Public Accounts committee  Our audits deal with the implementation of government policy rather than the studying or the establishment of government policy. We have indicated in the report that the department has to deal with the private sector contractor in the removal of the tolls, in making adjustments t

Public Accounts committee  It's somewhat difficult to say. We indicated that the Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges Incorporated, JCCBI, had found that it may be necessary to start planning the new bridge, but that the new bridge should be finished by 2021. So it seems that some of the information provi

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on replacing Montreal's Champlain Bridge. This audit focused on whether Infrastructure Canada managed selected aspects of the new Champlain Bridge project to deliver a durable bridge on time and in a cos

Government Operations committee  I think part of the problem is more that they look to the policy. The policy tells them to do something, and then they do it in a way that they can argue fits the form rather than the substance. In the Phoenix situation, the example I would give would be that the senior executi

Government Operations committee  Just the importance of understanding that there needs to be a certain tension between what ministers are trying to achieve and the role of civil servants.... I mean, obviously in the political world there's more of a focus on the four-year election cycle, and I think deputy minis

Government Operations committee  You cannot capture a culture in one word. There are many different ways of looking at it. In the message I delivered, I talked about a number of different things. Again, as we discussed earlier, one of those, particularly when you're dealing with something such as a payroll proje

Government Operations committee  I would say that in something like the Phoenix situation it is particularly difficult to address that question, because the problems touch so many people and have affected so many people. As the deputy said, I'm sure that the people involved in the project didn't intend it to t

Government Operations committee  In our work, we like to go back and do an audit before we comment on how successful implementation has been. We've seen the action plan. We are quite confident that the departments involved have taken our recommendations seriously, but as to saying how effective they have been, I

Government Operations committee  Any government has goals and objectives. The government must set the day's agenda. The public servants must always provide all of the information and all the details. Here we are saying that because of the preoccupation with the budget and the deadline, the executives in charge o

Government Operations committee  The recommendations we made, obviously, were in the context of an IT project, but I think those recommendations need to be considered in the context of other large and complex projects, as well.

Government Operations committee  No, not really. The only thing I could say is that the award of excellence was granted for different activities, among them the Phoenix project. In fact, I'm not aware of the way in which this prize is granted.

Government Operations committee  I think in the Phoenix situation, as the deputy minister said, there were really two projects, but the system development project was dependent on the success of the other project of the centralization of the pay advisers. There were very many indications, as we say in the audit,

Government Operations committee  Again, the reason I raised that was that I was reflecting on the audit we had done on Phoenix and the recommendations we had made, and while there could be more changes to approaches and to policy, I was concerned about those being enough to actually prevent another Phoenix from

Government Operations committee  To me, the issue that needs to be examined is what it was in the culture that allowed that to happen.

Government Operations committee  At the end of the message I prepared I indicated I don't have an instruction manual on how to change or fix a culture. The culture, however you want to define it, very much needs to reflect on the fact that, again as I said in the message, even though we are operating in a world