Opening Statement before the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance
2023 Reports 5 to 9 of the Auditor General of Canada
7 February 2024
Karen Hogan, Fellow Chartered Professional AccountantFCPA
Auditor General of Canada
Mr. Chair, I am pleased to be here to discuss 5 reports which were tabled in Parliament on October 19th, 2023. I would like to acknowledge that this hearing is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. Joining me are Jean Goulet, Markirit Armutlu, Carey Agnew, and Erin Jellinek who were responsible for these audits.
Two points stood out for me from these 5 reports: data and timeliness. In all of the reports, we found instances where data was weak or underused and failures to take prompt action impacting the public service’s ability to meet the needs of Canadians.
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, COVID‑19 showed us that the cost of not being prepared is measured in lives lost. This is why antimicrobial resistance is concerning. The rate of resistance to first-line antibiotics in Canada was estimated at 26% in 2018 and is expected to reach 40% by 2050.
We found that the federal government has not done enough to address this problem. While the Public Health Agency of Canada released a Pan‑Canadian Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance in June 2023, it lacks critical elements, including concrete deliverables, timelines, and ways to measure progress. Without these, it is unlikely the plan will be successful.
We also found that the Public Health Agency and Health Canada have been slow to implement changes, such as economic incentives, that could improve Canadians’ access to antibiotics of last resort. Only 2 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.
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 modernizing 3 benefits: Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan, and Employment Insurance.
In the first audit, we found that about two thirds of the approximately 7,500 software applications used in the government were in poor health, including 562 that are essential to the health, safety, security, or economic well‑being of Canadians.
We found that several factors contributed to delays and cost increases, including a lack of centralized leadership and oversight, a shortage of skilled people to carry out the work, and a rigid funding approach. Every day that these systems are not modernized increases the risk that they fail and Canadians lose access to essential services.
Our audit of the Benefits Delivery Modernization Programme echoed these findings. Progress on modernizing the 3 systems that deliver benefits to Canadians has encountered delays, cost increases, and staffing challenges. The Programme is halfway through its 13‑year timeline and all benefits are still running on systems that are 20 to 60 years old.
This audit also illustrates how the government’s funding approach is poorly suited to large information technologyIT projects. When the Programme was launched in 2017, Employment and Social Development Canada estimated that it would cost 1.75 billion dollars. 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 of the 2017 number, and none of the 3 benefits have been migrated to the new platform.
We found that Employment and Social Development Canada adjusted its approach to address delays and challenges. For example, the department moved Old Age Security to the front of its migration priority list as it is the oldest of the 3 systems and the one at greatest risk of failing.
While Employment and Social Development Canada’s decision to focus on migrating the systems rightly prioritizes the continuity of benefits, I am concerned that further challenges and delays could result in shortcuts to maintain the timelines or budget and cutting back on the transformation as happened with the Phoenix pay system. This would result in a final product that fails to meet the needs of Canadians.
Our next audit looked at the processing of immigration applications for permanent residence. 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 in 2022, it did not meet its service standards for prompt processing in any of the 8 programs we examined. People applying to refugee programs waited the longest, on average close to 3 years. At the end of 2022, 99,000 refugees were still waiting for a decision on their application and will likely be waiting years.
We found that most 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.
The department also did not assess whether its automated eligibility-assessment tool reduced processing times or identified and resolved any unintended differential outcomes.
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 to improve processing times.
Our last audit looked at actions taken by 6 federal organizations to foster an inclusive organizational culture and correct conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by racialized employees.
We found that all 6 organizations had action plans to address equity, diversity, and inclusion, but none of them measured or comprehensively reported on progress against outcomes.
Although the 6 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, departments need to actively engage with their racialized employees, use the data they have to inform their decisions, and 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 2021, and I will repeat it today: the government should not need a crisis to understand the importance of prompt action.
Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening statement. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have. Thank you.