Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I won't take any of your time. We just very much welcome the feedback of the committee and we look forward to availing ourselves of the opportunity of writing some reflections. Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for the question. That is a very important question indeed. They are part of the estimates, so they are an accountability document, and it's important that they do show results from planned spending. It's very important for us to have this kind of accountabi

Public Accounts committee  Over 90.

Public Accounts committee  We do try to calibrate the extent to which targets are met. If they're 100% met, it means they're fully met. If they're mostly met, it's probably 70% of the performance toward the target established.

Public Accounts committee  One is always trying to ensure that there's some sort of quantitative or directional assessment of performance. If there's a defined target, how do you determine how far you've gone in meeting that target? You know that if the target is defined quantitatively and 100% of your req

Public Accounts committee  Actually, in a lot of respects, I think we're further ahead than others in trying to calibrate the movement towards meeting the target. We tried to find some way of characterizing it rather than saying it's 70% or 60%, which would fall into the same trap of giving lower value mea

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we encourage the same calibration for all reports.

Public Accounts committee  We do provide very detailed instructions on what should be included in the reports and we do have a lot of examples in that guidance, including on the tables that are required, the plan spending, actual spending, charts, and all of that. We haven't given departments a strict temp

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Chair and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here today and to be part of this discussion of departmental performance reports. With me today is Amanda Jane Preece, the executive director of the results-based management division of the Treasury Board Secr

Public Accounts committee  Yes, Mr. Murphy. The departmental performance reports do include performance measures, and they continue to improve. These performance measures or performance indicators are consistent with the types of measures used in evaluation. But the structure of these reports follows audi

Public Accounts committee  Some of the gaps that we ourselves have found over the years are pretty similar to what the Auditor General has mentioned--a lack of performance information, in particular. One of the focal points of the new policy is to improve performance measures and performance information, w

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for those questions. It is a challenge to find experienced evaluators. Clearly we're building up this community rapidly. We're building it up largely through intake from universities. We have a consortium of universities working with us to offer evaluation courses an

Public Accounts committee  We've ramped up and have probably doubled the number of people who are evaluating over this last decade. We're making headway. It's true that they're in real demand. I think this will also encourage universities to offer more courses to encourage more students to come to this lin

Public Accounts committee  We've established a committee at the assistant deputy minister level. We also have working groups looking at specific issues across government in harnessing the expertise of our senior evaluators across government and heads of evaluation. We are pulling a lot of the information t

Public Accounts committee  We've established milestones. We've established a great number of particular objectives. This year, as you have heard before, our primary objective is to ensure that our guidance is firmly determined, that it is supported by departments, and that they see this as pragmatic and do