Public Accounts Committee on Oct. 25th, 2022

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Desjarlais, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to continue in the vein of Ms. Bradford's questions related to the Canada learning bond. We have some information here related to the deplorable uptake rates for that program. As Ms. Bradford mentioned, it's a seemingly good project for a lot of folks, but there seems to be such little uptake. She asked about the reasons for that, but I want to be a bit more specific on that question in relation to the kinds of folks who are accessing the program.

I'm guessing, largely, that the folks who are accessing this program are accessing it by way of financial institutions. I'm not certain if a member of the CRA or ESDC can mention what the typical access point is for this benefit.

[Atiq Rahman]

Could I jump in, Deputy?

Yes, a financial institution has to be an access point. Families who want to apply for a Canada learning bond have to open an RESP, which can only be opened with a financial institution. That has to be an access point.

For the families who have difficulty doing that, we have about 350 community organizations that we work with to help them open RESP accounts with financial institutions. Sometimes we hold events to bring in our partners from CRA, from financial institutions and from provincial governments to help them open an account. Sometimes they need to apply for a social insurance number, and Service Canada will provide a social insurance number on the spot. There would be members of the financial institutions helping them open an account to facilitate that, but it is true that the access point needs to be a financial institution for the RESP.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much for that very clear and concise answer.

For members of this committee, including me, I think one of the most important facts around financial institutions as the access point is knowing that there isn't an alternative. That's a present issue and a massive barrier to folks who want to access this public program. They'd have to go to another institution, like a financial institution, to get that. I think in some ways that's a barrier that I can immediately see here in relation to these numbers.

To the Auditor General, was that something that you folks looked into—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I'm afraid you're out of time, but you will have another round.

Mr. Genuis, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's an honour for me to be joining the public accounts committee. I grew up during the period of the sponsorship scandal, so the Auditor General was, in my mind, always a celebrity. I know I'm among great people here.

I dug into this audit. It's my first one at this committee. I was very struck by what was in it. It's a study into the ability of the government to get benefits to people who may not be aware of those benefits or may struggle to apply for them, and so forth. The conclusion that I got from it was that we don't really know. We can't really measure. The government has spent a bunch of money in this area, but we can't really figure out if it's working.

It seemed pretty disappointing and borderline scandalous that we recognize that there's this problem, but the government's efforts to address it are not being measured. We have no sense of whether we're progressing towards that objective.

Ms. Hogan, am I correct in my summary of this? Am I missing something? Those were my take-aways from the information you provided us about the lack of measurable results from the government in terms of this money they're spending on trying to do outreach here.

[Karen Hogan]

I think you used different words than the words we used in our report, but the sentiment is absolutely there. The typical recipe reaches the majority of people. Now, if the goal is to try to reach those who are on the edges, those who are harder to reach, who are reluctant to interact with the government or who might not be aware, it's time to try a different recipe, think differently or act differently.

That's what we were hoping to highlight here, that need to really try to do things differently.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

The very purpose of government benefits should be to reach those who are on the edge, those who are most vulnerable and those who are on the margins. It's a particular problem if we're saying that those who are perhaps in greatest need of government benefits and supports may not be accessing them very much because of that marginalization.

Another thing that struck me about this whole discussion was that the focus from the government seems to be that we need to spend more money going out and talking to people about these benefits, but not the discussion that maybe we need to simplify the structure of these benefits, make more benefits automatic or look at things like automatic tax filing, which exists in other countries.

I'll direct my next questions to the folks at the CRA.

What concrete steps are you taking to try to improve the simplicity of benefits that are available or make this automatic? It seems to me that the trend of government policy is to make things more complex, to say we're going to have an additional benefit for this and an additional benefit for that, rather than talking about large, simpler benefits that are targeted to vulnerable people and that they have more flexibility around.

[Bob Hamilton]

Mr. Chair, I'm happy to respond to that.

I mentioned that we are trying to make things simpler for people. I'll give you a couple of examples of things we have done, and it feeds into your automating principle.

For the child benefit, we do have an automatic benefit application where we can automatically enrol someone at the time of birth, and that's been very effective. For the Canada workers benefit, we brought in a number of people to be eligible for that automatically.

We are trying to use that automation where we can, but in other cases we've used different routes to try to simplify things for people. We have provided a form for indigenous communities—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Sorry, can I just clarify my question? Some of these things are now becoming automatic for those who file. Some countries have worked to create mechanisms where filing is automatic.

Can you talk about any measures under consideration to follow the British model in making that filing automatic and reducing the paper burden for everybody, but also making these benefits easier to access?

[Bob Hamilton]

We do have the auto-fill feature, which will fill in your tax form for you with information that we have. The issue that you run into is that for lots of people there are a number of discretionary elements in the tax system and it's hard for us to fill it in, or we don't have the information. Where we have it, we do have a process for auto-filling certain elements on your tax form.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Even if you have that information—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Genuis. I'm afraid you are out of time but there'll be another round for your side.

Mrs. Shanahan, you have the floor for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here with us today in person and on screen. This is a topic that is very close to my heart. I remember being part of advocacy groups back in the early 2000s around the whole issue of old age security and finding out that thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, were not getting their OAS because they weren't aware of how to apply for it, and so on. I'm very glad to see that there has been auto-enrolment since 2014.

In my work, too, as a social worker in financial autonomy, I'm finding out that behavioural economics—a term that we've heard here today—and let's just say a reluctance to engage with the tax system is very much a reality. This is why I'm very heartened to hear that the community groups are playing a large part in working with the CRA and ESDC in reaching out to folks.

I have a question now for both of the witnesses from those agencies. Do the department and the agency have estimates of the take-up rates for benefits such as the guaranteed income supplement, the Canada child benefit, the Canada workers benefit and the Canada learning bond in various vulnerable populations, such as indigenous people and people with disabilities? Can you provide those estimates to the committee in writing?

I'm asking Commissioner Hamilton and/or Ms. MacDonald.

[Lori MacDonald]

I can jump in first and say that we'd be happy to provide whatever statistics we have in relation to uptake in terms of our OAS and GIS programs. We do track uptake. Again, the difficulty is that we don't know what we don't know—to the point made earlier in terms of who's not accessing it—but we can certainly give some statistics around our auto-enrolment and so on.

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

That's very good.

Of course I understand this would be a rate that you would have for people who have completed their income tax returns, but we have heard also from Statistics Canada that there is a way of estimating, using linked datasets, the take-up rates for people who do not file tax returns.

Is it possible to get an estimate of those numbers regarding the programs that I mentioned earlier, the GIS and the Canada child benefit?

[Lori MacDonald]

We could take a look at that and see what we can provide to you, for sure.

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

Excellent.

[Bob Hamilton]

I would just echo that. I think Lori set out that we don't know what we don't know. However, we did some work with Statistics Canada and ESDC to try to use that statistical method to estimate take-up rates of the child benefit in indigenous communities. I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but we can endeavour to get you something in writing after the meeting.

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

Thank you.

I have a question for Statistics Canada.

We're seeing some very innovative ways of learning about hard-to-reach populations—for example, the street count that happens in a lot of Canadians cities regarding the homeless population. There was one in Montreal just a few weeks ago using trained volunteers. Is this something that is helpful in your work?

[Josée Bégin]

Statistics Canada has a large number of surveys that are designed to report on the quality of life of Canadians. We use different kinds of statistical methods to measure those indicators.

We also have some initiatives in terms of disaggregation of data. There's always a challenge with disaggregation of data in terms of respecting the confidentiality and privacy of our respondents. You can think of efforts to go to the lowest geographic level possible or to collect additional information from various population groups.

We've been working with partners because it's part of our mandate to ensure that we provide data and insights that are relevant to our partners, to inform the policy work they do.

I'll conclude here. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

That's perfect. Thank you very much.

That concludes the time.

Turning now to our next round, we're going back to Mr. McCauley.

You have the floor for five minutes, sir.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just want to follow up on, and perhaps add to, Mrs. Shanahan's request.

I may have missed it, but is the CRA able to provide us with the percentage of those we term as “vulnerable” who are completing their tax returns? Also, can you provide to the committee a breakdown of the numbers, whether we consider as “vulnerable” refugees, first nation or indigenous...? Can you break it down like that?

To the CRA, we were talking about this having been kind of a work in progress for six years. I'm looking at your departmental plan for this year, and it doesn't actually mention this issue of the vulnerable. It talks about the Canada workers benefit and to “ensure Canadians who qualify....” It's not in your departmental plan, but apparently it's been on the radar for six years. Is that just an oversight, or is there just not enough space in your departmental plan to note this?

[Bob Hamilton]

I would have to go back and review the departmental plan—the corporate business plan I think you're referring to—but it certainly has been a priority.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It's your CRA departmental plan, not a corporate plan, but that's fine.

I have a question for you. We talked about its being kind of a continual work in progress and there being almost moving targets with this, and I understand. We hear from StatsCan that it's difficult to identify sometimes. Do we believe we'll ever get to our goal, or will the goalposts keep moving on us? Do you believe that the recommendations put forward by the AG will get this settled satisfactorily, or will it just improve how we're doing it?