Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for being present with us today, especially our Auditor General, Ms. Hogan.
Thank you very much for your testimony this afternoon. I think it's important that we look at the conditions that took place in your office last year. I believe what we've seen and witnessed with the strike at the Auditor General's office is of concern and should be of concern to the government and to all Canadians.
The efficiency and efficacy of our public service, in particular the independent bodies of our public service and their credibility, really matter when we're talking about what my previous colleague mentioned, which was the fragility of trust between Canadians and our institutions. We need to actually do the work of making sure these institutions can in fact have the funding and the resources to do the jobs that Canadians want them to do.
Many of these supports were not just in the Auditor General's office, but right across the public service. We've seen Canadians rely on public servants, whether that was getting CERB cheques out or making sure that other aspects of the public social safety net were actually being utilized. There were real people behind that, real Canadian public servants.
Simultaneous to the thank yous we heard across the country from regular Canadians and even from elected officials, what happened was this unfortunate reality of seeing that work not get the same level of credit. It's incumbent on me, being a labour representative in some ways, that we look at the conditions that gave rise to that.
I think what we witnessed in the Auditor General's strike last year is something we should all take as a fair warning as to what could continue to take place in and around our public service across Canada.
In your comments, Ms. Hogan, you mentioned that the President of the Treasury Board gives your office its mandate for collective bargaining. This mandate establishes the maximum amount of pay and specifies the other terms and conditions of employment that may be offered by your office during collective bargaining. At times, the mandate includes how your office is to approach negotiations.
You said it was also important to note that the additional permanent funding you received in March 2021 could not be used to expand the collective bargaining mandate. You can see, when approaching the collective bargaining process, how difficult that could be—not only for the Auditor General's office—given the fact that the Auditor General had to operate within what she called “a fence” and corral decisions, which made it difficult for the public service to actually get what it needed in a responsible way.
We've seen evidence of this. For example, we saw complaints given to the Auditor General's office throughout that time. I'm sure many, Ms. Hogan—we don't have to go through them today—were about certain aspects of the work, particularly within wage increases and the lack thereof, but we at times also saw a request for arbitration to deal with the items that could in some ways not be reasonably dealt with at bargaining.
I think the question I have is this: When the employer—which in this case was your office—consistently refused arbitration, who made the decision to decline arbitration at that time?