Public Accounts Committee on May 8th, 2023

[Karen Hogan]

Yes, but I'm not sure I'll be able to explain it all in French.

I'd like to speak about four amendments that could be made to the Auditor General Act.

The first aspect has to do with access to information. It needs to be made very clear that we can have access to privileged information. It's important. In terms of the language used, we believe this is the right wording, because we have access to all privileged information. There is not really any entity that can restrict us, but every now and then, I must say that we encounter a few problems and some resistance. It's therefore important for the Access to Information Act to be very clear.

The second concerns an independent financing mechanism that would ensure that the Office of the Auditor General does not have to request an annual budget from a department it is auditing. You may recall that I said once money has been received, I would continue to request independent funding. Other agents of Parliament have a mechanism that is independent of the government, but that's not the case for us.

The third aspect would be to clarify our mandate with respect to Crown corporations. Our mandate needs to be more flexible in terms of special examinations, and it should be broadened to include them in all performance audits, rather than just for special audits.

The fourth aspect involves several factors.

For one thing, I believe it's important for the language to be gender neutral. For example, I am the auditor General of Canada, but in French, my office is called, “Bureau du vérificateur général du Canada” and the act is called, also in French, “Loi sur le vérificateur général”. In the French version of the act the Auditor General is referred to as “lui”, which is not neutral.

Our reports should also be tabled in both Houses of Parliament, the Senate and the House of Commons. Currently, they have to be tabled in the House of Commons, and are sent to the Senate afterwards. The reports of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development are tabled in both Houses because it is stated in the act. The wording used in the section on the Auditor General's report has not been adjusted accordingly.

I believe that these are the four most important amendments to make to the act.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much, Ms. Hogan.

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

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

In the theme of trying to find the best practices moving forward from the strike, we talked about accountability during my first round of questioning. I just want to be forward-looking now in some ways in order to prevent such an event from happening again. We don't want to see a national strike in which workers have to demand fair wages, basic respect and dignity. It doesn't bode well for Canadians.

You spoke about the impact to the Auditor General's Office, and it's very clear that those impacts were present right across the board for many weeks when we had the national strike. To understand how we're going to move forward on this in a good way, I recognize that your departmental plan makes commitments to this, and it's largely because of the events of the strike.

You speak directly to the priority areas being “care, connect, and modernize”. What does that mean, and who are you speaking to when you say “care, connect, and modernize”?

[Karen Hogan]

There are many parties. Our “care” pillar is for our staff internally. It's ensuring that we have a skilled, engaged and bilingual workforce, and that it is a safe place to work, where they feel they can raise their concerns and they feel included and respected for the work they do. That's definitely something that we heard loud and clear following the return from the strike.

The “connect” pillar is internal and external. It's across our organization, to break down silos so that we don't just work individually but with a global outlook of the organization as a whole. It's also to connect with our stakeholders and the individuals we audit—parliamentarians, senators, Canadians, the departments and so on—to create a collaborative working relationship with everyone we interact with.

The “modernize” pillar again impacts both internally and externally. We need to modernize our own internal functions so that we can be more efficient, but we also want to modernize how we communicate and report on our results. You're seeing some of that already, but I think we have a long way to go so that we can make Canadians aware of the work of the office and see it as an employer of choice across the country.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

In terms of some of the issues that were more relevant to indigenous and Black civil servants, we've heard, speaking directly with many of them, that there's an existing lawsuit against the federal government for discrimination against these two populations.

How are you tackling discrimination and racism within your own department?

[Karen Hogan]

We have made similar commitments to the clerk's call to action. While we weren't required to, we felt it was really important to do so.

We have lots of actions in place that we're working on and that I think we have to continue to work on. Increasing diversity across our management is definitely a step that we need to take. We've done a lot of training and awareness work across the organization on indigenous matters, on unconscious bias and on equity and diversity.

By putting a focus into all of our performance audits as well, we've actually increased capacity within our organization. Now we have almost every audit team consulting our equity, diversity and inclusion team before they embark on any audit, whether it's a special exam or a performance audit.

We're really trying to incorporate it into our work so that we can even push it through the public service. I think we have lots of initiatives. I provided a letter to the committee a while back with all of our commitments. I'm happy to recirculate it, if you would like.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much. That is your time.

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

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Auditor General, for being here at a time when this Liberal government is drowning in scandal.

Parliament has come to you a number of times, asking that audits be done on specific issues. You've told us in the past that you set priorities, and then when Parliament asks for those audits, they can be in addition to them.

We had the request from Parliament for the audit into ArriveCAN and the fact that tens of millions of dollars were spent developing an app that didn't work. We had a request to look into the McKinsey scandal as well. I wonder if you could update us on the status of those two investigations, and what impact it has on your resources when Parliament requests these additional audits. Do you require additional resources from Parliament in light of the volume of concerns that are emerging about this government's behaviour and the corresponding requests from Parliament that we're seeing?

[Karen Hogan]

I believe it's a cornerstone of the independence of my office to be able to pick who we audit, when we audit and what we audit. That being said, we recognize that Parliament is our principal stakeholder, and we take seriously the requests we receive from Parliament.

On the ones that you're talking about, when it comes to ArriveCAN, to give you an update, we don't talk about audits while they're under way. We believe it's important to share that information with Parliament all at once. What I can tell you is that our intention is to release the ArriveCAN audit in the fall of this year, and the audit for professional services contracts in the spring of the following year.

What we did in order to put those in—because, as you said, we had a work plan under way—was delay an audit in order to be able to get ArriveCAN in quickly. We haven't cancelled it; we've just pushed it out a bit.

On the larger one, on professional services contracts, we're still trying to gather a lot of information. Our hope is that it will be in the spring of the following year, but gathering information from the Crown corporations is a little more difficult than it is from all of the departments.

I don't believe that we need more funding. We just needed to adjust our work plan to allow for those two requests.

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

Okay.

Just for everyone's peace of mind here, we're in a minority Parliament, and in the event that there's an early election, what would the impact be on the possible release of the ArriveCAN app audit or the McKinsey audit? Could the government call an early election and thus force a delay in the release of one of these reports, or would they be released as scheduled, regardless?

[Andrew Hayes]

We are only able to release a report to Parliament when it is sitting. If it has been dissolved or prorogued, we don't have a vehicle to table reports.

We encountered that issue in 2011, when there was an election in 2011. The way we deliver reports is to the Speaker, who has to table them afterwards.

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

You guys brought down the government in 2011. If you didn't want an election then, you could have voted for the budget.

On the Trudeau foundation issue, I know that there was some discussion about bringing a recommendation to your office on that. The feedback we got was around some of the limitations and the mandate. My understanding is that the legislation specifically recognizes that the Trudeau foundation is not just a private charity—that it is a public institution and that you can audit it—but that the particular scope of what was proposed was outside of the work of your office. Could you share a bit about the kinds of things that you could or couldn't audit, theoretically, in terms of the work of the Trudeau foundation?

[Karen Hogan]

I'll invite you to add in if you want to, Andrew.

The mandate added to our act was called the “follow-the-dollar mandate”, which means to follow when there is a funding agreement between the federal government and a private organization.

We would be able to go and look at that funding agreement—in this case, it's an endowment agreement—and we would be able to see whether the terms and conditions of that agreement were followed and respected. The mandate doesn't allow us to look at other donors or private donations and the sources of those funds or the intentions of those donors, so all the questions that we were being asked to go and look at were outside of the scope that we have a mandate to look at.

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

Thank you.

Coming back to the previous question, I think people will be watching issues of prorogation with great interest, and whether the government engineers a.... You don't have to respond to this. I know this is more political, but from our perspective, if you have a report coming on the ArriveCAN app or on contracts with McKinsey and we see a premature prorogation or see the government engineering a dissolution, I think it will be interesting for Canadians to note that it is taking place.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you, Mr. Genuis.

I would note that any prorogation would not halt the work of the Auditor General. Those reports would come after the subsequent election when the new Parliament is convened.

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

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Auditor General and staff, for coming to speak on the operation of your office. It's very important that this committee have the opportunity to question you on that.

Further to Mr. Genuis's line of questioning, it has become more common to demand that your office conduct a specific review, as opposed to making a request, which has been the normal course of action. Are you concerned about this trend and how it might perhaps affect the independence of your office?

[Karen Hogan]

No matter the language of the request, I still hold the right to refuse to do an audit. When I can't do that is when it's obviously put into legislation, as was the work that was included in Bill C-2. That's a matter of law, and I will comply and follow with the law.

I always take seriously requests that committees make, and I think there are different weights. Sometimes we were already going to look at a topic and we might have advanced the work that we intended to do. We take it seriously when our stakeholder has an interest in something and we try to adjust our work plan when we can, but I absolutely believe that being able to decide when and what we audit is very important. At times we will say no and at times we will say yes.

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

Thank you for that clarification.

Now that you've had time to bring on board these 150 new hires and get them trained up, have you seen an improvement in the speed and volume of reports you're able to produce?

[Karen Hogan]

I have to admit that I'm always incredibly impressed with the individuals in our communications and desktop publishing and how they take audit-speak and make it non-audit-speak, and how easy our reports are to read and how easy the graphics are to follow. What we're seeing is an increased capacity to deliver on audits, and now we're working very hard on making sure our support services that are so essential to getting the audit past the goalposts are ramped up.

As I mentioned, over the past year we have been trying very hard to increase our capacity and are not always successful with some of our staffing processes, so we are seeing our ability there impeded a little. Our goal is to hit 25 performance audits in the year that just ended and in the coming year. I think that's where we're meant to be. We're achieving that target, but we can always be better and more efficient.

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

Last year there were recommendations from this committee and the Parliamentary Budget Officer to require the tabling of public accounts earlier in the year. What constraints are there on your ability to meet an earlier deadline?

[Karen Hogan]

I always agree that financial information is important when it's timely. Issuing financial statements in a timely way is important. There's a balance between the ability to make sure that they remain accurate and the speed that is needed.

Our challenge really relates to getting information from the federal government. There's a lot of work that around revenues with the Canada Revenue Agency. There's a lot of work around liabilities and estimates with some key departments. To move up the publication of the Public Accounts of Canada would require collaboration among us, the Receiver General and the comptroller general's office. It would also mean that timelines would have to be changed across the federal public service. The current timelines are very tight. If you wanted to have the statements out earlier, you can't just take time away from the audit. Everybody has to share in moving faster and advancing deadlines.

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

Do you believe that including additional details from Crown corporations could make it more difficult to meet an earlier deadline for the public accounts?

[Karen Hogan]

I guess it depends on the amount of work that is needed. It's a question that the comptroller general would be better placed to answer. We audit most of the parent Crown corporations, and so probably already audit some of the information that is likely being requested by Parliament to make it into the public accounts. A lot of that information is already available in the individual financial statements of the Crowns.

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

In this past year, you did audit a couple of Crown corporations, didn't you?

[Karen Hogan]

We do the annual financial audit of almost all parent Crown corporations, except for a few. The few we mentioned were the ones we did not do.