THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL AFFAIRS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, December 14, 2023
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met with videoconference this day at 11:31 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on such issues as may arise from time to time relating to social affairs, science and technology generally.
Senator Ratna Omidvar (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: I am Ratna Omidvar, senator from Ontario, and I am the Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology. I would like to start by welcoming members of the committee, our witnesses, and members of the public watching our proceedings.
Today, we are privileged to hear from the Auditor General of Canada regarding recent reports from her office which were tabled in Parliament on October 19, 2023. Joining us today, we welcome, from the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, Karen Hogan, Auditor General of Canada; Markirit Armutlu, Principal; Carey Agnew, Principal; Carol McCalla, Principal; and Jean Goulet, Principal.
Thank you for making the time to join us in what we hope is the last week of sitting, but we don’t know.
This is the only item on the agenda, and there are several reports that we are keen to hear about from Ms. Hogan. Before I give you the floor, let us quickly go around and introduce ourselves, starting with the deputy chair of the committee, Senator Cordy.
Senator Cordy: Welcome, Auditor General and officials. It’s great to have you here today. Thank you for the information that you gave us beforehand.
My name is Jane Cordy, and I’m a senator from Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Good morning and welcome. My name is René Cormier, and I am a senator from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Osler: Gigi Osler, senator from Manitoba.
Senator Burey: Welcome. Sharon Burey, senator for Ontario.
Senator McPhedran: Thank you for making the time to be here. I’m Senator Marilou McPhedran, from Manitoba.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you for being here. I am Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, senator from Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: I am Marie-Françoise Mégie, a senator from Quebec.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you very much, colleagues.
Ms. Hogan, the floor is yours for your opening remarks. I’m not actually going to police the time very carefully as we normally have to do, but your presentations or the remarks from you and your colleagues will be followed by a round of questions from the senators.
Karen Hogan, Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada: Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I appreciate you extending the time limit. Speaking about five reports in five minutes is difficult, so it will be a few over that, probably 10 or 12. Thank you.
The Chair: Take your time.
Ms. Hogan: I am very pleased to be here today to discuss our five reports which were tabled in Parliament on October 19. I would like to acknowledge that this hearing is taking place on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. Joining me are the principals who were responsible for these five audits.
Two points stood out for me from all of these reports. The first is data. Weak or underused data often affects departments’ and agencies’ ability to make well-informed decisions, monitor and report on results and to assess the effectiveness of their decisions. Ultimately, these blind spots identified in all of our reports reduce the public service’s ability to deliver programs and services that meet people’s needs.
[Translation]
My second point is timeliness, and the impacts of failing to take prompt action. This theme runs through all the reports, whether the limited progress on antimicrobial resistance, which the World Health Organization called a “silent pandemic” last year, or the aging of IT systems—a problem that the government has known about for 24 years. Progress that is measured in years, if not decades, is simply not acceptable when people risk not receiving benefits they rely on, or when people do not have access to medicines they need.
I will turn first to our audit of antimicrobial resistance, an area that my office last examined in 2015. When it comes to public health, the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the cost of not being prepared is measured in lives lost. For this reason, antimicrobial resistance is concerning. The rate of resistance to first-line antibiotics in Canada was estimated at 26% in 2018, and it is likely to reach 40% by 2050.
[English]
We found that, overall, the federal government has not done enough to address this problem. While the Public Health Agency of Canada released the Pan-Canadian Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance in June 2023, I am concerned that it lacks critical elements such as concrete deliverables, timelines, ways to measure progress, and clear roles and responsibilities for each level of government. Without these elements, it is unlikely that this plan will result in any progress.
We found that the Public Health Agency and Health Canada have been slow to implement regulatory and other changes, such as economic incentives, that could improve Canadians’ access to antibiotics of last resort. Only two of 13 new antibiotics used to fight drug-resistant infections are available in Canada, yet all 13 are available in the United States. To successfully fight antimicrobial resistance, Canada needs a full picture of antimicrobial use and resistance across the country, and a solid plan so that the right medicines are available and used in the right way to protect the health of Canadians.
Let’s look next at two audits that are closely related. The first examined the government’s overall approach to modernizing its information technology systems, while the second focused on a specific program to modernize how more than 10 million Canadians receive Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance benefits.
In the first audit, we found that about two thirds of the approximately 7,500 software applications used in the government were in poor condition, including 562 that are essential to the health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians.
We found that a number of factors contributed to delays and cost increases. They include a lack of centralized leadership and oversight, a shortage of skilled people to carry out the work and an inflexible funding approach. Every day that these systems are not modernized increases the risk that they may fail and that Canadians may lose access to essential services.
[Translation]
The second audit, focusing on the Benefits Delivery Modernization Programme, echoed these findings. Progress on modernizing the systems that deliver benefits to Canadians has encountered delays, cost increases and staffing challenges. The program is halfway through its 13-year timeline, and all benefits are still running on systems that are 20 to 60 years old.
This second audit also illustrates how the government’s funding approach is poorly suited to large IT projects. When the Benefits Delivery Modernization Programme was launched in 2017, Employment and Social Development Canada estimated that it would cost $1.75 billion. That number has since been revised twice to reach $2.5 billion in April 2022, and is likely to change again in the face of further delays and challenges. That represents a 43% increase over the 2017 number, and no benefits have been migrated to the new platform at this point.
[English]
We found that the Department of Justice’s approach to deal with the delays and other challenges in the benefit delivery modernization program. For example, it moved Old Age Security, the oldest of the three systems and the one at greatest risk of failing, ahead of Employment Insurance in the migration schedule.
While Employment and Social Development Canada’s decision to focus on migrating the system rightly prioritizes the continuity of benefits, I am concerned that if challenges and delays continue, decisions could be made to remove aspects of transformation or take short cuts to maintain the timelines or budget, as happened with the Phoenix pay system. This would put the benefit delivery modernization program at risk of resulting in a final product that fails to meet the needs of the diverse and vulnerable client groups, including seniors, people in remote locations, Indigenous peoples and refugees.
Our fourth audit looked at the processing of immigration applications for permanent residents. We found delays, backlogs and inefficiencies that affect the lives of people seeking to permanently make Canada their home, with the greatest impact on those applying to refugee programs.
While Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada improved the time it took to process applications and reduced backlogs overall in 2022, it did not meet its service standards for prompt processing in any of the eight programs that we examined. People applying to refugee programs waited the longest, on average close to three years.
At the end of 2022, 99,000 refugees were still waiting for a decision on their application, and in the current processing environment, many will be waiting years.
Although the government sets the target for how many permanent residents are admitted to Canada in a given year, we found that most of the delays and backlogs were caused by the department’s own processes. For example, the department did not always process applications in the order they were received, causing older applications to get further backlogged, or routed applications to offices without considering their processing capacity.
[Translation]
The department also did not assess whether its automated eligibility assessment tool reduced overall processing times for all applicants as intended, nor did it identify and resolve any unintended differential outcomes among applicants.
The department needs to analyze its backlogs to understand the root causes for differential outcomes, ensure that the tools it implements are not contributing to these differences, and match workloads to available resources in its offices to improve processing times.
Our last audit looked at actions taken by six federal organizations to foster an inclusive organizational culture and correct conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by racialized employees.
We found that all six organizations had action plans to address equity, diversity and inclusion, and took some actions, but none measured or comprehensively reported on progress against outcomes.
We also found that organizations were not always using performance agreements for executives, managers and supervisors to create accountability for fostering inclusion and change. To the racialized employees who volunteered to be interviewed for this audit, these and other gaps were viewed as a lack of true commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion.
[English]
Although the six organizations we audited focused on the goal of assembling a workforce representative of Canadian society, that is only the first step. It is not enough to achieve the change needed to create a truly inclusive workplace. For that change to happen, the departments need to actively engage with their racialized employees, to meaningfully use the data they have to inform their decisions and to hold their leadership accountable for delivering change.
These issues are not new. If COVID-19 taught us anything, it’s that being prepared and acting early costs less and results in better outcomes. I said it in March of 2021, and I will repeat it today: The government should not need a crisis to understand the importance of prompt action.
Madam Chair, this concludes my opening statement. We will be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Hogan. Thank you to you and your team for working on these important reports.
The reports that you have tabled intersect with the work of many committees, not just this committee. I’m sure colleagues who intersect with other committees will be raising questions from that point of view.
If I may kick off, I’m most seriously concerned about the lack of progress in updating the IT systems for the delivery of benefits to Canadians. Your estimate started at $1.75 billion and have now ballooned to $2.5 billion. It’s likely fair to say that if we hesitate now, we will pay later.
Can you tell me what response you have had from the government on these reports and what action they are undertaking?
Ms. Hogan: We conducted these two reports on IT issues together to really help give the government a good picture. The first was looking at the health of the overall strategy and systems across the government, and then we took a deep dive into an actual project that’s looking to modernize, which was the benefit delivery modernization.
We worked closely with the Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board, Shared Services Canada. The responses were excellent. They were appreciative of our work and that we flagged some concerns that were raised when we surveyed chief information officers across the government. So the fact is that we have a funding mechanism that is not keeping pace with the modernization of government IT systems. It is slow, lengthy and not very adaptable.
The responses were positive. The proof will be in the pudding, as the expression is, the actions that will be taken now, because it was disappointing to see that this was identified 24 years ago — aging IT systems was a concern — and that there’s been very little progress in trying to move that yardstick over the last 24 years.
The Chair: I’m curious to see if that yardstick does move given the directive from the Treasury Board to pull back funding from departments, so we look forward to further investigations on your part.
Senator Cordy: I will ask two questions at the same time.
The Chair: Good strategy.
Senator Cordy: Thank you so much for being here. It’s really helpful to hear you. Thank you for the specifics that you gave for some of the studies.
My questions will be general. There are excellent, brilliant, members of the civil service, and yet we seem to have problems. Things seem to get bogged and muddled down. For us — I’ll speak for us as senators — trying to get information, we wonder why it can take six months to get information for something that’s very timely.
The lack of data is also a major concern when we are doing studies. I’ll talk specifically about fisheries because I just finished at the Fisheries Committee. The data that we have is weak, seems to be underused and ancient. It’s very old.
I will be specific here. We have been studying the seal hunt, and we know that over 30 years ago, in 1992, there was a moratorium on the cod fishery. The idea was that they would have the moratorium, the fish stocks would increase and everything would be fine, but that hasn’t happened.
Is it the overabundance of seals that are causing this? We don’t know. We can’t get any of that information. That’s very frustrating. I’m being specific, but it’s sort of an overall thing. You feel like you can phone a department and request specific data and that it should be data that’s within at least the past couple of years, not well beyond that.
The other concern I’ve heard from so many people, from Canadians, is the timeliness. They make requests and the response times are slow. If you want responses, you want it fairly quickly, and that goes for senators, but it also goes for Canadians who phone and look for information or try to get information online.
How do we comfort Canadians that the data they will get from a department is reasonably new? I know it won’t be within months and I know your department takes its time looking at various departments, but can we ensure the data is not totally outdated so that it’s useless?
Secondly, how can we increase response times for Canadians and for members of the Senate and the House of Commons who are looking for information for reports?
Ms. Hogan: I wish I had the right answer to help you crack that nut on how to get more timely access to information. My office would echo that statement.
You have raised many issues, and I would take it back to some fundamentals. First, I’m not sure that many organizations grasp or understand the data that they have, or the data that they need to make good decisions. There is a gap in understanding that.
Then we often see that a lot of data is gathered and not used to inform decision making. The fact that every entity needed to complete a data strategy in recent years should help with that. It should have forced every organization to think about the data at their fingertips or the data that they need.
However, all too often, when we audit we find that it is not well thought through, and so we have taken a different approach to try and use data available at entities and ask them to give it to us. If they don’t analyze it, maybe we can analyze it and help them and send them down a path.
I do think that Statistics Canada is underutilized. They might disagree. They are probably very busy, but we have been really trying to collaborate with them on some audits where they have access to a lot of information and can make a lot of correlations and have the expertise to do the data analytics that many departments just don’t have.
I think it’s partially the data, the access, knowing what you need, but then the skills to be able to use it and analyze it, or actually even having the will to use it and analyze it, because that’s what we’ve seen in many cases.
When it comes to timeliness, that’s a different one. Government departments receive many requests from many different angles, whether it be access to information or privacy requests, or the normal requests within the organization to deliver and demonstrate that they are delivering on their policy and program requirements. Then there’s audit requirements, and then all the committees come in. There are many requests, and often we are going to the same place at the same time, and there’s only so much capacity for public servants.
You started it off with a great sentiment that there is an incredible desire in the public service to do right by Canadians. We just sometimes have to give them some time and space to do that, but we have to challenge them to keep challenging the old ways and the biases because efficiency is really missing, and we’re seeing a lack of good IT tools to help decision making, and that’s really what an IT tool is. It should support your decision making, not replace your decision making.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Osler: Thank you all for being here today. My question relates specifically to Report 5, Inclusion in the Workplace for Racialized Employees, and I will dig into the inclusion a little bit more. It’s been said that diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance. I would add that it means being seen, heard and valued.
I was thinking about the data that the six organizations are measuring and if the equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI, initiatives are seen as a tick box exercise to demonstrate outcomes in equity and diversity.
Did you find that the organizations had sufficient metrics to measure and track inclusion? Do you think your recommendations are fulsome enough to compel the six organizations to better achieve inclusive workplaces?
Ms. Hogan: The first question I can answer with one word, but I’ll expand. My response would be no, that they did not set themselves up to gather the information and measure inclusion.
However, I think it would be wrong — and this will partially answer the second one all together — to just think that we need to compel these six organizations to do better. We do, but these six were a sample of the federal public service. I could have chosen six at random. I chose six within a portfolio because they represented a large group of public servants. I was hoping that there might have been some opportunities to leverage best practices because they were in the same portfolio.
What really came to light was that every organization has its own culture and is very unique and might have different challenges from another. We saw progress and activity all over a spectrum, and I think that’s what we would see across the whole public service.
I am hoping that this report serves as an alarm bell to the entire public service and that every deputy head sits back and says, “I should look at these recommendations, and what do I need to do differently or better?” Because it’s not just about these six that we happened to audit. It should be about the public service in its entirety.
What we heard from many of them is that they needed some central support and central guidance, which was why some of our recommendations went to the Treasury Board of Canada, where the Office of the Chief Human Resource Officer of Canada is located.
There is a bit of a skills gap in how to measure outcomes or measure inclusion, and I’ll admit that it’s not simple. Even measuring whether training has changed behaviours will take time.
Departments do need a bit of that guidance from an expert in HR matters, but then they also need to step up to the plate in gathering the data that they need and using it and analyzing it and trying to make linkages. I hope that it will drive difference in these six, but my goal is that it will ultimately be more powerful if everyone in the public service pays attention to it.
Senator Osler: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: Thank you to the witnesses for being here. I have a question about the antimicrobial resistance audit. The report says, and I quote:
…Canadians did not have market access to 19 of the 29 antibiotics that the World Health Organization classified as reserve antibiotics…
Why is that? Are the other antibiotics not yet approved by Health Canada, or are they approved, but no one takes them?
Ms. Hogan: I’m going to check with my team afterwards to make sure I’ve given you the right answer, because the principal responsible for the audit is behind me.
Many of the antibiotics were approved for use in Canada, so they have been approved by Health Canada, but there isn’t a demand, so the suppliers don’t offer them in Canada. That applies to 19 of the 29 antibiotics of last resort, but more importantly, Canada has access to just 2 of 13 new antibiotics on the market. That matters because viruses change very quickly, so consistent access to new technology is crucial.
Since Canada doesn’t have the capacity to manufacture vaccines domestically, it has to rely on vaccines available in other countries. I’m just going to check with my team to make sure I gave you the right answer. Yes, I did.
Senator Mégie: Looking at a table comparing the various audits of Crown corporations, I noticed significant differences in cost.
Does the cost differ depending on whether the audit was done by a private firm or a public company? What’s the reason for the difference in cost?
Ms. Hogan: Are you referring to the section in the report listing the costs of the audits of Crown corporations?
Senator Mégie: Yes, that’s right.
Ms. Hogan: There were a number of reasons. Sometimes, we worked with a team in the private sector, so the audit was done jointly. We did half the audit and a private sector company was responsible for the other half.
Not all Crown corporations are the same. Some audits require hundreds of hours of work, while others involve tens of millions of hours. It depends on the corporation’s risk level and size, as well as the complexity of its financial statements. For example, auditing a Crown corporation that does a lot of investing is much more involved than auditing a museum. It therefore depends on the considerations of the audit, which can mean more hours are necessary. In addition, in a particular year, it may be necessary to apply new accounting standards.
This year, a lot of Crown corporations had to follow new accounting standards, and that can bring up the number of hours from one year to another.
Senator Mégie: Thank you very much.
Senator Cormier: Thank you for being here. I read the crux of your reports, and your findings are not only impressive, but also troubling. Some of them really struck a chord with me, and I think we need to keep them in mind as we carry out all our work. The information they contain is absolutely crucial.
My questions are about report 5, and if we have a second round, I will have questions about report 9.
We all agree that the public service should reflect Canadians, and the Employment Equity Act was passed for that very reason. Under the act, employment equity measures should be applied to women, Indigenous people, persons with disabilities and members of visible minority groups. Am I to understand that the 2SLGBTQI+ community is not considered an equity-seeking group in the public service? If so, I have a few questions. Does the fact that the community falls outside the scope of the act prevent you and your office from conducting examinations like the one you did on racialized employees?
My second question has to do with your report. We know that membership in a minority group can often intersect with queer and transgender identities. Did the federal institutions you looked at in your report compile that kind of data? Do they promote this intersectional diversity? Are they aware of the discrimination against people with diverse intersecting identities?
Ms. Hogan: Thank you for saying you appreciate the topics we cover and that they are relevant. We endeavour to choose audits that are relevant and will add value. We chose these topics a few years ago, and we are constantly reviewing our choices. Thank you for that feedback.
You are talking about the employment equity policy in relation to diversity. You mentioned the four designated groups. That was problematic in our audit, and it’s problematic in the public service. Visible minorities encompass a range of other minority groups. The federal government currently has no such breakdown of that information. I know that changes to the self-reporting process are planned, but it’s very tough for a department to see how it’s doing without that information.
In fact, when I took on this role in 2020, that was one of the questions I asked. I could see how many visible minorities my office had hired, but when I inquired about different ethnicities and other characteristics, I was told that information wasn’t available. Being an independent employer, we were able to make changes to our form, which we did last year. That information is not available within the federal government, however.
When it comes to the 2SLGBTQI+ community, if the information is not collected or required, we can’t see where things stand.
Senator Cormier: You can’t include it in your form or examine it, yourself?
Ms. Hogan: We didn’t collect the information on public servants, ourselves. We simply examined the information collected by departments. What information do they have available to support their decision making? That information is missing.
We did a report on Gender-based Analysis Plus. I appeared before the committee to discuss that report, in fact. One of the things we found was just that: the demographic data on individuals to better inform responses and approaches, as well as identify barriers, was missing.
Better data collection was a focus of our recommendations, but without detailed information, it’s very tough.
[English]
Senator McPhedran: Thank you very much. I have a number of questions, but I am particularly intrigued — I want to make sure I understood in your remarks, Auditor General, that you really placed some emphasis on outcomes and the fact that you didn’t find a systemic approach or systems in place to follow up and measure outcomes. I think you referenced matching information that was available to what was actually happening. I think you used the term “outcomes.”
My question is — picking up on some of the other references — about how we have this gap. I would see it as somewhat methodological for so long, when Canada started out decades ago as a leader in EDI, and now we’re hearing that there’s a follow-up or a follow-through gap.
Do you and your team have a methodology that you’re looking for, or that you’ve reached a conclusion about, by examining this question of how you actually report back, make changes and use information to implement the goals that have been articulated for a long time now? There’s the gathering of information that you referred to. Then there’s the use of the information and the actual measuring of any changes or outcomes.
Ms. Hogan: I’m assuming you’re referring to our inclusion in the workplace audit?
Senator McPhedran: Thank you.
Ms. Hogan: Okay. I will see if Ms. Agnew wants to add something to this, as she’s much more of an expert in the area than I am.
I want to highlight first that there was a lot of great activity going on in the public service in response to the clerk’s call to action. We shouldn’t take that away from so many departments that have done a lot of good work. The issue is that it was really focused mostly on meeting employment equity targets, so changing the face of the public service to have it look like Canadian society, but not really focusing in on whether racialized employees felt valued or included in their workplace.
There is a whole audit methodology out there on auditing the culture of an organization. In this audit, we didn’t do that. We didn’t go looking for a culture audit. We were just looking to see whether the departments had set themselves up to try and do that themselves, and that basic step of looking beyond just the numbers was not there. Measuring the outcome, inclusion or a changed behaviour is not that simple. Even in my organization, I can tell you that everyone took unconscious bias training, but we admittedly didn’t track and follow up to see if the behaviours of some of our people supervisors had actually changed. The life of a public servant is really impacted by their direct supervisor on a day-to-day basis, and we really need to get down to that level. We were looking at things such as: Did you include it in their objectives? Are you really trying to measure an individual’s performance against an objective to meet the goal of a more inclusive public service?
What we found is that while it was in the higher-ups, it wasn’t cascading down. That’s a real gap, because those are the people who impact public servants every single day.
It’s not simple. When you ask me if we used a methodology, we didn’t go to look at culture, but there are some out there.
I don’t know if Ms. Agnew wants to add anything.
Carey Agnew, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada: Thank you for the question. I want to highlight the importance in this space of qualitative data collection as well as quantitative data. It is true that the data out there isn’t perfect, and we acknowledge that in the report, but it’s the best departments have, and they ought to be using it.
It was important to hear the lived experiences of racialized employees, so we conducted private interviews with volunteers from the racialized communities and the networks of these employers to raise qualitative issues, and that guided our work.
In terms of a methodological approach, that was key to our outcomes and our findings. Those findings, the issues that were raised, were very profound — a lack of accountability, in particular, as well as profound mental health impacts. That helped guide our engagement for this exercise.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much for being here. This is invaluable information. Thank you for your work, Auditor General.
I just wanted to look at the big picture. One of the roles of our institutions is to be able to connect the dots as to why this is important. My question is a connect-the-dots question about all that you have talked about and the lack of accountability of outcomes.
How does this really affect trust in Canadian institutions that underpin the foundations of our democracy, perhaps even impact the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation? This is a larger question about this disaggregated data, the outcome measurements, the modernization of the programs. If we don’t have this, what is this doing to our society?
Ms. Hogan: I would answer it in a couple of ways. When I look at inclusion in the public service work, which we did, I think the word “trust” is a big one there, bigger than Canadians’ trust or confidence in their public service and their governments. It’s a two-way street. You have to be willing to share some information with us that’s personal, and then you have to trust that the decision makers will use it in the right way.
It has taken the public service decades to get to where it’s at. It can’t take decades to change and really have an inclusive public service.
The trust has to be two ways, and I think decision makers have to use what they have at their disposal to show racialized employees that they mean what they say — that it isn’t just a call to action and a response — but that they truly mean to change the culture across the public service. There, I think, actions speak much louder than words.
If I look at the bigger, broader picture of what it does to Canada when there are aging IT systems and maybe Canadians are having difficulty interacting with their government, it does erode confidence. This is a perpetual problem that the public service has in that the public service needs to be long term. It needs to think intergenerationally, but the reality is that there is political pressure and this is very short term. If a government is in power for four years — even four years is a short period of time in that governments might change, priorities might change focuses. There is that constant battle, and it’s the responsibility of the public service to try to stay focused on the long term.
I believe that’s part of why IT infrastructure has gone so long without an investment. Let’s all admit that it isn’t sexy on the campaign trail to say, “I’ll spend billions of dollars to update an IT system that no one sees.” But what we’ve seen, repeatedly, is that the IT systems are critical to getting accurate benefits in a timely way to Canadians. We saw that throughout the pandemic. That really echoed the importance of investing in things that you just don’t see.
It is time, even though there might be a push right now to tighten the purse strings and reduce spending, not to reduce it in certain elements that will improve service delivery to Canadians.
That was one of our biggest concerns on the IT audit: Don’t lose sight of the transformation, the need to increase access to benefits, to improve the user-friendliness of how you get your benefits and how you interact with your government at the cost of dollars or timelines. You still need to spend prudently and be wise, but when it comes to IT, the longer you wait, it’s almost exponential how much it costs into the future.
To give you a quick analogy, you can drive a 50-year-old car. It’s probably a very nice-looking car, very antique, but it is costly to maintain and repair, but it might not be as reliable as a new car. Even doing that cost-benefit analysis of whether it is better to maintain the old one, or time to buy or lease a new one. You have to make that decision at some point.
When it comes to these systems that we looked at in the audit of the Benefits Delivery Modernization programme, almost every Canadian in their lifetime will access a benefit from of one of these systems. The decisions made today will impact not only Canadians now but for generations to come, and we need to get it right.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you for being here. This is fascinating stuff, both as reading material and as a committee study.
I have a question about the section on the efficacy of antimicrobials. I’ll give you some context. I read your recommendations. You mentioned that progress had been made. You talked about collecting data, preserving effectiveness and improving access. There was something I didn’t see, but perhaps it’s in there. In one way or another, did you have an opinion on how much importance or how long the Public Health Agency spent studying what was causing the resistance? I do realize, of course, it’s an area of shared responsibility.
I’ll tell you why I ask. I know antimicrobial resistance has a disproportionate impact on certain communities, such as people with spinal cord injuries, people with disabilities who have spinal cord injuries. It can be caused by overprescription and self-medication in the past. Did you find that efforts were being made to address the problem through awareness-raising, from a cause standpoint? Conversely, is the focus on what is happening today?
Ms. Hogan: A lot of issues come into play, and the roles and responsibilities are overlapping. The federal government has a role, but health is managed by the provinces. Add to that the fact that physicians are self-regulated. Yes, we did find that prescription information was needed. We actually saw an improvement on the veterinary side. Keep in mind that this problem is not limited to humans. The One Health approach brings together food, animals, the environment and humans, so that whole approach has to be considered.
We saw an improvement with veterinary prescriptions. What medications are being given to food animals, and what impact is that having on human health? If livestock feed contains antibiotics, they end up being consumed by humans. Overprescription is an issue the Public Health Agency of Canada is very familiar with. One of our recommendations was to examine the sources and root causes, and to work with partners to see where the antibiotics are. Are they being overprescribed? Are they being overused? What we found was that first-line antibiotics were less and less effective. Our bodies are accustomed to them, so antibiotics aren’t effective. That was captured in our recommendations, but it’s a bit hidden. It is something we discussed with the two departments.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you very much. I do realize that the issue involves a number of considerations. Thank you for your answer.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Thanks for being here. It is good to see you again, Ms. Hogan. You always explain things so well, and it’s really a pleasure listening to you.
I’ve got a lot of data questions. We’ve heard about underused data. Senator Cordy mentioned that, and you mentioned underused data. You also mentioned that some people don’t understand data. That also suggests that there is data that’s unused or not used well. We often at this committee hear about data that’s missing from various files.
From the studies you’ve done, have you found any particular systematic data issues that run across files? Is there anything that stands out or are they all over the map with their data issues? Is there something systematic, something that really crosses the boundaries of the organizations in any way?
Ms. Hogan: I’m going to invite any of the principals who are with me, if they want to join in, but I would think it’s more the latter in that it really depends on what it is. You need to understand the universe of IT projects out there, but the Chief Information Officer of Canada doesn’t have all of that. You need every department to provide information about the applications that they use, the age and what they’re used for, are they mission critical or not.
There’s a missing data gap, just not filling in the information, keeping it up to date and timely because it’s constantly evolving. That might be a common thread really, comprehensiveness and timeliness of data.
Then if we look at the racialized employee work, some data is available. For example, you will have data on performance ratings for all of your employees, and you will have information and data on promotions, but do you put the two together and then slice it by different demographic segments? Do you look at racialized individuals with disabilities? Do you slice it that way?
Some of the data is available, but they don’t make that interlink. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of that data isn’t there. The racialized group is one big bucket, so you can’t pull out different subgroups in that population until the information is gathered.
The common threads are that it’s not disaggregated enough and not always comprehensive or timely because so many parties need to be involved in giving a whole-of-government picture. It really does mean that every department needs to do their thing individually and then feed into a whole-of-government picture. I don’t know if anyone wants to add anything. They’re all happy with my answer.
Senator Dasko: You’ve done a number of case studies. If we were to take a case study within a case study, or examples, is there anything in terms of the data or aspects of data issues that really stands out as problematic? Maybe you don’t want to single out one organization, and I should ask on the positive side too. Is there an organization among the studies that you undertook that stands out in that they figured it out and they’re doing well, so both sides?
Ms. Hogan: I will offer up some thoughts. I’m concerned. I’ll talk about the six organizations in the inclusive public workplace audit, but to remind everyone that this is a sample that is entirely what you will see across the federal public service. You could replace the name of an organization, and you would see it somewhere else.
In that audit, we did see that Justice was really a leader in engaging, for sure, with their employees and trying to really understand lived experiences and using the qualitative and quantitative. Then I would have told you that it wasn’t about them having all the data they needed because they still have that gap in that self-identification, it only has the four employment equity groups identified. They still have data gaps. They’re not at the pinnacle of using data.
Senator Dasko: They are not considered enough anymore?
Ms. Hogan: No. In that, the RCMP probably used their data the least. They have the same data as everyone else. Is that because they were worse than any other organization? You will see that elsewhere in the public service. We have data, and we learned a lot going through this audit about our own organization because we held ourselves to the same lens, and we have data that we’re not using as well as we should have.
That’s why it’s important that every department look at this report and really reflect on how they can improve their organization.
Senator Dasko: Thank you.
Senator Moodie: Thank you, Ms. Hogan, for your thoughtful, meaningful and analytic approach. This is an amazing body of work. I want to congratulate you and your team.
As a physician, I know that antimicrobials lose their effectiveness over time making it harder to address multi-drug-resistant infections. This is an old problem we’ve been grappling with for so long that we have a new scientific area of study, antimicrobial stewardship, that developed around this, not to mention the understanding we have now about the multi-factorial variables that affect this that you mentioned in your reports.
Your report says that by 2050, an alarming 40% of infections in Canada are expected to be unresponsive to first-line antimicrobials, and knowing that the introduction of drugs is largely under the control of pharmaceutical companies in response to demand, really, and we have a small market, it really is about how government is responding to help us manipulate access to drugs.
In your view, is the government doing enough to increase Canada’s market access to antimicrobial drugs, the newer ones we talked about, some of the developing scientific —
Ms. Hogan: One of our main findings is we felt the government didn’t do enough to address the issues they know about antimicrobial resistance. You are correct, this isn’t something that’s new.
What’s sad about it is that in 2018 a little over 5,000 deaths were attributed to or linked to antimicrobial resistance. The sad part is that there is a drug out there that could have helped or perhaps could have helped these individuals that just isn’t available in Canada.
If we compare Canada to other countries, what we’re seeing in other countries is they do have either regulatory measures they’ve taken or economic incentives to get pharmaceutical companies to increase access to Canada. Canada is a small market, and we didn’t see much advancement in that area. When we sat back and asked why — this isn’t a new problem — what we saw was that for the first time very recently, there has been dedicated money put toward advancing the response to antimicrobial resistance. Up until now, there has been money found in the two departments’ budgets to fund more research than really addressing the bigger issue of increasing access.
Although you can have an action plan, if you don’t have the funding behind it, very little progress will be made. We hope that with our recommendations and the fact that now there is some dedicated funding, hopefully we will see some progress.
Senator Moodie: This is a left-field question. Sorry about that. Can you project that pharmacare might change this landscape in terms of access, demand and buying power?
Ms. Hogan: The foundation of being the Auditor General is you make statements based in fact, and I cannot speculate —
Senator Moodie: You didn’t find anything, then.
Ms. Hogan: No, and I cannot predict what will happen. I can tell you what data is out there and talk to you about facts.
Senator Moodie: Did your data suggest it might?
Ms. Hogan: I wish I had a crystal ball.
The Chair: Thank you, Senator Moodie. I have a couple of questions for you, Ms. Hogan, on report number 9 in terms of processing timelines and backlogs at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. That is a file this committee regularly interacts on. We receive legislation and we review it. We have heard from the minister in the chamber about the backlogs and the new resources they are putting on the table to address them, yet I see in your report that access to online applications for refugees is difficult. The portals remain unavailable to refugees overseas or anywhere, and they still have to go through unsecured email, which I think you can appreciate can be tricky.
I read with surprise — I should say not with surprise but with concern — that the average wait time for privately sponsored refugees is, as you point out, 13 months. This is a program that the government regularly struts the world stage on, and rightly so. It’s a terrific program. It sets us apart, yet as you have uncovered the onion, there are problems.
The government has agreed with almost every recommendation, and they talk about work-in-progress, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. Are you able to assess whether the interventions that the government has said they will undertake will address the problems you have pointed out?
Ms. Hogan: There are a few issues there. I’ll start with maybe the portal and then get to our recommendations and the progress.
I encourage members when you are writing a report or working following this hearing, I was at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts last week with the deputy head of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. In that hearing, she talked about the portal being available now to certain refugee programs. So there has been progress made since the report was finalized. I don’t remember exactly which, so that’s why I would refer you to some of the testimony she gave there.
I think the important thing to understand in the immigration folder is that there are things that are outside of the department’s control and things that are inside the department’s control. Some of the things that are outside are immigration levels or conditions in a country that limit access to documents. If we look at immigration levels, there’s a certain level set every year, and that is the maximum number of individuals who can come into Canada.
In our report, we actually have a table that outlines that in many of the programs that we looked at — and we only looked at 8 out of 50 permanent resident programs — that they start the year off with an inventory or a backlog of applications greater than the actual immigration level for the coming year. Then you will add new applications.
The Chair: Supply and demand.
Ms. Hogan: So there will always be a wait time. What the department should then do is determine how they can improve those wait times by attacking the things they can control. What we found was that they had a lot of weaknesses in how they were managing the inventory of applications that they had, and that’s where many of our recommendations were focused — spend time looking at the things that you can control.
One of the big contributors was that they had made a commitment in 2018 to look at capacity-based work allocation. What that means is determining how much capacity one office can handle and send the applications they can handle and spread it out. There are 87 offices across the country that handle permanent resident applications.
What we found is that they weren’t doing that assessment. They would route applications to an office based on the country of residence where an applicant was when they made their demand. For example — and I’ll bring it to life for you — we looked at two offices that have roughly the same number of employees, one in Italy and one in Tanzania. Tanzania, however, receives five times the number of applications, yet they have the same number of employees. A file that gets routed to the Tanzanian office will sit in a backlog much longer than a file that goes to an office in Rome. This is based on where you reside when you’re applying.
That’s why many of our recommendations to the department were about focusing on those unintended differential outcomes, the ones you can control, to speed up the process, because there are things outside of your control that you can’t speed up. I hope that if they implement those recommendations, we will see an improvement in wait times, but there will always be a wait time when demand exceeds the volume accepted.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Hogan. I wish I had more time to go into this report a little bit, but I don’t and I have to be fair to my colleagues.
Senator Cormier: You might have answered a bit of the questions I want to ask. It’s almost a follow-up to hers.
[Translation]
In report 9, you say, and I quote:
However, processing times remained long in refugee and humanitarian programs, with applicants waiting almost 3 years for a decision at the end of 2022…
People in the refugee and humanitarian class are in a critical situation. Going back to their home country is unthinkable. They fear persecution for all sorts of reasons: religion, social standing, sexual orientation, and gender expression and identity. In your audit, did you ascertain why processing times were so long? If so, could your recommendations fix part of the problem?
Ms. Hogan: I don’t know whether something more specific is causing the problem in the case of refugee programs as opposed to other programs. The troubling part is that refugee program applicants don’t have access to the same tools. For example, there was no electronic application portal. A number of refugee programs do not have service standards. Even if standards aren’t met, there should be a target or goal, but there wasn’t. A number of reasons account for why refugee program applicants wait so long.
I can’t say whether the situation is different for the other programs. The concerns are all the same — the way applications are managed, the office where the application is sent for processing. When you have to wait a year or two more, you have to provide a lot of updated documents, and that is very tough to do in some countries. The issues are numerous. More regular or faster processing times would certainly be better.
Senator Cormier: Do you know whether the methods for access are culturally appropriate given the places where refugees are from?
Ms. Hogan: It’s interesting because we looked at the approaches of certain offices. During the pandemic, when people weren’t travelling, it wasn’t possible to conduct in-person interviews, so some offices changed their process, but those best practices were not shared.
No, we didn’t examine it through a cultural lens. The examination we did really focused on the basics. Do you know where all the applications are? How are you going to improve application processing? At a basic level, we are talking about processing an inventory of paper applications, and even on that front, there were a lot of improvements.
We found that the department did not analyze differential outcomes on the basis of race, country of origin or country of residence. We recommended that the department perform an analysis to identify barriers and weaknesses in how applications are managed. It has a lot of work to do to improve processing, but it also has a lot to do in terms of identifying unconscious bias in how applications are processed.
Senator Cormier: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Osler: My question is on Report 6, Antimicrobial Resistance, and the report references the One Health approach, which recognizes the interrelationship between humans, animals and the environment in antimicrobial resistance.
The report acknowledges that food animals account for approximately 80% of medically important antibiotic use in Canada. My question relates to the efforts directed toward antimicrobial use in humans versus animals. Can you comment if the audit found more regulatory gaps, policy gaps, oversight gaps in the human antimicrobial use sector compared to antimicrobial use in the animal sector? Are there more gaps in one versus the other?
Ms. Hogan: I have called up a friend. I have asked Ms. Armutlu come join us at the table so she could add to the answer.
This is the second time we looked at it, and we did see some progress, and some of the progress was on the animal side in that there were guidelines added around better reporting of what’s in animal feed, some prescription guidelines there. We saw a little bit more progress I would say on the animal feed side versus the human side. I will see if Ms. Armutlu has anything else she would like to add.
Markirit Armutlu, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada: Absolutely. I could add that we did not look at antibiotic use in veterinary medicine that was not important to human health. We really focused on antibiotics that were important to human health. Even at that, there’s a significant amount being used in veterinary medicine, but we did see, as Ms. Hogan said, good improvements in that area, but still, as the report indicated, more needed to be done.
Senator Osler: Okay, thank you.
Senator Burey: Thank you again for this really great information. I would like, Auditor General, for you to expand more on the role of Statistics Canada. You sort of alluded to it in a previous answer. How could they improve the data collection, analysis, maybe even a cohesive culture change across government?
Ms. Hogan: I don’t think Statistics Canada needs to improve how it collects data and analyzes it, but departments need to reach out to them and use them more and feed them data and pull data, right?
The more sharing of its data that the public service can do, the better. That being said, our census data does take a long time to come out and get analyzed, but I think Statistics Canada is underutilized. I’m sure the chief statistician may not be happy with me now. He may get a lot of people knocking on his door, but we really have renewed our engagement with them to help sometimes because we know it’s a gap that people just don’t know how to make linkages sometimes between data, and they are really an expert there. I think it’s more about everyone using them.
There are issues that the public service has to overcome such as privacy of information, and when you collect information you have to tell people why you’re collecting and what you plan on doing with it. Some of those issues also include changing processes and habits to more regularly say we might use it for other purposes. That has to happen globally before a bigger interaction and sharing of information can happen in the federal government.
It might sound simple, but it isn’t always simple to accomplish when you think about privacy rules and so on.
Senator Burey: Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Hogan. It’s a real privilege for us to have you and your team with us, and I hope we can repeat this, so you will forgive me a little if I go slightly off topic but remain on the general theme of inclusion of racialized employees.
You have a team. How are you doing? What measures have you taken that have proven successful, or to be best in class? After all, people in glass houses, you know that. You know where that goes.
Ms. Hogan: I know the expression very well. How are we doing? We’re making strides, but we have a lot of work left to do.
I can talk about our own employment equity targets. We are definitely exceeding them in some areas and not meeting in others, especially when it comes to representation from Indigenous people.
While I might have a large representation of visible minorities in my organization, I don’t have it in my senior ranks, in my leadership team, and I have been working hard at trying to improve that. I have a small leadership team, so although I have made strides, I can’t publicly talk about it because of the requirements that unless you have five or more individuals, so you can’t really talk about it. I can only eventually maybe one day show all of you.
When we started the journey on the inclusive workplace audit, I stopped partway through and said, “Wait, we cannot be making recommendations when we haven’t even looked at ourselves,” and so I did ask the team to sit down with our HR folks in our office and hold ourselves and assess ourselves against the same 11 elements that we assessed these six departments against. We did not do as well as I had hoped. We didn’t meet six of the 11 elements, and we partially met five others.
After we reported this report publicly, we shared that information with our entire office and said, “We have a lot of work to do and we need your help.” We do have a bit of an action plan, but one of the areas we were short on was undertaking a lot of consultation with our own racialized employees. So we have to do that better in the coming years and months.
Like many departments, we are victims of tracking some inputs and not always the outputs, even though that is something we say to everyone. I am very happy to tell you that we have a big journey ahead of us, like everyone else in the public service, and that’s why I tell you this is something every department should look at and read. We can all do better.
The Chair: Thank you for sharing that with us, Ms. Hogan. We look forward to seeing you again. Your work prods us every now and then to undertake studies of our own, or to invite you to come to our committee.
I would wish all my colleagues, a very merry Christmas and holiday break and a happy New Year. This will be the last time we see each other before we reconvene in February if all things go according to plan. Thank you again to our witnesses, our colleagues and the staff everywhere. Have a great break.
(The committee adjourned.)