Public Accounts Committee on May 8th, 2023

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

I hope that continues. In fact, it leads me to reflect on the evolution of the work of the Auditor General. We have gone from just making sure that the numbers all add up to being able to look at what is behind the numbers, and hence the performance audits.

You have mentioned a couple of times that your objective is 25 performance audits per year. Has that always been the objective of the department? You referred to this being the case even prior to the numbers that we have in front of us.

[Karen Hogan]

If you go back to, I think, Sheila Fraser's mandate, that was about the volume that the office used to issue. Not all audits are created equal. Some are smaller and some are larger, but it was around that ballpark figure in a given year.

Then there was a call to reduce budgets across the whole government, and the office voluntarily did that. Then new mandates were added that were not funded, and we saw the number of performance audits fall to about 14 in a given year. When I requested additional funding, as Michael Ferguson had started to do back in 2017, it was with the intention of bringing our volume back up to about 25 performance audits per year.

I would just caution about counting the reports. As I say, Bill C-2 was one, but it was very large. A report can be quite small. I think it's just a benchmark and a target. As long as it ebbs around that, it is probably a good volume. Then it's about what parliamentary committees can study. The capacity you have to study all of that work has to be considered as well.

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

I think that this committee is looking forward to studying many more performance reports, especially because it allows us to question department officials and to get to that better place where objectives are better met.

Would you give us some insight into how the Office of the Auditor General decides on the what, who and where to perform those performance audits? What goes into that thinking?

[Karen Hogan]

It's quite an extensive process, and it is constantly turning. It's not like it stops and it starts, but it sort of has an end. We develop a work plan, and then we just start up again and keep going. It really does need to be a flexible work plan, because the world around us is constantly changing.

It starts with a great in-depth analysis on the departments, on portfolios. We speak with senior officials, deputy ministers and so on across the federal public service. We have conversations with this committee and other parliamentary committees and with senators on areas that might be of interest to you so that we can put them into the mix. We then look for external feedback. We have a panel of senior advisers. We have a place on our website where Canadians can suggest topics to us. We bring together a suggested group of audits. Then we bring our cross-functional team across the entire organization to review them and go through them and challenge them. We're hoping that we represent an average group of Canadians and what Canadians might want to hear and care about, so we challenge audits there. Sometimes that results in new audits being suggested or a scope of audits being adjusted, and then we have our work plan for a couple of years.

We also can look at mandate letters that come out and see what's in those and whether we should realign some of our priorities. We consider environmental factors before we embark on a new round of audits in a given year, as everything continues to change. However, we always have audits being started, audits in mid-course and audits at the reporting stage at any given point in time.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

That is the time. Thank you very much.

Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In connection with your four requests… In fact I counted them, and there seem to be five, the last one being tabling the report in both Houses.

[Karen Hogan]

I included that as one of the “several factors”.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

Okay. That's fine.

From my standpoint, two things were truly relevant and particularly interesting.

One of them covered an area of concern to me, which is the Crown corporations. In view of the taxpayer money they receive, I believe that they should indeed be subject to performance audits. It would be helpful to have more such audits, particularly as Crown corporations, like departments, should be included in the Public Accounts of Canada. I believe that it would be perfectly appropriate for them to be given a thorough audit of that kind, because they receive taxpayer money. It's mainly a question of transparency. Departments are required to report which people and companies receive funds, which is not the case for Crown corporations. I think that's a major problem. We already made a recommendation about it last year when we tabled the report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. I am awaiting a response from the Treasury Board, but it keeps postponing it.

The other extremely interesting point was partly raised here by one of my colleagues. I think that the most recent saga with respect to the Trudeau foundation, and the exchange you had with my leader, Mr. Yves-François Blanchet, about how much you could actually do, pointed to a potential problem. When money leaves the government and goes to a private foundation or organization, what you can do in your audit is relatively limited. I took that to be the reason why you couldn't do the requested audit. I think this aspect is covered by the first factor you mentioned, which is access to information.

Why not include all those who receive money from the government in the potential audits? A performance audit could identify what certain private stakeholders did with public funds.

Could you tell us more about that?

[Karen Hogan]

I'll make a start, and Mr. Hayes could add further details.

Our mandate to follow the money is precisely what you just said. It gives us an opportunity to determine whether funds, following a donation or an agreement with the government, were used as required in the contract.

Is it necessary to audit all the other activities of a private organization? I don't think so. The goal is to ensure that taxpayer money was actually used as it should have been.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I'm sorry, Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné, you've run out of time.

We turn now to Mr. Desjarlais.

You have the floor for two and a half minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

To conclude the last aspect, when you last spoke about your departmental plan, you mentioned that last portion, the care component, which was in direct relevance to the employees. Rising out of this really historic event in terms of the difficulty between the Treasury Board and your bargaining group being able to actually get to a deal forcing these workers there, is there a commitment to better work in terms of that “connect” piece with other ministries, including the Treasury Board, to actually see that the issues you are presenting here today are matters of relevance for them to consider, especially given that we need to have almost a post-mortem analysis of how something so critical was able to take place?

[Karen Hogan]

I will ask Andrew to jump in. I was trying to be clear that throughout this labour dispute, we spoke almost daily with the Treasury Board. It wasn't for lack of engagement—

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

What were they telling you?

[Karen Hogan]

—or exchange with them.

It was to help us understand the mandate and that everyone else who had negotiated had settled within that mandate, and to see how we could find a resolution staying within that mandate.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

But you recognize that there were very few at the very end of the mandate. You recognized that in the statements earlier today. You said there were a few outstanding bargaining tables. There weren't many, but they included your unit. Did you recognize that, and did you note to Treasury Board in those many discussions that these were at the very end—considering that a new mandate was just about to be negotiated— and how unfair the workers might perceive that to be, given the cost-of-living crisis?

[Andrew Hayes]

The answer to that is yes. Indeed, that is how our collective agreement was ultimately finalized. It covers a year more than what we were first looking at.

I want to come back to a point you made, which I think is very important: What did we learn from this strike? It was the first strike that we as an organization ever had. That hadn't happened in the public service for a very long time. For us, it was learning all the time.

What we would have done differently, definitely, would have been to enhance the communications with our employees throughout the strike. We know that our employees were facing difficult situations. Some of them didn't understand the role of the employer compared to the role of the union. If we had a do-over, that is what we would definitely do better.

In terms of the relationship with central agencies, we have to work with them for the best of interests of our employees as well. We are keeping those lines of communication open all the time. We have made commitments in our collective agreement to engage in studies of our classifications and our job postings and that sort of thing. We are doing that. We started that with the union already. There is a joint committee, and we will need to engage with the central agencies to be able to sort out what we can do at the end of that analysis, so we have to keep that relationship strong.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is the time.

Mr. Kram, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to circle back to the performance dashboard that your office has up and running now. Can you give us some background about whose decision it was to come up with this dashboard? Was it mandated by government? Was it all an in-house decision? I am very curious.

[Karen Hogan]

It was a decision of Michael Ferguson to start following up in a more formal way on results in audits—not really on the recommendations, but more on results and focusing on outcomes. This initiative started with him. It paused for a little when he passed away, but I committed to picking it up and making sure we moved it forward, especially when I was seeing that so many of the first reports I tabled had long-standing issues that had not been addressed. We needed to try a different way to ensure that entities were staying focused on the commitments they had made.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

That was my next question.

For example, in the report on emergency management in first nations communities, we've seen that some of those recommendations are very similar to the ones from a decade ago. They never seem to get acted upon.

I'd be curious to know how far back in history you are going with this dashboard. Can an average Canadian see how these recommendations sometimes seem to sit there for years and years?

[Karen Hogan]

It's my understanding that when we started, we went back three years. Now we're adding a good chunk of the work we're doing. We're being selective. Do we want to put certain reports in, save them for a full follow-up audit or just have them in the update on past audits?

We only went back three years. As you can imagine, it's not a self-declaration: Departments aren't saying, “Yes, we've met it.” We're going in and doing some work to kick the tires and see what's going on. We have a dedicated team that stays focused on that year round in order to update this.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

As you're well aware, this committee spent a considerable amount of time in these last few weeks dealing with the vaccine contracts, which certainly involved a great deal of confidentiality issues, with parts of contracts redacted and those sorts of things.

How will this public dashboard for Canadians handle issues of sensitivity and confidentiality like the ones we saw with the vaccine contracts, for example?

[Karen Hogan]

We won't be able to talk about things that are confidential and shouldn't be discussed in the public forum. Our intention is to definitely follow up on pandemic preparedness work.

That was one issue we found at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic: Recommendations and commitments coming out of H1N1 and SARS had not been acted on. Forgetting between emergencies that you need to invest and take care of certain things is not a hiccup I'd like to see the country have again. We are going to follow up on many of the recommendations we had about pandemic preparedness and being more ready next time.

Do you want to add something, Andrew?

[Andrew Hayes]

I would say we encountered a similar issue with our cybersecurity report. We had to hold back some information. We were intentionally transparent in that report about a recommendation we made to the department so that we could follow up and be transparent with this committee about our follow-up and include information about whether or not action had been taken in response. We are going to find ways to identify whether action has been taken on our recommendations and whether results have improved for Canadians.