Public Accounts Committee on May 4th, 2026

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Auditor General, Commissioner, thank you for your excellent reports, which highlight tremendous needs.

I'd like to focus on the one about bird flu, given that the Public Health Agency of Canada intended to purchase 800,000 doses of vaccine before conducting a needs analysis. It purchased 500,000 doses in August 2024, and then, in February 2025, it finally determined that it only needed 300,000. What baffles me is that, for no apparent reason, the agency still purchased an additional 370,000 doses in March 2025, just a year ago.

How do you explain the Public Health Agency of Canada making this additional purchase? One of the major issues is how much it cost. A quick search using artificial intelligence tells us that a dose costs between two and seven euros. So we're talking about $2 million to $10 million that was essentially wasted.

First, Mr. Chair, would it be possible to ask the Public Health Agency of Canada to provide us with a written breakdown of the total cost of the contract for these vaccines? I understand that the contract is confidential, but there are still cost components involved.

So, if 95% of the doses were thrown away, is that due to poor planning and an inability on the part of the government to make accurate estimates?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

In the early stages of the process, there wasn't much certainty, and the agency made decisions quickly. As I said, the fact that it purchased an additional 370,000 doses even though it knew that the first 500,000 doses purchased weren't being used much is hard to explain. However, it's not up to us to explain it; that's the agency's job. Maybe they'll come here to do it.

As I said before, how can we learn from this situation to better prevent and avoid waste in the future? That's at the heart of our recommendation.

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

That's an excellent question. That said, we've been through a pandemic, and I remember Justin Trudeau talking about his stockpile of some 10 million vaccine doses to ensure we had every possible chance. In the end, we clearly haven't learned any lessons from that. I'd be curious to know how much money was wasted on those millions of doses that weren't used or that we paid for but couldn't use.

How is it that we don't have the IT capabilities to manage the distribution and tracking of vaccine supplies after having lived through the pandemic?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

It's disappointing to have to come to the same conclusions that we reached years ago.

It is the agency's responsibility to learn from these various emergency situations and prepare for them now, rather than waiting for the next emergency.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Next, we have Mr. Stevenson for five minutes, please.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

As a CPA, having the Auditor General and her team here is like Christmas for me, so I'm happy to have you here.

We have five reports and there's far too much information for us to ask about in five minutes. That's why we're all over the map here today with various questions.

I'm going to focus on the indigenous financial initiatives part of it.

We've had previous conversations about how, in 2016-17, they were to have the co-developed eligibility criteria be included. Could we possibly have that list sent to us in writing?

Have those criteria changed? When I look at your information, approximately 30% of the indigenous groups across Canada are actually participating in this 10-year planning. Has it evolved over time or will it be evolving, or is the eligibility part fixed?

[Karen Hogan]

Thank you for your kind words. I can tell you that my kids aren't happy when mom shows up, but at least you are here.

I already have the eligibility criteria in writing. They're included in paragraph 23 in our report. They were co-developed with first nations colleagues in the department.

Two were initial eligibility criteria. The organizations needed to have a financial administration law or bylaw to govern their finances, and then they also had to meet certain financial performance measures. The decision was that this would be evaluated by looking at audited financial statements. Then there were ongoing criteria, where a set of audited financial statements needed to be provided to the First Nations Financial—

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Are those the annual requirements?

[Karen Hogan]

Yes, they needed to be provided annually to the First Nations Financial Management Board, which would assess whether or not certain metrics were met, like a debt-to-equity ratio, and so on.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

They are separate from the annual requirement versus the initial one.

[Karen Hogan]

That's correct. The initial one was to apply for the grant and get it. We looked at all 191 applicants, and they were all eligible for the grant.

The annual monitoring is where we see some gaps. The First Nations Financial Management Board would take the financial statements and then provide a summary report to the government indicating whether the financial indicators had been met annually. That's where there have been gaps, with only 40% of the files having reported every year. Others had gaps of a year here or there, and six that we looked at had no reports whatsoever.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

In your review of those, were any of the groups ever removed from the program because they failed to follow or didn't meet the criteria, or has any of their funding or anything ever changed with regard to that?

[Karen Hogan]

None of the organizations whose files we reviewed were removed from the program. When we asked Indigenous Services Canada and the First Nations Financial Management Board why there were files missing, they explained to us that it was due to a lack of capacity in some of the first nations communities to create financial statements on an annual basis, and then a lack of access to auditors to audit those. This speaks to the importance of really building up that capacity that is needed in first nations communities to continue to meet the ongoing requirement.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Other than getting more information, were there any consequences for any the participants when they didn't meet the criteria?

[Karen Hogan]

The program wasn't designed that way. I would say this was a co-development on deciding that these were going to be measures that could be met.

If it's not working for first nations communities and the department, then I would encourage them to sit back down together and see what it would take to make sure that mutual accountability—which is a two-way street from first nations to the government, and vice versa—is created and maintained.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Further down, you talked about the community well-being index, how it's not a good measure and that it's only every five to seven years. If it's only every five to seven years, what were they evaluating their outcomes on—or were they evaluating their outcomes at all—based on what you were finding there?

[Karen Hogan]

This was one of our findings: that they weren't assessing whether the initiatives had met their intended outcomes.

At the outset, the departments at the community well-being index had a metric they would use to see whether the socio-economic gap between first nations communities and other Canadians had been closed. This is a metric that's done by Statistics Canada. While it's broken down between indigenous communities and other Canadian communities, it was last issued in 2021.

It's been seven years—

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

It's pretty hard to evaluate whether they've done a good job or not if you can't have—

[Karen Hogan]

This is exactly why we recommended an annual assessment.

There's a lot of information already collected from first nations communities. The department needs to figure out a better way to determine whether this grant, which can't be targeted by the community well-being index, is actually making a difference.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is your time.

Mr. Ma, you have five minutes, please. You'll finish it up here today.

[Michael Ma, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the folks here from the Office of the Auditor General.

My questions will be focused on the flood hazard mapping.

Commissioner, your report includes a number of constructive recommendations, so thank you very much. Can you speak to the importance of flood hazard mapping where flooding is the most common and costly natural disaster?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

As you see from the first exhibit in our report, it's not only the most costly. You'll see that the cost to the federal government for flood relief has been escalating quite rapidly over the last few decades.

In order to try to get a handle on that, why not plan better for the future and try to avoid the construction of new infrastructure, new housing and so on in areas that may well, with climate change, become hazard areas? The whole point of this is really about being safe rather than sorry with respect to new infrastructure.

We have a lot of infrastructure that's already prone to flooding, and there are different programs in place to deal with that, but this, really, is about investing the resources now in preventing future disasters resulting from the construction of infrastructure in areas that we should have avoided.

If flood mapping produces good, high-quality maps that are usable for all users—whether that's a new homebuyer, a housing developer or a public infrastructure planner—what we would see is newer information that doesn't just look at the past in determining where we shouldn't build but also does scenario planning into the future to try to predict as much as possible—there's a lot of uncertainty—which areas to avoid in order to be safe rather than sorry.

[Michael Ma, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

To that point, do you feel the department could use newer or more advanced tools, including the possibility of AI, to help with that prediction of weather changes?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

With respect to the information that's supposed to be available to Canadians through the portal, Public Safety Canada does need to upgrade what type of information is made available. Right now, the portal that's being launched as we speak—there's a shell of it that has come up on the Internet in the last couple of days—doesn't have the capability for users saying, “Okay, with a change in climate, what should I plan for?” It just looks back. Whether they use AI or any other tools, it is possible to incorporate that information, even if they are subject to uncertainty. That would be one area of improvement.

With respect to the regulatory maps—the more detailed, higher-resolution maps that Natural Resources Canada is helping to fund—we already know that Environment Canada can assist in that process by providing data that would help incorporate climate change considerations into what we call regulatory-level mapping.

[Michael Ma, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.

Could you describe how federal departments are working with the provinces and territories on flood hazard mapping, and why that collaboration is essential for the success of this?