Public Accounts Committee on April 20th, 2023

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Hello, everyone. I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 58 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(g), the committee is meeting today to study Report 4, entitled "International Assistance in Support of Gender Equality—Global Affairs Canada," which is one of the 2023 Reports 1 to 4 of the Auditor General of Canada.

I'd now like to welcome our witnesses.

From the Office of the Auditor General, we have Karen Hogan, Auditor General. Thank you for being here today with your team. We have Martin Dompierre, assistant auditor general; and Susan Robertson, director.

From the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, we have Christopher MacLennan, deputy minister, international development; Patricia Peña, assistant deputy minister, partnerships for development innovation; and Natalie Lalonde, chief audit executive, office of the chief audit executive.

Ms. Hogan, welcome back again. You have the floor, for five minutes, please.

[Karen Hogan, Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General]

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on international assistance in support of gender equality, which was tabled in the House of Commons on March 27.

I would like to acknowledge that this hearing is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is a priority concern across the world, one that is captured in the United Nations sustainable development goals. In 2017, Canada launched its feminist international assistance policy, which applies to all of Global Affairs Canada's spending for international assistance.

When women and girls have equal opportunities to succeed, they can be powerful agents of change, driving economic growth and improving the quality of life for their families and communities. Under the feminist international assistance policy, Global Affairs Canada committed to funding projects to improve gender equality and the conditions of the world's poorest and most marginalized populations.

Our audit focused on whether the department supported gender equality in low- and middle-income countries, and reported on the results for the approximately $3.5 billion it spent on bilateral assistance projects each year since the launch of the policy. We found that the department was unable to demonstrate that its spending improved the lives of women and girls. Significant weaknesses in the department's information management practices resulted in missing or incomplete project files that could not support decision-making or demonstrate due diligence. As a result, the department is unable to track overall outcomes against policy goals.

[Karen Hogan]

This is a serious issue. We recommended that the department take immediate action so that it can fully report on the outcomes of the projects it funded. This is crucial to demonstrating the value of these investments and to ensuring that women and girls are benefitting from the programs that Canada is funding.

Global Affairs Canada also needs to address how it measures longer-term outcomes. We found that the department focused on short-term outputs, with only 2 of 26 policy indicators measuring outcomes. An example of this was a project to build washrooms and handwashing stations in schools to make them more welcoming for girls who might otherwise miss class when they are menstruating. The department did not track this project’s outcomes, such as whether school attendance and completion rates improved for girls over the long term.

We found that although Global Affairs Canada implemented a thorough process to assess the extent to which gender is integrated in its projects, the department could do more to incorporate different identify factors. For example, while it regularly included age, it did not routinely consider other factors, such as ethnicity, family size and structure, or rural or urban location. The department should improve the integration of intersecting identity factors in its project development so that it can deliver more inclusive programming.

This concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you for your remarks.

Turning now to Global Affairs Canada, Mr. MacLennan, you and your team have the floor for five minutes.

[Christopher MacLennan, Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Let me begin by thanking this committee for the invitation to appear today to speak about this report.

I am pleased to be joined by Patricia Peña, assistant deputy minister for partnerships for development innovation, who will be leading the department's response to the report, and Natalie Lalonde, our chief audit executive.

First, I would like to acknowledge the work carried out by the Office of the Auditor General and thank them for this report. The report highlighted the importance of Canada's feminist international assistance policy, but also noted the urgent need for Global Affairs to improve its monitoring and reporting on the results of our work.

I would like to assure the committee of how seriously Global Affairs takes the findings in this report. Canada's development assistance programming is making a tangible contribution to improving the lives of women and girls, from reducing maternal and child mortality to supporting the completion of primary education, reducing gender-based violence and supporting women's economic empowerment. These efforts matter.

It is for this reason that we have to redouble our efforts to ensure that we have the effective information management and outcome measurement systems in place to demonstrate to Canadians the value of their investments.

Let me begin by touching on how we are already addressing the recommendations made in this report.

On the first recommendation, regarding GAC's information management system, I have tasked the department with immediately putting in place interim measures for a single project documents database to store and manage all project documents. At the same time, the department will integrate the findings from this report into our larger, ongoing overhaul of our grants and contributions management system. This major transformation project, launched one year ago, will allow GAC to automate and streamline its business processes and systems to give us better information for decision-making and improve the impact of Canada's international assistance.

In response to the second recommendation, to measure and report on results of our programming, we recognize that we must find a better way to aggregate and communicate our results. With more than 1,500 international assistance projects underway at any given time, we have a large amount of data and information connected to the overall objectives of the Feminist International Assistance Policy.

Under Ms. Peña's leadership, the department will undertake a complete review of our current approach to gathering and disseminating the outcomes of our work and will oversee the strengthening of our corporate tools, updating governance mechanisms and development of options to better report on the impacts of our development assistance programming.

The third recommendation looks at identity factors beyond gender and age in project-level equality assessments. Global Affairs Canada is committed to improving how we ensure that every development project receives a full gender-based analysis, including questions of intersectionality. The department will immediately launch a review of the changes made in 2020 to identify where further adjustments are needed in terms of management guidance, tools and training.

In our international assistance work, Canada has been a leader in advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls for several decades. Canada works with partners across the globe to support the development of more inclusive communities and to achieve poverty reduction.

I welcome the work of this committee and look forward to continued collaboration with the Auditor General on implementing the recommendations of the report.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

We will begin our first round. The first four members will have six minutes each.

Mr. Genuis, you have the floor for six minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the Auditor General for her important work on this subject.

My questions will be directed at the officials.

Obviously this report is profoundly disappointing. This government has, with great fanfare, tried to rebrand some of the efforts that actually started under the previous government related to improving the lives of women and girls around the world. A government that is actually serious about making the lives of women and girls around the world better would be interested in bothering to measure outcomes as part of their policy indicators. That should be a pretty basic thing. If ministers, staff and the government are actually saying this isn't just about politics and they're actually trying to make people's lives better, then they would insist on the measurement and tracking of results.

Unfortunately, the government has clearly not done that. After eight years of lots of talking about feminism and a feminist international assistance policy, we find out that the government has loved to talk about it in a domestic context, but has not in fact been asking the right questions or putting in place the mechanisms to link their actions with outcomes.

To the officials, before us today you're even saying contradictory things, as far as I understand it. On the one hand, you are telling us that you take the work of the Auditor General seriously, but on the other hand, you are asserting that the work you have done has been making a tangible impact. The Auditor General's work says that you do not know if you are making a tangible impact because your policy indicators are not actually linked to outcomes.

How can you sustain the position, sir, that you take seriously the findings of the Auditor General while continuing to say that you know things that in fact, based on the data, you don't know?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I agree one hundred per cent with your point that gathering the results of our activities is critically important. For that reason, for a number of years the department has been collecting results at the outcome level for all of our projects. At any one given time, we have 1,500 projects active across all of our development assistance spending. Each one of those projects is required to have a results framework that includes ultimate outcomes, intermediate outcomes, immediate outcomes and a series of activities that support those outcomes. Each and every one of them does.

Now, the challenge—which the Auditor General has shone a light on—is a challenge that we've known for many years. It goes well back, particularly to.... You made note of the great work that we've done, going back to Muskoka in maternal, newborn and child health. We've been learning these lessons over a number of years. The difficulty that we have is rolling up results across 1,500 individual projects in a manner that rolls it up into a corporate-level reporting against a single policy.

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

Let me put this to the Auditor General then, because I don't think your explanation is entirely consistent with the report.

The report says that, yes, you have trouble aggregating those impacts and in various cases you didn't have data, data wasn't being accessed or in some cases data wasn't available at all. More fundamentally, the policy indicators you have identified are not outcome-related. They're policy indicators, but they're not outcome indicators, so you have a problem not just with aggregating the data but with tracking the wrong things.

Can I just ask the Auditor General if I am correct in my reading of the report?

[Karen Hogan]

You are correct in that, of the 26 indicators, only two of them are outcome-based and those are at the policy level.

I guess I would provide that, at the project level, of the ones that we looked at, we saw that project officers were doing a good job managing, monitoring and paying out when milestones were met, but I didn't see those as outcomes. Those are really more outputs.

I acknowledge that you need both, however. You need outputs to measure medium term and short term, but you need outcomes for the long-term objectives.

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

Right, and just to demystify this for those who are watching, the difference between an output and an outcome is something like this. An output is how many doctors' visits were funded for women needing a particular kind of service. An outcome is what the health outcomes are across a population. You can say that we spent a lot of money and we facilitated a certain number of doctor visits, but if that didn't actually change the health status of people overall, then you haven't achieved your outcome. If you're measuring outputs and not outcomes, then you're not actually measuring whether or not you're making a difference.

Just to go back to the officials in the time I have left, I think we've clearly established the point that you don't actually know if your policy is making a difference in terms of outcomes, and that you cannot in fact assert that we're making a tangible impact, because you're not measuring outcomes. Do you acknowledge that?

[Christopher MacLennan]

With respect, I would have to disagree.

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

Are you disagreeing with me or with the Auditor General?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I'm disagreeing with you—your characterization of what we're doing.

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

Okay.

Could the Auditor General clarify? Is my characterization correct?

[Karen Hogan]

I can speak to only the files we looked at. Out of the 1,500 files my colleague mentioned, we looked into 619 of them and pulled a representative sample from that. I can speak only to those groups, and the ones we looked at did not have outcomes associated with them.

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

You're not just disagreeing with me; you're disputing the finding of the Auditor General.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Mr. Genuis, that is your time. We'll be back to you, I'm sure.

Mr. Sidhu, before I turn to Ms. Bradford, who is online, I've been advised that the headset you have is outdated. I just want to flag that to you if you're planning on asking some questions. You seem to indicate it won't be an issue. Perfect—I just wanted to double-check. Thank you. I wouldn't want to overlook you for any reason.

Ms. Bradford, you have six minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing before our committee today. We really appreciate hearing from you directly.

I'm going to start with my questions for you, Mr. MacLennan.

I was wondering if you could just give us an overview and speak to how Canada's feminist international assistance policy is supporting the most vulnerable.

[Christopher MacLennan]

Thank you very much.

When this policy was instituted in 2017, it was quite honestly a radical shift for the department. Not only is it about what we focus our projects on but also about the way we undertake the complete undertaking of the international development assistance responsibilities that we have.

Since 2017, we have, over the course of the first five years of the policy...and I should note that this is the first audit of the policy we've had. The projects that are associated with this policy are only now starting to produce the results after five years. As everybody is aware, producing results in international development does not take place in two years. It has very long-term investments, which are required to achieve lasting sustainable results.

What the department has done is that it has adjusted completely its approach, with a clear focus on gender equality and a clear focus on helping the most vulnerable in the countries in which we are active. I can give you one example of what that means. It means two things.

The first one is that we specifically address some areas where we have inequalities between men and women, and we attack those problems directly. As people would have seen in the report, that's the 15% target we were trying to achieve, which means projects whose purpose ultimately is to address inequalities. That's a very sharp tool to go after only those elements in international development assistance.

With the other 80% of our programming, it means that in all types of programming we undertake we ensure there are gender equality elements to everything we do, in everything from the distribution of food aid, which takes into consideration the needs of women and girls.... A really simple example is that, if you are distributing food in a food aid situation and the sacks of millet or the sacks of grain you're distributing are in 50-pound bags, it's more likely that women will not be able to carry them. That is the type of analysis we apply to ensure we distribute that food in an effective way to women, who are the leaders of households and the ones who make sure the families eat.

That goes beyond the dollars we would spend. It goes to our efforts to work with organizations—with the WFP, the World Food Programme, and with other UN agencies such as the UNFPA, the fund for population, and other partners—to ensure that in everything they do, even if it's not specifically focused on gender equality, all of their development programming is delivering in a feminist way across all gender equality results.

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

Building on that, how does GAC work with its partners—you've referred to some—including those in civil society organizations to systematically track its investments and capture FIAP's impact, assess its progress and share it? How do you work with your partners to capture that?

[Christopher MacLennan]

There are a couple of ways. It depends on the context within which we're working. I'll use an example of working in a partner country with a local partner, let's say.

I can talk to you about a fantastic project we have in Tanzania, looking to help girls stay in school. We work with local partners to build out their logic model of what their efforts are going to accomplish.

That includes, as one of the elements, as I mentioned, the project performance measurement framework. It includes ultimate outcomes, intermediate and immediate outcomes, and the host of activities that are designed to support that. It should be noted that, when we're working with partners in that way, it's the partners themselves who build those frameworks. We work with them closely. We encourage them to choose the proper indicators, whether they be performance indicators on outputs or performance indicators on outcomes, to ensure they line up to the best of their ability with things such as the SDG indicators, but it is the partner who builds those frameworks.

We then work with the partners to ensure the proper execution of the project. One of the core elements that we do is a gender-based analysis. We do a gender-based analysis—now called gender-based analysis plus—across every single one of the projects. For all the 1,500 projects I've mentioned, we do that analysis.

That analysis is used for two reasons, basically. The first one is to enable us to determine exactly what type of a project it is. That is the gender coding you would have seen in the report. The other thing it does is that it enables us to help the partners to better integrate the gender learnings we have on the ground in their work. That is just one example of how we go about doing that.

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

The AG indicated that one of the issues was GAC's ability to manage information.

Could you elaborate on what improvements will be made with respect to that? Is there any update on the progress, and when do you anticipate these improvements will be completed?

[Christopher MacLennan]

This is actually a very important question. It was unfortunate in the way this transpired.

The truth is that, at Global Affairs Canada, we're aware that we have some antiquated and very slow systems for the creation of documents, the storing of documents and the retrieval of documents. This is something that we were aware of.

It's the reason why we launched last year, or about a year ago, a transformation exercise for our entire approach to grants and contributions. We needed to do a transformation in any event, because we have to migrate to a new IM/IT platform. The platform we are currently using is expiring. We're using that as an opportunity to rethink the entire process of our grants and contributions management. That will start with a better understanding of the creation, retrieval and use of documents on an ongoing basis.

In the interim...and this is one of the things I've learned and the department has learned from this audit: We can't wait for that to take place. This will be a multi-year process to overhaul our entire grants and contributions process. In the interim, we are going to immediately install a new database, which will be a single repository for our documents. It will enable us, in a more efficient and efficacious way, to build the document base for all of our projects, to use the document base for all of our projects and also to be able to share them when required.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much. That is the time.

Ms. Gaudreau, you have the floor for six minutes.