Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's very nice of you to ask, but I'm good. Mark is good too.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Sadly it is widespread across the public service.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's irrespective of additional or stable funding that departments receive. It is in virtually—I can't say all organizations, but it's widespread.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think the issue of departmental results indicators moving from year to year is clearly not unique to these two departments. As I said, it's widespread. How do you fix that? That's a good question. I think it's up to ministers to set targets and to try to make their officials st

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's probably a very good point. I think the government is relatively good at doing stuff routinely, despite what people may think. It struggles when it's asked to do something different quickly. That's where we tend to hit a wall. If you ask officials to do the same thing over

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I have no comment.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's not something that came up when we put together our report, but it's something that comes up almost every time we look at specific government programs. The reason generally tends to be that in government, every department wants to have a level of certainty. When they're desi

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I don't think departments set much higher goals over time. They probably have increased their ambition, but that's not what struck us as being the main issue when government departments failed to meet some of their targets. I think it has more to do with just a lack of capacity t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm not sure whether we have all of the data at the granular level, but it's clear that money set aside and provided to departments for settlements constitutes a good part of the increased spending. Beyond that, I'm not sure I can comment without asking you for more specific as

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I don't see how a majority of executives can have at-risk pay and performance pay if a department only meets half of its targets. Is there merit...? I think there's more than merit. I think it would be common sense. There might be other issues for why the government is not movin

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  [Inaudible—Editor] more seriously, you've touched on an important point: tying executive performance to the attainment of corporate targets. These also mean government-wide priorities and targets, so it's a very good first step. Then, it's about setting themselves ambitious targ

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think that should be the penultimate goal of every public servant, and I think it is for the vast majority of them.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  You're right. It's hard to be excited about this, and these survey results are from five years ago. For a department that spends billions on health care funding, to use survey results from five years ago that health care is good in your community, or a percentage of eligible firs

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Just to be clear, my comment should not have been construed as my opinion on the type of relationship the Crown should be having with first nations communities. I was responding to a question about specific performance indicators that were a bit more difficult to attain—or to m

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I experienced this issue when I was in the public service: It's always difficult to set ambitious targets ourselves. People tend to go towards targets or indicators that already exist, that are familiar to them. Rather than measuring results, people tend to measure the mechanisms