Public Accounts Committee on April 20th, 2023

[Christopher MacLennan]

Exactly. Those types of problems will be immediately resolved.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Was the data lost, or did we just not know where to look for it?

[Christopher MacLennan]

No. The only data that was lost was for the one project that was in Ukraine. That data had to be destroyed when the team left Kyiv last year. All of the other documentation has been retrieved.

The problem is exactly as you pointed out. It was long and labourious to do it because it required the spoke activities to find all of the documents, which is not at all.... It's a huge gap in our system. We have a long-term solution, but we can't wait for the long-term solution. That, I think, is the real benefit of the audit.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

When you say “long term”, what's long term to you? How many years is that?

[Christopher MacLennan]

The overall project, if it's.... Patricia can speak in greater detail—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I'm just looking for a ballpark figure of how many years it is when you say “long-term solution”.

[Christopher MacLennan]

Up until the end of 2026 is the entire project. The interim solution will be immediate, which is the ability to have a single database, where all project information is stored and is easily accessible.

When you're looking to do something far more advanced in terms of things like machinery and being able to use AI to help with some of the problems of how to get to aggregation, for example, that's to come in this larger project of the transformation initiative.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

How much is your department looking for in the main estimates and budget for funding for this fiscal year?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I'm sorry. I'd have to get back to you on that specifically.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Mr. McCauley, do you want that answer?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

No. I can look it up, I'm sure. Thank you.

I'll read something to you from section 4.40. This is the most disturbing line:

We found that Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy included commitments on how funding should be spent but had no goals related to specific improvements in the circumstances of those who benefit from the funding.

Have you fixed that?

Ms. Hogan, are you satisfied, with the response to this specific issue or to your report, that we can get to that?

[Karen Hogan]

I'll speak first, and then we'll ask the deputy to answer on how he plans to address it.

This speaks to the overall policy. The policy had just spending commitments. Spend 15% on direct gender integration. Spend 50%—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

That's why I said it's the most worrying.

[Karen Hogan]

That doesn't really show the outcome and the whole objective of the feminist policy. That shows where to spend money. In my view, that's likely a reason why the majority of indicators were output-based. They were in line with spending commitments versus outcomes.

Perhaps the deputy would like to talk about solutions.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Yes. We'll have to come back to that, but I am hoping for another round.

I'll turn now to Ms. Bradford. You have the floor for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to change the line of questioning a bit.

Mr. MacLennan, the OAG found that the department did not meet its commitments to spend 15% of its assistance on gender-targeted projects—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Ms. Bradford, pardon me. Can you raise your boom mike a bit?

I'll double-check with translation. I've stopped the clock.

I'm getting a thumbs-up. Go ahead, please. I'll restart the clock.

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

Okay.

I'm changing up the line of questioning a bit, Mr. MacLennan.

The OAG found that the department did not meet its commitments to spend 15% of its assistance on gender-targeted projects or to spend 50% of bilateral funding for sub-Saharan Africa, at least until 2021-22. Are you able to tell us whether the commitments were met in 2022-23?

[Christopher MacLennan]

No. At this point, I don't have that data yet.

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

What is the department doing to ensure that the three spending commitments under the feminist international assistance policy are being tracked?

[Christopher MacLennan]

I can assure you that those three commitments are tracked very regularly. We've been tracking them since the moment the policy was launched.

The degree of change from 2017, quite honestly, is quite significant. As an example, the commitment with respect to gender equality-focused programming moved from our baseline of 3% in 2015-16 to a total of 12% in 2021. It had actually gone to 14% in 2019-20.

We track it on a regular basis throughout the year and the change over time was quite significant for that one. On sub-Saharan Africa, we reached a high of 49%, which is just shy of actually achieving the target that was made.

I can let the committee know that the department regularly manages its budget against a long number of programming commitments and spending commitments. That's normal. It's gone on for as long as I've worked in international assistance, which is numerous years now and through numerous governments. The difficulty with a percentage target, however, is that we don't always control the denominator. What took place with COVID-19, followed by the invasion of Ukraine, fundamentally changed the denominator.

Ukraine and other crises are not in sub-Saharan Africa, so Canada ramping up its efforts to respond to those crises obviously had an negative impact on the percentage total going to sub-Saharan Africa. For COVID-19, the nature of the investments we made were fundamentally about immediately procuring and distributing vaccines. That doesn't lend itself to being a GE3, as it's called. As a result, our ability to hit that target was diminished.

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

Okay.

The OAG “reviewed documents from relevant senior management committees from June 2017 to September 2022, and...did not find evidence that senior managers regularly reviewed gender equality outcomes or progress on policy goals.”

Do you agree with this finding? If so, what's the explanation for it?

[Christopher MacLennan]

To my knowledge, the committees the Auditor General looked at were the Global Affairs corporate committees, which are a series of committees that are spread across the full mandate of all Global Affairs Canada. My assumption is that the report is accurate.

Since I was named deputy minister, which was a little over a year ago, in January 2022, I've created a dedicated international assistance operations committee, whose very purpose is to look at the breadth and depth of operations challenges we have in the department. That includes performance management and the tracking of results. That's now been integrated fully into this new committee that I've struck, which includes all of the assistant deputy ministers in the department and is dedicated to international development assistance.

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

Okay, that took care of my next question.

I don't actually have any other questions at the moment.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to endeavour to get through a last round. I want to just cut the time from five minutes to four minutes for the government and official opposition members, and two minutes for the two other opposition parties.

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