Public Accounts Committee on March 23rd, 2026

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you, Mr. Deltell.

Next is Ms. Tesser Derksen, please, for five minutes.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Great job on these reports; thanks so much for your hard work on them.

I'm going to continue talking about pay modernization. There are some indications that departments are on the right track, but you've certainly articulated concerns you have over the shortened timeline, for example, and also balancing priorities of scheduling with pay processes. From your report, I understand that the number of pay transactions older than a year has been reduced by 50% over the last two years, but you've expressed concerns with the pace being adequate enough to address the remaining backlog.

Do you see opportunities to increase pace without sacrificing process integrity?

[Karen Hogan]

That's a tough question, because when you look at it year over year, I think the backlog has gone down. We've given you a great chart in the report to look at. What's concerning is that more than 50% of what remains is more than two years old, and about 16,000 pay transactions are more than six years old. Those will take longer to treat and resolve than something that just came in over the last six months or so. I am concerned that those older ones don't seem to be clearing up. That will take some time. That's why shortening the time frame is a concern.

We did see in the audit where they prioritized the departments that will be in the first wave of adopting Dayforce. That's a good practice. They still have a lot of work to do, however. They still have pay transactions to clear, and to recognize that every single day more will get added. Pay is a very evolving item. If you don't tackle the items quickly, they do become things that sit around and take a really long time. They may be complex. Many of those individuals may no longer work for the public service. It will be really difficult, I think, to resolve some of those older things. It will be a right balance, and it will probably take some resources, but it will be about prioritizing what you treat first.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

Okay.

One issue that I believe you identified as having contributed to the inefficiencies and the backlogs in the old system is the quality of data. I understand that the PSPC and TBS departments have taken some steps to improve quality of data and data management. Can you provide us with your evaluation of whether those improvements on data management will be adequate?

[Karen Hogan]

I'm not sure I looked at all of them, but I think I would point to the standardization of processes. You do need to have all of the departments and agencies that are part of this. Pay is not just a black box that gives you your paycheque. It is a whole process from onboarding and any change in your life to your pay. It needs departments and agencies to be involved. That whole HR-to-pay process is important. They've identified about 200 processes that could be standardized. For example, it's what would go in a letter of offer. It's making sure that every letter of offer has the same things that are needed within the pay system so that you're not missing anything. Departments only need to adopt those standardized processes when they shift. I think there's an opportunity to look at the timing of that. Is there merit in maybe starting to standardize things now so that not everyone is rushing?

These are all elements that I would expect are considered now that the decision was made to shorten the timeline to transition. We're so early on that we could at least say that these are concerns and make sure you think about them as you move forward.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

You touched on something important there, about one hand talking to the other within departments. That's a concept that's come up a few times today, about the siloing and isolation that some departments work within.

Based on the necessity of integration between the central agencies and departments and the siloing of estimated costs—sometimes in the federal government it just works that way, for better or worse—would you say that this is a result of a systemic culture or a culture of systems? Have you seen any programs that have successfully un-siloed and taken a broader canvassing of potential costs and impacts?

[Karen Hogan]

You're going to make Andrew and me think about that—if we've seen something that has successfully un-siloed.

I think this is definitely an opportunity to try to do differently, which is why some of our recommendations have been to think about this more globally. I would encourage every public servant, when they work on a project, not to think about their department or their deputy head who they are accountable to for their budget, but to take a look as a Canadian. A Canadian looks at the federal government and just sees one organization, not the many little silos in which we function. If we started to think that way, then maybe we would plan differently and cost differently. That's why some of the recommendations we issued were meant to challenge the old way of thinking so that we don't repeat Phoenix.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

That is your time, I'm afraid.

Mr. Lemire now has the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Hogan, I'd like to understand the federal government's IT service trends.

An article published in La Presse this week talked about Cúram. I'll read you a quote that goes like this: “As for future costs—for five or six years from now, when the program is completed—I don't have precise figures.” That comment was made by a senior official from Employment and Social Development Canada during a requested technical briefing.

Take, for example, the ArriveCAN program, under which a so-called indigenous company with four employees was awarded contracts worth $330 million. Let's be clear: There was abuse in the way things were done.

Let me get back to Cúram. The initial assessment by government officials was unreliable, and the government has acknowledged that. In other words, the government knew it. It knows that IT projects always run over budget. Ottawa admits this, and it doesn't know how much Cúram will cost. From the outset, cost estimates for IT projects are unreliable, and it lacks the capacity to estimate them accurately. Do you sense a recurring pattern with regard to IT projects in general?

As a result, is it safe to assume that Dayforce might cost well over the $4.2 billion presented today?

[Karen Hogan]

You're reminding me of several of our audits—not just audits of IT projects—where we've identified significant shortcomings in preliminary cost estimates. It's clear that there are also shortcomings when it comes to IT projects.

I'd like to raise a few points.

Sometimes, preliminary cost estimates are put together very quickly in order to secure funding and then be able to better determine the costs. However, as we saw with Dayforce, significant costs are left out. I would therefore expect to see adjustments. Other times, there is a lack of recognition of the complexity of what is required of a technological tool. Furthermore, requirements often change over time. In fact, ArriveCAN is a good example: During the pandemic, border measures changed frequently.

That said, these are all factors that contribute to the complexity. Nevertheless, it's still important to consider the overall picture from the start. This is a shortcoming we often see in projects in general.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

My speaking time is up.

Thank you very much, Ms. Hogan.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lemire.

Next, I think we're going to split the time.

Mr. Kuruc, would you like to kick it off? I'll notify you when you're halfway through your time.

[Ned Kuruc, Conservative, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thank you, everybody, for attending today. Thank you for your very detailed reports.

I'll be starting on the international student program reforms.

Between 2023 and 2024, we had 153,000 students who were identified as “potentially non-compliant”. In your report, you stated that, because of budget issues, only 2,000 were able to be looked at annually, so a total of 4,000-and-change cases were looked at.

To my understanding, then, roughly 149,000 potentially non-compliant cases were not looked at. Is that correct?

[Karen Hogan]

Yes. According to the figures the department gave us, it only had funding to look at a little over 4,000, which means that the others were not investigated.

However, what's concerning to me is that when it did investigate the 4,000, about 40% of them were closed, but they were closed because the students stopped communicating with the immigration department. I would have expected that it would have taken that all the way to the end to determine whether a student was meeting the terms of the permit.

Remember that these are just students being flagged as potentially non-compliant. You need to give them an opportunity to demonstrate that they are studying full time.

[Ned Kuruc, Conservative, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Okay, thank you.

Your audit examined nearly 550,000 individuals whose study permits expired in 2024. There were 39,500 individuals identified who could no longer be in Canada because they did not have immigration status. Where were these 39,000? How did we get that number?

[Karen Hogan]

This is one of the examples I cited about the immigration department not acting on the information that it had. Study permits have an expiry date, and they were not putting together a list of students who had expired permits to assess what was happening. Our audit team worked with them to determine how many students had expired permits and then to find out whether—

[Ned Kuruc, Conservative, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Sorry, to make that clear, your team compiled that list, not the immigration department. You found the error, and your team, on top of doing this audit, assisted them in helping to put together this list. Is that correct?

[Karen Hogan]

That's correct. We worked closely with them to go through their database and identify all the students with expired permits. The next step was to assess whether or not they had applied for any other immigration permit, and that's where we ended up with our list of a little over 39,000 students.

We then took that list and asked the Canada Border Services Agency to confirm if individuals had left the country. The result was that about 40% had. Now it's up to the immigration department and border services to decide what to do with the remaining individuals and take action as they deem necessary.

[Ned Kuruc, Conservative, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Mr. Stevenson, you have the floor for just over two minutes.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I believe there's a bit of a romantic feeling towards our RCMP among the general public, but I don't think they necessarily agree with all of our bureaucratic problems that we might have going forward.

At the back of your report, there are a lot of recommendations, and then there are responses from the RCMP. Almost every single one of them says that they agree and they're going to do something in this regard or they're going to try to fix it.

Are their words going to match their actions when they didn't set out these goals?

Didn't you say earlier that when they came up with their goals as to how many people...? We have this massive shortage in recruitment of officers. Their goals were not to fill those positions that we figured they need but to recruit the number they could train.

[Karen Hogan]

There are two parts to your question, and the first is about recommendations. I believe that a response to a recommendation should have a statement of agreement or disagreement, a clear timeline and some clear actions.

The RCMP could have given us better responses. This is where I encourage the public accounts committee to invite them to study our report and give you a detailed action plan. That would be my recommendation on the responses.

When it comes to identifying their needs, they set a target to recruit 1,280 police officers based on the number they believed they could train with the funding they had and the ability they had. That number is well short of what they need, so they're not even aiming to recruit to meet their needs.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Can I get a little more detail on that and how they came up with that number? In the report, it says it costs $247,000 to recruit and train an RCMP officer, but we had a discussion earlier about how there are fixed costs and there's a per-member cost.

When they're doing these calculations, it would be much more efficient if they had their full training targets, because then the per-recruit costs would probably go down. Is that not correct?

[Karen Hogan]

Absolutely. The per-recruit costs would go down if they could fill up the training classes and then graduate more cadets.

They determined the 1,280 based on what they have as capacity at Depot and how many they could put through there. You already have a trainer and you have a classroom, so if you fill it up—

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

They said that their maximum per year that they could probably do is 1,600, but they have significantly fewer than that. You said in your earlier—