Public Accounts Committee on April 20th, 2023

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

I'm sorry. I am almost out of time. We will have to pick this up.

Why was the policy designed to measure outputs instead of outcomes? How was that supposed to be satisfactory to policy-makers or Canadians?

[Christopher MacLennan]

The policy is a different document from the placemat of indicators that was developed after the policy. The indicators that were developed were about ensuring that we were turning the boat. As everybody can understand, when you have—

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

I'm sorry. You're telling me you have two different sets of indicators. You have the outcome and the output indicators. The Auditor General was looking at the output indicators. You're now suggesting that you have outcome indicators somewhere, but that information wasn't provided to the Auditor General.

Where is this outcome-based data if it wasn't referred to in the Auditor General's report?

[Christopher MacLennan]

The outcome-based data is included in each and every one of the individual projects that the department undertakes on an annual basis. There are, on average—it varies from one year to the next—1,500 individual projects at any one time. Every single one of those projects is required to have a results framework that includes both outcomes and outputs.

If you want I can explain where the difficulties are, and we do have real difficulties.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Actually, gentlemen, we're going to have to come back to this. The time is up. There will be time for the opposition bench.

I will turn now to Ms. Yip.

You have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Thank you for coming.

I'll start off with Mr. MacLennan.

How much of Canada's aid or assistance is focused on gender equality?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I would argue that all of the aid we undertake is driven by a feminist approach to delivering international assistance.

That means multiple things. One thing it means—and this is one of the targets in the policy—is that we will specifically work with partners to design types of programming that directly address gender inequality, so that it is the purpose of the project. It informs all of our spending.

We have very long-term relationships with some multilateral organizations, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. We have been a member of that for 20 years. Since the feminist international assistance policy, we continue to support that organization, but we have taken a far more aggressive role on the board—we have a seat on the board—to encourage and ensure that the organization also adopts a much more focused approach to gender equality. That's one way.

Across our other development assistance projects, we integrate gender outcomes across all of our projects. They vary according to what the type of project is. There are some projects where you can have gender equality results that are built into the program that you can understand in an immediate sense. Then there are others where quite honestly it's more difficult and it's less possible to have a gender equality result per se. Every single project receives the analysis to tell us what is possible, what is needed and what we should do within each and every project.

We work with partners. Often, these partners are women's rights organizations on the ground in the countries in which they are operating. They tell us what their needs are. We work with them to build out what makes sense from the perspective of supporting that women's rights organization to do its job. Then we build the program around that.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I noted that the OECD ranked our programs as fourth in the world. Is that right?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I think it was first, actually, in terms of overall contributions to gender equality.

The OECD has something called the development assistance committee. That development assistance committee provides a uniform way for all donors to account for what they are spending all of their development assistance on.

Over the past five years there has been a rather significant increase in the focus of Canada's international development assistance on gender equality objectives.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

You also mentioned that the “plus” is being applied to all the programs.

Can you expand on that? Is it truly inclusive?

[Christopher MacLennan]

That's a very good point. It does speak to one of the recommendations in this report.

Global Affairs Canada has for a long time been one of the leaders among other donors in applying a gender lens to all of our programming. This began back in the late 1990s with one of our first policies, called women in development, and has evolved significantly since that time.

When the feminist international assistance policy was originally launched, we were well placed. We had a dedicated gender equality team that had been basically undertaking these gender-based analyses across all of our programming for years. When the policy was launched, it became pretty clear that we needed to expand it and it needed to be the “plus”. It needed to look at other types of intersecting factors that also contribute to the vulnerability of some of the clients—some of the people we're most looking to serve.

In 2020, we adjusted quite significantly our approach to our gender-based analysis to add that “plus” to ensure that we had a more inclusive approach to our gender-based analysis to include things such as ethnicity, religion and age, as an example. These are these intersecting criteria or issues that may lead to increased vulnerability.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

I again yield the floor to Ms. Gaudreau, but this time for two and a half minutes.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Okay. So I'm going to move on, although I am a bit gobsmacked.

If you have found your documents, is it possible to provide them to the auditor general? In fact, I'm talking about the ones that were missing for responding to the request. I think it is important to finalize everything. Can you undertake to do that?

[Christopher MacLennan]

We have continued to give her all the documents as we collect them. We have collected everything, but if there are some missing for the Auditor General, it will be possible to send them to her, certainly.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Excellent.

You have talked about a lot of things, be it the constraints associated with policies, the efforts you have made, the information technologies, the fact that you are a huge organization, or the structure specific to each project. I don't think those are good reasons that can be hidden behind.

I would like to know whether you received a memorandum or a recommendation saying what it really was important and urgent to do, to demonstrate political will. Was that political will, to demonstrate transparency to people and make sure they would be able to know what results this $3.5 billion produced, tangible at Global Affairs Canada?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I can absolutely assure you that the question of results is central to everything we do. However, it doesn't make things easier to do, particularly organization-wide. That is where our challenge lies. The real fly in the ointment is in our method and our capacity to work on 1,500 projects, to collect the indicators that are similar, and to produce a report that encompasses all those indicators. We are not the only ones to have this problem.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

What are you lacking? What can we do to help you ensure that this never happens again and that you immediately have the figures at hand if you are ever asked the question?

You know, I am an entrepreneur. I have worked in big organizations, and that could never have been acceptable. Either it would have gone bankrupt or it would not have received any more grants.

[Christopher MacLennan]

For example, we are already working within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD. That is one of the organizations trying to help all the donor countries. The OECD itself understands the issues and problems well. For example, the Nordic countries calculate only the results at the project level. They do not even try to report on all their programming. They simply accept that in this area, the issue relates to the projects. So if you want to know what the results are, you have to look at each project to see the results properly.

Other countries are trying other things. In our case, we are trying new things. I can give you an example, for health...

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I'm sorry. You have no time left right now, but we will be able to come back to it.

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

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Considering just how short the time is, I'll leave my last question. Perhaps we can follow up with some supplemental questions later on if we can find a better explanation for the difference between some of the outcomes on the 60 projects and the 30 projects. We just don't have enough time for it today, unfortunately. If you can provide any more information related to those projects, or the issues in relaying that information to the Auditor General and why that information was delayed, perhaps somewhat expanding some of your points in this discussion.... Perhaps you can provide in writing why the delay exists in such a significant way.

I'll move on to the Auditor General. We're trying to sort out how we actually deal with this in a fair way so that Canadians can expect that this issue can be concluded. The 2021 internal audit was evidence of this failure.

Auditor General, you made mention previously that it obviously would have been an accumulated problem that required addressing. Your office, of course, took the liberty of ensuring that a more in-depth audit took place, but how common is it, for example, to have an internal audit, have your audit and then monitor the action and implementation? How long does it often take, particularly for this ministry, which is such a large spending ministry and has these really unique problems of being unable to second this information in a quick fashion? It leaves me with the perspective that this may never be fixed, in some ways, just because of how complicated this is.

Have you seen audits like this in the past? Have they reconciled themselves with the need for better transparency?

[Karen Hogan]

I think this is the first time that we've audited Global Affairs Canada in a very long time, which is exactly why we wanted to go there and see how they were doing. It's a lot of money, and hopefully it really drives an impactful and important change for women and girls across the world.

The issue is one of information management. You don't need a big, complex tool to be able to have an ability to consolidate information. I hear clear goodwill and desire from the deputy to put something in place in the interim. They had already started a project that was long term. I did not know that when we went in and looked at it, but after we found the internal audit and we saw the outcomes, I would have expected that an interim measure would have been put in place, because it is important to be able to show globally what you can do.

I thought about all the numbers when you talked about 35. We do mention 35 somewhere in the report. It's that we found that only 35 of the projects we looked at were contained in the external reporting. It's only a little more than 50%, which speaks to the case that, when you don't have a central repository of everything, you can't speak globally to what you're accomplishing. That's why having an IM/IT tool is really critical when you have so many projects and such a volume of transactions going on.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Turning again to Mr. Genuis, you have the floor for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

I will summarize where I think we've been with the questions I've asked and then try to get more clarity on this.

A central objective of our development assistance is to make life better for women and girls around the world. The Auditor General has said, in my reading of the report, that we don't know whether the government policy is having the intended outcome because we're not tracking outcomes at a corporate level. Our deputy minister has said that we have output and outcome measurements. We're aggregating the output measurements, yes, but we're not aggregating the outcome measurements, but we do look at outcomes at the individual project level. That's what I understood you to say.

Further, we know that the information on projects is not being regularly accessed. We know this because it took months for the Auditor General to get data—in the end, incomplete data—about the various projects. Integrating this concern about what is being measured and how that information is accessed, we can see that, if outcomes are being looked at in individual, local projects, they are not being measured systematically across the board, and information is not being accessed and used by policy-makers. I come back to the point that I think the Auditor General made, which is that we don't know. We're not tracking or testing to see if our policy is having the intended effect of making life better for women and girls around the world.

Mr. McLennan, is my summary of things correct?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I would argue that what we are doing is—

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

Can you answer my direct question and then offer an explanation rather than skipping over the answer to the explanation?