Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on employment training for indigenous people. The work on this audit was completed in December 2017, and we have not audited actions taken by Employment and Social Development Canada since then. Many indigenous peo

Public Accounts committee  Again, it would depend on what the legislation or the agreement says. We'd have to go back and look at that. Again, I'm taking it to an extreme. We don't look at what the provinces accomplish from equalization funding, fiscal formula funding or anything like that. That's money th

Public Accounts committee  In that case, there may need to be more reporting back to the federal government in terms of, “Okay, here's the money you provided. Here's what you were supposed to do. Have you done it?” I think it's going to be different. I think, to me, what's fundamental in that question is t

Public Accounts committee  I think that is a significant complexity. Let's remember that at least with the provinces, while they receive significant money from the federal government, most of them also have revenue-generating capacity, whereas for the first nations, how much revenue-generating capacity the

Public Accounts committee  Obviously, the issue of data and needing the right data is important. I guess what I want to do is bring this back up to.... We used education as an example, but what we are talking about here is data to be able to analyze the socio-economic gap between indigenous people and non-

Public Accounts committee  I'll start, and then I'll ask Mr. Martire to fill in some of the details. I think the deputy explained, as well, that it was funding provided to the educational institutions to provide this type of preparatory program. Our concern was that only 8%—

Public Accounts committee  But the preparatory program itself was delivered by the university.

Public Accounts committee  Okay. What we identified was that only 8% of the students who entered into those preparatory programs completed them. It would be a whole different question of how many of those 8% who were able to complete them went on and completed post-secondary education. Only 8% of the stud

Public Accounts committee  Certainly all of those dollars are reflected in the financial statements of the Government of Canada. We would be able to compare them to any agreements that were in place with the recipients, and then we would be able to go through those to determine whether the recipients met t

Public Accounts committee  The importance of focusing on results is something we have brought up in the past. In this case, it's about focusing on ways to improve aboriginals' quality of life. I understand that this file, which is very complex, affects many first nations people, who all have their own nee

Public Accounts committee  It is because we looked at the data in another way. I'm going to have to do this in English because it's a little too complicated for me. Essentially, what the department was measuring was concerning, if a student starts grade 12, does that student graduate from grade 12. Wha

Public Accounts committee  We didn't analyze the data on the basis of comparing one first nation or one model to another. That wasn't the basis of how we did our analysis.

Public Accounts committee  Again, I haven't looked at that to know for sure, but I think what's important is that, whatever model is used, there is good public reporting on what the outputs and the outcomes of that are. That doesn't necessarily have to be a contribution agreement type of arrangement and re

Public Accounts committee  We have different ways of looking at different organizations. Sometimes in agreements, departments will build into the agreement that there's a right for an audit to be done, perhaps an audit by the department or an audit by the Office of the Auditor General. In terms of the Brit

Public Accounts committee  That's always difficult to say, because until we actually see the changes that they are talking about, it's hard to say whether they are going to make a difference or not. I think in this report, we've seen that successive governments over the last 20 years have said they are go