? Medical service data from the provinces is the best way to know exactly how many new arrivals who aren't coming to see us there are, and where.

That is a promising way in the future, but it is a gap for us, absolutely.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

I have to say that the relationship between the provinces and the federal government on this is certainly something we should be repeating at other levels of government. With regard to the exchange of information, there is a lot of potential there to ensure better services across the board, across Canada.

How much time do I have, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have two minutes.