Public Accounts Committee on Oct. 2nd, 2025

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

We are beginning our third round, which will consist of five members with various times.

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

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, all, for presenting to us.

We had questions last week regarding Housing, Infrastructure and Communities. They told us, basically, that Mr. Mills with PSPC would have to answer some of those questions.

Ms. Boudreau—or maybe it was Ms. Tattersall—said that there is a list and there is a percentage they have on the government buildings. My main question is going back to what my colleagues have asked.

There's no incentive here for the departments to actually make the cuts. It was said that there are 28 custodian departments and the departments are going to be responsible for determining what is vacant and not. It seems to me, Mr. Mills, that you guys are going to responsible for saying that you've actually done something.

How do we square this circle between saying there aren't really good measurables and they don't have incentives on the departments, yet you have to figure out where they're going to be cutting to make progress?

I don't know what recommendations you have for us, using a stick or an incentive to make the departments come to the same conclusion. I do believe it's something to do with your standardized measurements, which are not there.

Can you tell us what other things you can do so that the departments have to follow through and then in a year's time or so...?

It sounds like you're the ones who are going to be responsible, even though the departments are the ones determining what is actually happening.

[Michael Mills]

It would be helpful for us as a government to have some agreement on some very clear standards, such as the number of square metres per employee or the space topology. Where there may be areas for exemptions—

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

You said that there's a need for standards.

Who is responsible? Who do you think should be responsible for making those standards and how can we measure them when they come to you later?

[Michael Mills]

To make sure we're on the same page, I believe we should have a clear set of standards in terms of the number of square metres and have mechanisms, as we've talked about, if departments wants to go beyond that for whatever reason. They can do it within their discretion and maybe have some other areas where they can get some savings, if they want to be more aggressive and go below the standard.

I believe also that we should have greater clarity on what types of departmental needs would justify certain exemptions to a very rigid or specific standard. In order to have that be the strongest instrument, it would need to be a government-wide policy. We would need to have cabinet approval for such policy and direction.

We could do it in a standard or we could do it in a guideline, but then we wouldn't have the mechanisms to actually enforce, whereas if we had clear a policy statement around principles, we would be able to do that.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Just to be clear, we have none of those. We're leaving it, at this point, up to cabinet to give you direction as to who's going to make that decision.

[Michael Mills]

At the moment, we have a very voluminous number of guidelines, documents and standards that were developed within PSPC within the policy framework. What those guidelines and directions lack would be mechanisms to make sure that we can ensure that all are aligned and clear on what those are, and that all recognize the need to follow them.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I'm going to take a bit of your time.

You said “cabinet”. Could the President of the Treasury Board not enact that change you're suggesting, through the treasury? Why would it have to be a cabinet decision?

Now that the line item's there, couldn't that come through the Treasury Board president as a policy?

[Michael Mills]

I'll defer to my Treasury Board colleagues to explain that.

[Samantha Tattersall]

Treasury Board sets administrative policy for real property—the envelope—not the management of accommodation.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

Do you have anything to add to that, Mr. Mills? No? Okay, thank you.

Thank you for your time, Mr. Stevenson. I sometimes have questions. I usually take members' time from the official opposition. I'm going to have some more later, as well, but your time is up.

I'm going to go to Ms. Derksen now. You have the floor for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses who are joining us today.

One of the risks of going later in the meeting is that a lot of what I want to talk about has already been addressed, so I'm going to try to flesh out some of the information that you have provided. I'm going to start with Mr. Mills and Madame Bertrand. It seems pretty obvious that we are lacking some data. That seems to be the point of a lot of problems being generated—this wild card being the tenants, and they're quite a variable.

Madame Bertrand, you mentioned in answer to a previous question—I think it was asked by my colleague, Mr. Osborne—that you were looking at three to four solutions to implement in order to standardize some of this data collection.

Could you expand a little bit on what those might be?

[Nathalie Bertrand]

We are working very collaboratively with our SSC colleagues to look at some of the solutions that are available to us. Some solutions are maybe implementable but in a much longer time frame. That would be things like standardized security swipe accesses, so that we would all have the same type of information, but that is not coming in the short term.

In the short term, we are looking at software to be deployed on existing tablets. That would allow us to record connections to government systems. That is one of the solutions that we are testing. This is how, at PSPC, we track where employees are working from, but again, there is no standard software that is deployed on existing tablets. That would be one of the solutions that we're looking at.

Another one that we're testing is sensors and solutions that are employed through GC-WIFI. Again, GC-WIFI is deployed in some spaces but not all spaces. At this point, what we are evaluating the options, determining what would be a feasible option and then how long it would take to deploy across our entire portfolio.

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

Thank you.

There are long-term solutions and mid-term solutions. Getting back to the problem I pointed out with the tenants being co-operative, for lack of a better term, would implementing those technological solutions solve this problem if tenants were not willing to co-operate? Would there be policies in place that would require them to use those or utilize the technology that you implement?

[Michael Mills]

Mr. Chair, it's a difficult question to answer. Knowing my colleagues across government, if they were presented with very accurate numbers of utilization, I believe that many of them would be compelled to look at how they could reduce space if there were solid data such that the space was not being utilized. I don't think anyone's interest is to hold on to large pieces of underutilized space. In a lot of cases, I would argue that what we would see is underutilized space around the margins where they're thinking, “We may have some expansions to programs. We may have some changes. We won't have the flexibility. I'm a little bit uncertain about giving it up,” but I do think that if you were able to present compelling evidence of underutilized space that could be validated, my colleagues would look to work with us to reduce it.

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

Thank you. I certainly want to give a generous opportunity to our colleagues, and hopefully they would be reasonable in their responses. I'm thinking of the potential rogue tenant who, as we've already pointed out, is not incentivized. They don't want to go through the hassle of moving, necessarily.

I know we're a retrospective-looking committee, but if we're looking to the future with how, perhaps, lease agreements are drafted, is there an opportunity there to make sure that there are provisions so that type of information is part of the legal agreement for leasing the space?

[Michael Mills]

It's something we could look at. As we move through the evolution of our leases, we do add things. We've been adding the requirement to collect more information on greening results. We've added requirements to collect the volume of waste in buildings, so we may be able to look at that.

Again, it would be very dependent on what the technology is, how invasive it is and how we can ensure that they would safeguard the data to make sure that we're guarding the privacy of federal departments, as well as the federal employees who work in them.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Mr. Lemire, you may go ahead for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Mills, we are talking about the importance of being present in the workplace to increase efficiency and savings. However, I think workplace centralization is at play. I live in the Abitibi‑Témiscamingue region, and I consider the presence of public servants to be important. In delivering services, public servants have to understand the realities of people who live in remote areas. That is fundamental.

However, if costs go up while the government forces departments to drastically cut spending, how will it be possible to maintain service delivery in the regions and ensure that public servants can work there without hurting their career advancement?

[Michael Mills]

That's really a management question that falls to every department. Each department determines the locations of its own offices in accordance with the services it provides to Canadians.

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

What about your department? How are you going to ensure that your employees in the regions have access to career advancement opportunities?

[Michael Mills]

We have a number of regional offices where public servants have career advancement opportunities, in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Matane, for example. Some of our service divisions carry out significant regional operations.

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

I think we could see some centralizing of workplace locations in the years ahead. The take-away this morning is that there is reason to be concerned when it comes to the presence of public servants in regions. Do you feel that keeping public service jobs in the regions will stay a priority in the long term?

[Michael Mills]

The priority for me is to deliver services to Canadians, so we take into account where they live when we are organizing our services and deciding where to set up offices across Canada.

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

My time is up, but I have one last comment.

Delivering services is one thing, but those services have to be tailored to peoples' realities. If the workers providing those services understand the region's reality because they live there, they will necessarily provide better, more effective service.

Thank you.