Public Accounts committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. I'd like to begin by thanking the members of the committee for inviting me here. I would like to take you through a quick update on the status of our work to implement the eight recommendations. I'd like to acknowledge that we are gathered on traditio

Public Accounts committee  Indeed, the new program we will put in place April 1 was developed in partnership with those communities, in order to guarantee better results and to help them reach their goals. As you know, the seventh call to action published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Cana

Public Accounts committee  First, the final result should be an increase in employment among those groups throughout the country. However, how will we determine that that increase is truly the result of the programs? Here is what we can do, and the situations where we expect it to be difficult to perform

Public Accounts committee  It was organized with community partners, and I think that Ms. Wernick was directly involved in this project. Its purpose was to obtain more detailed data about each community, so as to better understand their diverse needs, because the communities differ. For instance, some of

Public Accounts committee  Do you want me to focus exclusively on the data? Okay. On the data area, there are areas for which the department had data available that it did not share back with communities when it did the analysis of the data. That should have been done and needs to be done, and it will be

Public Accounts committee  You may wish to ask the Auditor General that. Inside the department, one of the reasons they were not collecting the longer-term data is that they doubted the calibre of that data to accurately reflect what was happening, given the inability of communities on the ground to do tha

Public Accounts committee  I'll focus on the monitoring question, if that's where you wanted me to start, but I'm happy to go wherever you want. In the Auditor General's report in paragraph 6.83, they lay out the statistics on how the department did on the timeliness of its financial and activity monitor

Public Accounts committee  I'm going to need some help on this one, but before I go to that, I understand your frustration and I want to assure you that as public servants, we join to make a difference. We are committed to doing that. As a public servant who happens to have Perry Bellegarde as his neighbou

Public Accounts committee  Just to give a concrete example of that, what that means on a distinction-basis approach is that our Inuit partners may say, for example, “We wish to focus our energies further upstream”, which means we need a different set of measures than just employment, because there are goin

Public Accounts committee  I've spent a lot of time digging into this, and as an economist I understand the limitations of statistical collection at a micro level. Let me just walk you through this. What we want is comprehensive, accurate, timely and cost-effective data. At a micro community level, whethe

Public Accounts committee  The first point I would make, as somebody who's done a lot of federal-provincial programming over his career, is that overlap and duplication between federal and provincial programs are not a bug of federalism. It's actually a design feature. When you have two jurisdictions spann

Public Accounts committee  No. I have met with the folks who've done the design. We had a half-day session with Statistics Canada last week as well—not on this specifically, but on other elements. I'm confident that our best statistical people have looked at this and come up with the best approach to devel

Public Accounts committee  Let me unbundle the “why” and give some different categories. On the question I just answered on the unavailability of labour market data at the micro, granular level, I think the “why” is that no such instruments existed. That's why we didn't collect it. That's why we had embar

Public Accounts committee  It's not a surprise, but the centrality of that data in allowing programs to operate on the ground—because that labour market information is critical to how they operate—is the reason we're pushing further on it. There are other areas where we had collected data, for example, as

Public Accounts committee  I've been at the Department of Finance, the Privy Council Office, National Resources Canada, and most recently the Department of Canadian Heritage, where we did extensive programming regarding indigenous languages, which is I think the closest proximity to this one.