Evidence of meeting #35 for Public Accounts in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was amendment.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
I'm going to interrupt. We have found in committees that it's much better to have a date.
Could you propose a date, like January 1, 2024, or something like that? I'll give you a few seconds.
It's much more helpful to the public servants when they know what they're working against as opposed to simply “24 months”.
Liberal
Tom Osborne Liberal Cape Spear, NL
Certainly. If we're going to go back over the previous 24 months, Mr. Chair, we could say, by the time we look at this, that it could be April 1, 2024.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
All right. That would cover the public accounts for two years.
The amendment to the motion is to strike “January 1, 2017” and replace it with “April 1, 2024”.
Monsieur Lemire, go ahead.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
This is an important amendment. One of the things we've been talking about all evening and as long as we've been talking about this whole motion is the sheer number of documents. I've been told, certainly, that we're looking at millions of documents, and it could be an immense cost to translate them, redact them and so on, so this really narrows it down. It takes it from a 10-year period to a two-year period. It cuts it down to probably 20% of the documents, to start with.
This is a really important thing. If we can get through all those documents, we should be able to come up with some good questions to ask the various officials when we do the study.
The whole point of this is not the documents. The point of this is to do the study, at the end of the day, so we can drill down into what happened and when, and figure out what went wrong, how we can fix it and, frankly, how we can avoid it going forward.
I want to emphasize that cutting this back to two years would be really helpful to deliver meaningful outputs and meaningful results from this motion.
Liberal
Jean Yip Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
To continue on the point of the mountain of paperwork that it would involve, there are two paths before us. One is a mountain of paper, millions of pages, that would take a long time for everyone to review. The other path would be one of efficiency and clarity. I think the path of having oral testimony from the officials—witnesses—who actually run these programs would be very helpful.
When we look at the massive paper production, it would involve a small army of public servants to find these documents, requiring overtime. It would also take another army of committee staff to try to make sense of them. I have already related the amount of time that it took for us to do this in another public accounts study.
I just feel that by the time anyone reads—I don't know—page 500,000, the information will be obsolete. The program will have moved on and taxpayers would have had to foot an enormous bill, whether it was overtime for the public servants or overtime for committee staff, plus translation costs, and also the amount of paper and the use of computer time. All of that would take millions of dollars in administrative costs, and I don't think that would serve the taxpayers well.
Also, I would not want to divert the committee staff from the work at hand. Currently, we have seven draft reports to review, several outstanding AG reports to study and five new reports coming this upcoming week with the Auditor General's spring reports, which I'm sure we are all very anxious to discover. I'm sure the chair would like to continue the progress we have made and really delve into finishing up all the work.
The committee staff—
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.
I don't see the connection between what is being said and the motion. Also, other committee members have already said all this.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Yes, but—
I will, yes.
The rule is that members cannot repeat what they've already said. Therefore, I agree this has already been said.
Ms. Yip, you have the floor.
Liberal
Jean Yip Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Yes, I was just detailing the work we have at hand. I wanted to make sure that the committee staff would be able to provide the support.
As I was summarizing, we don't want to paralyze this committee's work, and we want to make sure the committee staff is able to be prepared for the remainder of the session.
Thank you.
Conservative
Liberal
Kristina Tesser Derksen Liberal Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to talk a bit about setting dates because—again, I'm going to go back to my background in the legal world—dates can make or break the outcome in a really substantial way that people sometimes don't turn their minds to. I want to talk about the question of that temporal scope in document production. In a request of this kind, it's really not a minor technical matter, because it can determine what evidence this committee has access to and, by extension, it determines what questions we can ask and what conclusions we end up reaching.
I want to take some time to explain why I think the subamendment that my colleague has proposed represents something that's a more defensible and a more functional approach than what was originally there. We had an original motion, where I believe it was January 1, 2017, as the starting date for document procurement, but the amendment removed the date entirely. I think that's something you caught, Mr. Chair, to your credit. There was an unlimited temporal window that had been created through that oversight in the amendment.
This subamendment is proposing to replace that struck text with, I believe, the starting date of April 1, 2024. Now, I suspect that my colleague Monsieur Lemire might wonder what the relevance of that date is, and I might wonder myself, but dates necessarily sometimes have to be a bit arbitrary. You have to start somewhere.
Liberal
Kristina Tesser Derksen Liberal Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON
Obviously, having no temporal limit is a problem. When a committee adopts document production requests with no starting date, in theory you're requesting all documents ever created on the subject matter. That has been the crux of our opposition to the motion in general. The scope of what the motion was contemplating with regard to the production of documents was completely untenable. Particularly for a program like benefits delivery modernization, which, as we've talked about, is modernization of the legacy IT systems—some of which are 60 years old, I continue to repeat—this could potentially mean documents going back decades.
In fact, the motion was requesting close to a decade's worth of documents. Some of those records actually may no longer be retrievable, or in forms that might not exist anymore, or staff may have long retired, or they're in formats that even modern systems can't read. It creates a production obligation that departments will legitimately struggle to meet. This has been repeated ad nauseam. I apologize for repeating it, but I think it bears discussion. The response to that struggle would be incomplete production, accompanied by detailed explanations of why complete production is impossible. You end up with this kind of circular logic. That doesn't serve Canadians. It doesn't serve anybody. Those who might prefer the study to be mired in a dispute about document completeness rather than focused on the substantive questions that the Auditor General has raised....
I agree with the change in date. The programmatically anchored starting date is different. While April 1, 2024, may be arbitrary in the reason it was chosen, it's not an arbitrary date. We have a hard and fast date that we can deal with. It's the start of the fiscal year, I believe, in which the Treasury Board gave BDM its initial project approval, so there is some meaningful connection to that date with the program. That's when the program was launched in its current form. That's the moment at which the government structures that this committee is examining came into existence, so it does make some sense. It's the moment at which the cost estimates we're scrutinizing were first formally established as well.
I know that my colleague Monsieur Lemire would agree that the scrutiny of the cost estimates and in fact the cost overruns are what he's really trying to get to the heart of, and I do appreciate that.
All of that happened after the program received its initial project approval captured by the anniversary of April 1 as its starting date. I'd also note that anchoring the date to a specific programmatic event rather than an arbitrary calendar date makes the production request more defensible and more precise. That's important when we're talking about the volume we're contemplating here. If a department can test the scope of production, the committee can point to the Treasury Board's initial project approval, the anniversary of that date, as April 1. That's a cleaner and more enforceable standard than either January 1, 2017, which I think was the original date, or no particular date, which is, as we've already decided, nonsensical.
I want to make one more point about the practical effect of an unlimited temporal window on the ability of this committee to actually use the documents it receives. If I understand correctly, the goal of document production is not to just receive documents; it's also to read them. To understand them, they would have to be translated as well, as we've discussed. We use them to ask better questions of witnesses, which is something we're really good at in this committee.
If this committee receives that enormous volume of records that would span potentially a decade, the analytical capacity required to process those records before witnesses are summoned is really beyond what our library analysts can reasonably provide in the time available. A more defined temporal scope, which my colleague is proposing, means more manageable production, more thorough review, properly translated documents and more informed questioning. That is good for accountability. That's what we want around this committee table. We want accountability. It's good for Canadians. That's what Canadians want. They want accountability. It's good for the credibility of this committee's follow-up report.
I will support this amendment that my colleague has put forward. I will defer to my other colleagues if they have other comments to make on the issue of the timeline.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
I really like those words—“unlimited temporal window”. That's amazing.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Again, I really want to emphasize that certainly my concern with this whole motion, right from the get-go, has been the sheer volume of documents and the horrendous task of gathering them. Having public servants out there putting them together and getting them translated and redacted as necessary would be hugely expensive and so forth.
Certainly, this is a significant step forward. I want to emphasize that. It cuts down the time. It makes the unlimited temporal window a very limited temporal window, and I'm very supportive of that. I think it's a good idea.
Thank you.
Conservative
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I was going to say this is information my colleague Mr. McKinnon has already brought up.
I just want to ask the government a question. In all transparency, what happened before March 31, 2024 that the government is trying to hide?
Maybe I can also ask this: Does it have anything to do with the May 27, 2022 briefing note from Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council, addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which we've integrated in the motion?
Maybe that's what they're trying to hide. Maybe it's something else. I, for one, am going to vote against this motion.
Liberal