Evidence of meeting #39 for Public Accounts in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was question.
A video is available from Parliament.
5 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Hogan, can you tell me how much of an impact the lessening of pandemic restrictions had on the effective travel costs for ministers and parliamentary secretaries?
5 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
That's a real management question that I think that the government would be able to answer. I could not tell you; we don't audit to that level of detail.
5 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Okay, thank you.
Mr. Huppé, there's been quite a bit of discussion about problems with the pay administration system. How does the government plan to implement a long-term, sustainable and efficient human resources pay system?
5 p.m.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
What's happening right now is that there's testing going on on a new potential option for a system. Two things are happening. There's a lot of work being done on Phoenix. We're trying to stabilize it as much as possible, and over the years there have been system modifications and investments in that system. At the same time, as you would have seen in the media and so on, we're also in the midst of testing another potential system.
We are taking our time. We don't want to make the same mistakes, so the testing is very complex scenarios with departments. For example, in the Coast Guard, there's a lot of shift work and stuff like that. That testing is ongoing at the moment.
5 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Do you think that when they get ready to make a switch, they'll run the two systems maybe parallel for a bit to double-check what's going on?
5 p.m.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I would tell you that one of the key lessons learned from Phoenix was that the initial system, the old system, was turned off and not run in parallel, so one could hope that the day that a decision is made to move to a new system, it would be run in parallel, for sure.
5 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
I agree that one would hope.
Looking at National Defence, again I think this is also a question for you. The one problem was their inventory; it wasn't really accurate and up to date. I guess they've addressed that, but they need to implement that modern scanning and bar-coding capability. It's been delayed. Do you know when that's expected to be completed?
5 p.m.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I don't know exactly. Maybe the Auditor General has a date.
5 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I believe that it's a couple of years out. It used to be 2026-27, and I believe it's at least 2028 now.
It would be a great question to the Department of National Defence to get a more specific time frame. I believe that they provide this committee with an update on their action plan, so it might be something that the committee could reach out to ask.
5 p.m.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Right now the action plan they have shoots for 2028-29.
5 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Given that the Department of National Defence is extremely active right now deploying things to Ukraine, I think replacing that inventory and replenishing our stock would obviously be a priority.
Ms. Hogan, in the financial audit commentary, paragraph 25 says:
Overall, we were satisfied with the timeliness and credibility of the financial statements prepared by 68 out of the 69 federal government organizations we audit, including the Government of Canada. As described below, the audited financial statements of the Reserve Force Pension Plan have not been issued on a timely basis.
Do you know why that is and what steps, if any, they're taking to address that?
5 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
This is an issue that we've been reporting for many years now. For many years we denied an opinion or could not issue an opinion. They had trouble supporting the liability, the pension liability.
The Department of National Defence has worked very hard over the last few years and has been able to gather the evidence that we needed in order to issue an opinion, so we issued our opinion on a few years, but they're late. The expectation is that by January of this year, they should be caught up, and then, once they're caught up, we would expect that the reserve force pension plan will continue to issue its financial statements with an audit opinion attached to them in a timely way.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
For how many years in a row have you issued an unmodified opinion on the public accounts?
5:05 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
This would be the 24th year.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Do you know if that is the case for all provincial public accounts?
5:05 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
No. Some of the provincial auditors general issue modified opinions on the provincial financial statements.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
We have a very clean record, nationally, doing this.
5:05 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
We have a very strong public service that works very hard to put together the financial statements, and yes, our audit opinion has been clean for many years.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you very much.
That is the time, and it's a positive note to end on.
Ms. Sinclair‑Desgagné, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.
5:05 p.m.
Bloc
Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné Bloc Terrebonne, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I applaud the creation of an advisory committee on sustainable finance. Perhaps I could offer a little advice on what might be worth considering, particularly on the relevance of auditing what Crown corporations are doing in terms of funding oil projects.
Le Devoir noted in an article that Export Development Canada alone had supported the oil and gas industry in various ways to the tune of $8.1 billion for 2020. In 2022, 47 new oil projects have been identified and, as of the first quarter of 2022, almost $1.5 billion had already been invested in oil. I think this is a concrete action that the government could take.
On that point, Ms. Hogan, the government announced in February 2002 that it would no longer invest public funds in the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. Still, it has approved a new loan guarantee of approximately $10 billion for the project.
How likely do you think it is that the corporation will not be able to pay its debt?
5:05 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
That's a very difficult question to answer. I confess that I don't have a crystal ball to predict whether the corporation will have problems in the years to come.
5:05 p.m.
Bloc
Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné Bloc Terrebonne, QC
If the corporation defaulted on its payments, how would the government's finances be affected?
5:05 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
A lot of assumptions can be made about what will happen. As to whether there should be a guarantee, it depends on the debt.
5:05 p.m.
Bloc
Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné Bloc Terrebonne, QC
The fact remains that the government is a guarantor of this loan. According to the contract, if the corporation is unable to repay its creditors, the Government of Canada will have to disburse the funds, up to $10 billion.
5:05 p.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Yes. That's the nature of a guarantee. If the company is unable to pay its debts, the government will have to take care of it, since it has guaranteed the loan.