Public Accounts Committee on May 5th, 2022

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much. I think that's important to note for public service employees.

I want to turn to my last area of questioning.

I grew up in northern Alberta. I know the territories quite well. I spent many a time in the Northwest Territories. In the Northwest Territories, of course, there is oversight by the Auditor General to the systems there.

This last year, between 2020 and 2021, there were zero audits, zero performance audits for any of the territories. Can you explain why?

[Karen Hogan]

I will look to Andrew to add, but I do believe it's just a timing issue, to be quite honest.

There was some difficulty in the territories in converting to virtual hearings, so there were delays in some of the reports. We did not stop. We still do at least one performance audit in every territory every year. In fact, we have one territory where we're going to be doing a couple in the coming year.

I believe it was just a timing issue.

Andrew, am I correct in that?

[Andrew Hayes]

Yes. I can just add that there were also some territorial elections—

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

No, it can't be every year. I'm sorry, but I just want to correct the record there. It's not every year. The record shows that from 2020 to 2021 there were no audits, so it's not every year.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Give a very brief answer, please.

[Andrew Hayes]

In each territory we try to have at least one performance audit every year. In terms of the reasons there might not have been audits in particular territories, sometimes it's related to elections that happen or delays, for whatever reason.

In the context of the pandemic, I will say that the ability of our office to go and visit the territories was affected. That's a very important element of those northern audits, because of the particular circumstances faced by the people up there.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

I will turn now to Mr. Patzer.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you very much.

To the Auditor General, in your comments and in here, you talk a lot about the digital transformation that's ongoing in your office. I'm wondering if you can update the committee. When did the digital transformation begin? When do you project it to be completed?

[Karen Hogan]

I'm happy to talk about the transformation. It actually started once we knew that we were going to be receiving additional funding. The transformation is a large one across the organization.

As you may recall, when we were looking for funding over the years, when we.... We didn't have money. We diverted resources from investing in our IT solutions, so a big part of our digital transformation will be IT-solution based. It is really about what we do, how we do it and how IT and data will help support the work we do.

We're looking at our processes and how we report. It is so much bigger than just IT solutions. Expenditures have started, but I expect that the majority of them, which will be IT-solution based, will be longer into the future, probably two or three years out before we see some significant investments there. It's already started, as I say. We're replacing our software now for working papers, and we've done a lot of work on our cybersecurity. There have been investments throughout the year.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Do you think that this investment is going to help increase your productivity going forward so that we'll get more reports per dollar spent?

[Karen Hogan]

That is absolutely the intention. Some of the money right now has been foundational. We needed to make sure that our information and our systems remained secure. It is about stabilizing some of it, replacing and decommissioning legacy systems and then setting us up to bring on new tools that will make us more efficient and effective.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you.

In your new mission and vision statement from 2020, it states that you'll be building connections with stakeholders, and you say that the stakeholders are Parliament, the people of Canada and the entities that you audit.

How do you plan to reach out and build those connections with each of these different stakeholders? We'll start with the people of Canada. How do you plan to make that connection?

[Karen Hogan]

One of the items to make connections with Canada, as I mentioned, is opening up an area on our website for Canadians to submit their concerns and thoughts about topics that we can audit. I have a senior panel of advisers who usually provide me advice on areas to audit and on messaging, and it's my intention to have that committee membership expanded and changed a little so that it represents Canada a bit better. We'll have representation across the country.

I expect that all of our audit teams will engage with the individuals we audit who represent Canadians and that, together, will bring all of that back to inform our work and how we operate going forward.

That would be Canadians. If you'd like me to talk about MPs, as I mentioned, I started having discussions with many senators, which had not been done for many years, across the organizations. We have met with senator groups individually over the last year. I am doing my best to do outreach with parliamentary committees.

Mr. DeMarco, our commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, is doing a tremendous amount of outreach on his side of things, so he might want to speak to some of that as well.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I'm just going to quickly interject there. I want to go back to this digital transformation issue. We're seeing a lot of people right now working from home. Obviously people have had to do that over the last couple of years with the pandemic. We all get that and we understand that.

I'm just wondering if you're going to be auditing the performance of the department, though, over those couple of years to determine how productive people were working from home and going forward, because we realize and know that a lot of people will continue to be working from home.

Are you going to be focusing on the performance of people as they work from home versus working in the previous arrangements they had?

[Karen Hogan]

Right now it's not our intention to devote an audit to the productivity of public servants. It's definitely something we could consider as we look at individual programs when we go in and audit them. We don't have intentions to have an audit on productivity throughout the pandemic.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Do you think, for helping to make sure that we have more audits going forward...? You have the funding you were looking for, but as was alluded to earlier, the number of reports hasn't necessarily risen accordingly.

I know you mentioned that, in a couple of years when you have the digital transformation completed, it will help your productivity and hopefully the department's productivity, but I'm just wondering. If we're not getting the bang for the buck with people working from home, I hope that's something we're going to consider looking at to make sure that we do get the best performance.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

I'm going to allow the auditor to provide a brief answer to that, please.

Go ahead, Ms. Hogan.

[Karen Hogan]

My brief answer would be that you can measure the value of money invested in our organization in many ways, and it's not just in the number of audit reports. One audit report could be very large, for example, the efforts on Bill C-2 that we will do. If we do that, it would probably be seven or eight individual audits, but it will come out as one.

I caution just calculating the number and not necessarily looking at the impact of the value in other ways.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Our last member is Mr. Fragiskatos.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Ms. Hogan, in looking at the departmental review, I notice that homelessness will be a future focus of the office.

How will the role of other levels of government be taken into account in future work, considering the fact that other levels of government play such a pivotal role in responding to that challenge?

[Karen Hogan]

You raise a challenge that we see in many of our audits. We saw it throughout some of the pandemic audits, and we're definitely seeing it in our homelessness audit.

When there is that need for collaboration and coordination amongst different levels of governments, our ability to tackle some of those issues is strained because we can only look at the efforts of the federal government and where federal money is being used. It is an ongoing challenge, but it shouldn't deter us from looking at really important topics like homelessness.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you for that.

I know that you have a constrained ability there. This is not an instruction at all, but simply an observation. I think when the public looks at something like homelessness, which is inherently challenged, to put it mildly, there is a need to understand it as something that various levels of government have the responsibility to address. I would hope—if it's not an instruction, it is a hope maybe—that future reports really acknowledge the fact that other levels of government have very pivotal roles to play from a jurisdictional perspective in terms of the Canadian federation and how it operates.

You know very well that the provincial and municipal governments are much more responsible in terms of dealing with the issue, although the federal government, considering its fiscal abilities, is in a very special place to assist and the national housing strategy has been at play and yielded good results. But we certainly need to see more.

I also want to ask you to shift focus. The greening government commitment is what I want to look at. On low-carbon executive vehicles, how this policy has been used, and also, in using the Treasury Board of Canada's green meeting guide, what sorts of things do you do differently to hold green meetings?

I ask that question simply because, if we here on Parliament Hill and government as whole are making the point to the Canadian public about the importance of addressing climate change, I think there's a need for the public to look to Ottawa and see exactly what is happening in terms of action here.

[Karen Hogan]

I might turn to Lissa Lamarche to help me out with this answer if I don't go as far as you'd like me to go, but I do thank you, first off, for your hope. I think that both Jerry DeMarco and I have heard you, because even climate change is an area where so many layers of government and every single individual plays a role, so thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.

When it comes to greening meetings, like most organizations, we've all done a great job at it since many of us are staying home and not gathering together. A lot of our efforts that we had planned actually didn't materialize, because we're not in the office together.

Prior to the pandemic, though, we were working very hard at making sure that people would bring their own utensils and glasses and that anything we used at a meeting might be compostable. We were always trying to do our part from that perspective on greening our meetings, but I think that, virtually, we've all done a real big part now.

I don't know if you'd like Lissa to add anything more to your questions on that front.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

With time permitting, if there is a desire to add to that and if a colleague wishes to, sure, that would be great.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

There is time. We have about 45 seconds.