Public Accounts Committee on March 27th, 2023

[Karen Hogan]

We have an exhibit in our report that goes that far back. I don't have this committed to memory, so if you give me two seconds, I will take a quick gander back.

We tracked back to 2018. If you look at first nations reserves, you can see they had access, in 2018, in 31.6% of cases. That has grown to 42.9%.

Canada's connectivity strategy is absolutely making progress. The strategy is meant to target rural and remote communities, including first nations. There's just a lot left to be done, when you think about how many households still don't have access.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Mrs. Shanahan, you have the floor for three minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Many thanks to the Auditor General, again, for this work, which is so important to accomplishing the goals we all have. It's so important to the theme of inclusion we're seeing here.

I think the focus is on the outcome. Am I right, Auditor General? It's not just about the measurement of activities. You've spoken about this before.

[Karen Hogan]

Absolutely. I think you need to measure activity along the way. You need to show progress and know whether or not you need to adjust your approach, but the ultimate goal should really be on the outcome.

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

I think that's what we're here for. We have a vision and very ambitious goals, but it's in the implementation of the programs and policies to get to those goals where we encounter difficulties.

Again, around the design measures.... I'm not targeting any particular report here, although I do want to talk about the connectivity report a bit, as well. What is the role of consultation with stakeholders in designing measures that will actually allow us to collect relevant data?

[Karen Hogan]

When it comes to connectivity, I think collaboration and coordination with stakeholders are absolutely essential. The service providers need to provide that information. There's a lot of coordination here with other levels of government. As we saw in our audit, certain MOUs have been signed with provinces to ensure they coordinate and the joint money goes further in order to increase accessibility.

It isn't just the federal government working here. It is important to have good collaboration and speak to stakeholders in order to know their needs, pain points and concerns. We did that during our audit as well. We raised some of the concerns they flagged for us around how slow it is for departments to approve funding so projects can get under way.

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

Thank you.

On the report concerning access to rural and remote communities, it's so important in your report that you do that disaggregation, because overall, if I'm reading the key findings correctly, over 90% of households had been connected by 2021, but that's not good enough. I get it—we need to get to that dernier rang, as we say in Quebec, to that last household.

You did mention the MOUs. Are all provinces on board to work with the federal government to make 100% coverage a reality?

[Karen Hogan]

I do believe there are seven provinces that have MOUs with the government, because they already have connectivity initiatives. Whenever there is a connectivity initiative in one of the provinces, they have signed an MOU with the government in order not to duplicate efforts but to expand efforts.

When it comes to coverage, while the country does show 90% connectivity, that camouflages the results of rural and remote communities and first nations reserves. We shouldn't forget that 1.4 million households are underserved or not served at all. That's sizable; it is like every single person who lives in the city of Montreal not having Internet, so that is a large group in the country who still need to be reached.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much, Auditor General.

We turn now to Mr. Genuis again for three minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Auditor General, could you dig in further on the significance of it taking you four months to get access to certain information? Oftentimes, for parliamentarians, it takes a long time to get certain information and they say, “Oh, it's translation”, or whatever it is, but you've drawn the specific conclusion that the fact that it took you such a long time to get that information really indicates that people within the department also don't have access to the information or that it took them so long to get it because the information is not readily available, which means that, to the extent that it exists, it's not being used.

[Karen Hogan]

Normally, when we request information from the departments we audit, they provide it to us rather quickly, because they should be using it for decision-making purposes. What we found here was that there was no standardized approach to storing that information or gathering it. We then went a little further than that to see whether or not senior management committees and senior management groups were asking for and looking for the information, because maybe it was being provided but just not used and so on, and I think the issues we saw were pretty vast.

Four months, to my mind, is a great amount of time, and we weren't able to analyze in detail all 60 files we would have liked to. We did a really deep dive on gender analysis, and we would have liked to do that more broadly. We were able to look at only 10 because of when we received the information.

If you don't have it readily at your fingertips in a database, that means you're not using it to make fundamental decisions, such as determining whether you are achieving good outcomes in this one area of the world and whether you should spend more money there or allocate more money in a different place. You're also not demonstrating the actual outcomes of this large investment. It is important that they fix those information management weaknesses.

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

Thank you. That's really important for us to understand.

In terms of the spending commitments, the report identifies three commitments around spending: that 80% or more of the projects include consideration of gender, that 15% be focused on gender in particular, and that 50% or more of those projects be in sub-Saharan Africa. Of those three, the first is the only one they satisfied. In some ways, it's the easiest one to satisfy because it's not that difficult to say that a project includes a gender lens. It's the other two that are more specifically measurable in terms of achieving them or failing to achieve them, and they failed to achieve them.

What do you make of that?

[Karen Hogan]

I would highlight a few things.

During the pandemic, some of the funding was used in different ways in order to ensure that, for example, if girls couldn't go to school, they would get tablets instead of something being built in a school. But I agree with you that when you spend more on just considering gender—and it could be as easy as having a gender analysis in a project—you take away from other buckets. Evidence shows that when you really empower women and girls, you will drive meaningful and important change, and I think that's why we included a comment about needing to really focus on meeting those spending commitments.

I would highlight, however, that the policy has only three spending commitments and those commitments aren't really about outcomes and making the lives of women and girls better. That was another recommendation we gave, that they should actually have some targets that measure progress.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

I have just two more members on my list, and then we're going to have to let Ms. Hogan depart. She has another appointment after ours.

I'll be going first to Mrs. Gray, and then Ms. Bradford will end it for us.

Mrs. Gray, you have the floor for up to three minutes, please.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Hogan, the report refers to the accessibility of online information as one of the barriers most frequently experienced by travellers with disabilities. It refers to online information that was often “not fully accessible”, and there was an example given of incorrect information for a person using a screen reader or information that was difficult to find. Specifically, there was a departure time for a person with visual impairments that wasn't correct.

Did you find this was something that came up often with regard to the online information barriers? Was this something that you found was a real issue that needs to be addressed?

[Karen Hogan]

Fundamentally, think about the last trip that you may have built. The chances are that you started that by going to a website somewhere and figuring out how to get there, or where you would stay. It's really important that websites be accessible, so that individuals with disabilities can independently book their travel.

Statistics Canada found that the most frequent barrier that individuals with disabilities face is issues with a website, so it's constantly being flagged as important. We looked at whether or not Via Rail's website and CATSA's website met all of the accessibility requirements, and we found that there was a 17% gap for Via Rail's website and 15% for CATSA's.

You highlighted some of the examples that we raised, but this is just the place where you start. If you're discouraged because you are unable to independently book your travel, you may not travel. That would not be the most desired outcome. You want everyone to be able to freely move around our beautiful country.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you.

Your report looked at the agencies covered by the Accessible Canada Act, which has a goal of a barrier-free Canada by 2040. Did you feel, in your assessment, while going through the audit, that there was an urgency to meet these goals by 2040?

[Karen Hogan]

We saw a lot of progress being done, and I think consultation is the first one. However, I would highlight that I think consultation should be broadened and done on a more continuous basis. It isn't a “one and done” thing here.

I hope that action will be taken to bridge some of the issues we found, but will then keep focusing on meeting real, true barrier-free transportation in Canada before 2040. That would be a long time to wait for all these issues to be fixed.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you, Mrs. Gray. You're down to just a few seconds.

I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Bradford now, so that we don't hold up the AG and her team for too long.

Ms. Bradford, you have the floor for three minutes, please.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses here today.

Ms. Hogan, continuing on accessibility and accessible transportation for people with disabilities, on page 20, you refer to the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority. They categorize complaints “by their nature and not by the status of the person”, so sometimes people who had these challenges based on their disability weren't captured correctly. You gave the example of how “the screening of a service dog was considered as a complaint related to a security screening procedure rather than as a complaint related to a person with a disability.”

Are there other examples you can give us where they are miscategorized, so we're not fully capturing the impact on people with disabilities?

[Karen Hogan]

This is linked to the recommendation that we gave about better analysis and use of complaint data. What we found was that the entities were trying to address someone's complaint in a timely way. We recommend that they sit back and really look at the data.

We did some word searches. For example, we looked at “mobility devices”, “service dogs” and “autism”. We looked for words that might indicate that the traveller or someone travelling with the traveller had a disability. We found almost 1,000 complaints that contained similar words, and we had a broad view.

Not all of them will necessarily be an individual with a disability travelling, but this shows the importance of sitting back and looking for systemic issues throughout the complaint data, and that's really not being done by Via Rail and CATSA. We hope that it will improve their ability to identify potential barriers, so that they can remove those in the future.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

I would like to go back to report 4, about gender equality and Global Affairs Canada.

You did make the comment, and I just want to get it on the record again. In your report, you said, “Departmental spending in the 2020–21 and 2021–22 fiscal years was affected by world events”, particularly in this case COVID, so that some money was reallocated to respond to needs resulting from COVID. You said that might have affected meeting the spending targets.

Getting back to that, we didn't meet two of the three spending commitments. Can you just reiterate which is the one that we did meet out of the three?

[Karen Hogan]

Yes, you're right. COVID did likely contribute to some of the reasons why the spending commitments weren't met. One of them was very close; it almost inched to 49%. Obviously, that means you still need to be focused on how you allocate money to projects.

Of the three spending commitments, the one that was met was the one where 80% of the spending needs to go to gender-inclusive projects. That could be as simple as a gender analysis, all the way to something that really targets women and girls. There really is a vast array of projects that are included in that bucket.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you very much, Ms. Hogan.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is our time for today.

Ms. Hogan, I want to thank you and your team for the work you've done. You've given not only us but all parliamentarians a lot to consider with these reports. As I mentioned to you previously, these are all important. Accessibility is important, whether it's high-speed Internet or Canada's transportation system, and looking for results.

I do want to thank you again. I appreciate your coming in. I know there is a lot going on this week.

With that, I will adjourn the meeting. The subcommittee will be meeting in camera right after this.

Thank you, everyone.