Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and good afternoon, committee.
[Translation]
Thank you very much for this opportunity to talk about Public Works and Government Services Canada and its report on plans and priorities.
[English]
I have with me at the table today Mike Hawkes, our chief financial officer, and Johanne Bélisle, our assistant deputy minister of corporate services, policy and communications, who are really the authors of our report on plans and priorities. Mike does the numbers and Johanne writes the document, or at least her people do.
I joined Public Works and Government Services Canada about eight months ago and I am personally continuing to discover a large, diverse, and very busy department. It's one that has about 12,000 employees across the country and annual spending of some $4.5 billion.
PWGSC is the federal government's central purchasing agent, its banker, its accountant, and its real property manager. We provide services in the areas of payroll and pension, information technology, translation, communications, and audit. Each of these service offerings is large and complex, and the assistant deputy ministers in charge of them have very big jobs.
While there's not room at the table for all of them to sit here with us today, they have accompanied me here and would be very happy to come to the table should you have detailed questions on their area of business.
At PWGSC, in everything we do, we try to strike a balance between providing the government with quality services and ensuring the government's assets are well managed. Maintaining this balance is in fact one of our department's major challenges. This is why you will find in our RPP that we have two strategic outcomes. These are outcomes that anchor our business and they relate to, on the one hand, quality services and, on the other, sound stewardship.
Given the breadth of our activities, we are able to support the government's priorities in a number of ways. For example, we contributed to the development of the Federal Accountability Act. Notably, we'll be establishing the office of the procurement ombudsman, as called for in the legislation.
We support the government's efforts in the area of security. For example, we work with the Canada Border Services Agency in the development of border crossing infrastructure. We support the government's environmental efforts through our office of greening government operations, which is leading efforts across government to improve environmental performance. I understand the leader of that organization was here a couple of months ago to talk about their activities.
We're now in the third year of a broad transformation agenda to improve key back office functions of the Government of Canada, particularly in the areas of real property, procurement, and information technology. This ongoing effort to do business more efficiently and cost-effectively meshes well with the government's commitment to strong economic management.
As you would know, Madam Chair, while the focus of public attention is often on our contracting and real property activities, we at PWGSC are more than buyers of goods and services and managers of bricks and mortar.
I'd like to take this opportunity to briefly highlight a few other functions that are germane to the work of our department. While PWGSC has numerous lines of business, one critical function I'd like to mention is that of Receiver General, which is responsible for the consolidated revenue fund and the Public Accounts of Canada. Millions of Canadians rely on cheques they receive from the Receiver General every month: seniors counting on their Canada Pension Plan and old age security payments, families receiving the universal child care benefit and goods and services tax credits, as well as thousands of companies that do business with the federal government. In fact, there are few Canadians who do not receive a payment from the Receiver General at some point during the course of a year.
This amounts to more than 255 million payments a year in almost 200 countries. All told, the office handles more than $1.5 trillion in cashflow a year.
Our Receiver General function not only serves vital public needs but also plays an important role in ensuring that government spending decisions that you make as parliamentarians are carried out. When a department wants to spend money, we check to ensure that they have parliamentary authority to do so, prior to releasing the funds.
We then account for the billions of dollars spent by the Government of Canada annually in the Public Accounts of Canada, and for the past eight years the Office of the Auditor General has given us a clean bill of health with respect to this accounting. The OAG has in fact commended us as being a world leader in this regard. You may not know this, but most industrial countries do not have the capacity to account for their spending, as we do, on a consolidated basis.
[Translation]
And PWGSC's activity extends not only to financial integrity and accountability. We also have a role to play with respect to Canada's language and culture. Canada's Aboriginal roots, our French and English duality, and our pluralistic society help define who we are as a country.
Our Translation Bureau gives meaning to this reality by providing translation, interpretation and terminology products and services here on Parliament Hill, to the Judiciary and across the Federal Government. The Bureau's work goes beyond translating French to English and vice versa. It provides service in Aboriginal languages and in more than 100 foreign languages, as well as closed captioning.
These efforts are measured as 1.5 million pages a year and their impact is profound—helping Parliament and the Government listen to and communicate with Canadians of every background, whether it is on economic, social, environmental or cultural issues.
Our Translation Bureau stands out on the world stage for the quality of its product and its overall significance. It is in fact the second largest of its kind in the world, exceeded only by that of the European Union.
[English]
Another vital, yet little known area of PWGSC is our industrial security sector, which ensures that Canadian businesses are security cleared and thereby equipped to compete for billions of dollars in government contracting opportunities for goods and services, both here and abroad. Over the course of a year, this group processes close to 100,000 security clearances and 1,000 company inspections. We also operate the Secure Channel, the online infrastructure that enables the exchange of secure, trusted information between the government and its partners and citizens.
Let me turn briefly to the management of the department. Because of the size of our business and budget, PWGSC has placed a great deal of importance on ensuring that we have enhanced accountability, supported by stronger management controls. Over the past two years, we've made a number of organizational changes to ensure that we are well equipped to deliver on our ongoing business and our transformation agenda.
In 2005, we were the first department in the federal government to create an office of the chief risk officer. We have also created the position of chief financial officer, and a dedicated corporate services branch, and a separate human resources branch. And we continue to work on departmental initiatives to strengthen accountability and transparency, to manage risk, and to ensure a culture of integrity. Again, l'd like to refer to the Auditor General, who commented favourably in her 2003 report on what she described as PWGSC's fairly sophisticated system of internal controls.
I have talked about some of the lesser known things we do, and I would like to talk for a minute about who we are, because it's difficult in a few minutes to do justice to the scope of PWGSC's activities. Our department employs a wide variety of professionals, including translators, engineers, surveyors, auditors, geologists, architects, geomatics experts, procurement specialists, and so on. Our people range from Monsieur Maurice Joanisse, who carves the stonework in this very building, to the interpreters in the booths here; from the IT professionals who helped develop the world's first online national census last year, to the building experts behind the restoration of the Library of Parliament and the Vimy Memorial.
Madam Chair, the breadth of our mandate is wide, and our funding and management challenges are complex. Given the billions of dollars PWGSC manages and the tens of thousands of contracts it enters into each year, it should come as no surprise that challenges and queries arise.
[Translation]
On every occasion, we have acted promptly and decisively to improve our processes where needed and to maintain public trust.
Now, we are happy to answer your questions.
:
The government says that it must be careful in its expenditures, that it should group together its purchases, and make full use of its buying power so that the taxpayers will get more for their money. That is what the minister has said and I see this in management's statement as well, but it isn't really reflected in the Report on plans and priorities.
You are just submitting the report to us. There is a three year projection and, in my opinion, you have made good progress over the past three years. I must make decisions, but how can I do that when you provide no percentages nor do you set any targets? There are wonderful motherhood statements, but nowhere does this report refer to an obligation to meet any type of result expressed as a percentage or any deadline to meet the objectives. The committee cannot make an informed decision or give you and your staff a pat on the back and tell you that you have done a good job. I can't even determine if the PWGSC budget has been reduced because I cannot find your objectives or any statements of your current performance. I can't put a figure on it.
We speak of transparency. But you can't assume that the members are... It's rather upsetting. You are responsible for a large budget and, what's more, the Auditor General of Canada, in every one of her annual reports, mentions accrual basis accounting. Our committee did a study on the subject. That being said, I don't think you apply accrual basis accounting at PWGSC. But you should be doing so. PWGSC and Treasury Board should use accrual basis accounting, as was requested by all members around this table.
I was anxiously awaiting your appearance here today. I wanted to ask you how, in your opinion, we can make decisions if we have nothing to go on, other than the general outlines as expressed in a rather specialized jargon. At some point, we will have to provide supplementary estimates, there will be a Report on plans and priorities, and nothing will have been adopted.
I say this because I feel it is important. I'm not sure how you can respond. It is simply an observation. What kind of question do you want me to ask? I have nothing here on which to base a question. I am sorry.
:
Thanks very much, Madam Chair.
It's an excellent question. I guess the first thing to say is that we have done a lot. We have not done as much as we would like to have done, but we have done a lot. Maybe I can take a moment to describe a little bit the journey we have undertaken.
In 2004 a series of studies came out that described—I'll use your words—the dog's breakfast that exists. What Public Works was asked to do by Treasury Board Secretariat was to concentrate on what we call the IT infrastructure—not so much on the programs, but on the infrastructure, which is the telecommunications, the networks, the data centres, and the personal desktops, just to make sure that the basic IT infrastructure, which we call today the utility, is operating on a shared-service basis, and as efficiently as possible.
In late 2005, we positioned our organization to perform shared services. I'm happy to say that today we are close to 20% of the way there. So about 20% of the IT infrastructure, those services that I just described, are in fact performed by my branch.
We're not stopping there, of course. We have plans, in a very community-based way governed through Treasury Board Secretariat, to work with the other departments, and we have a series of memorandums of understanding and service agreements whereby we're continuing that journey. Our whole premise is to work with departments so that they understand the benefits and sign up with us to provide the basic IT infrastructure services.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
The old standard came from a previous Treasury Board policy known as chapter 120, which was near and dear to the hearts of many public servants.
In the mid-1990s, when Public Works promulgated the accommodation management framework, we developed standards based on the functional programming of the space itself or the needs of each of the client departments. We put it in place in the late 1990s and, during that period of time, started to implement the standards throughout.
When government started to rapidly increase in the early 2000s, we started to take a lot of space that already existed. To save money, we moved into existing space and lost control of the utilization target. Back in 2004, we decided to re-emphasize the space standards, and as space came up for renewal, we introduced the new standard.
The new standard has been in place. Actually, it's not a new standard; it's a standard that's been in place since the mid-1990s. But we've been putting more rigour into the application of it.
We've been very successful at moving the standard from 21.4 square metres to the previous amount of utilization of 19.8. It's been significant. When you think of it, 1.6 metres doesn't sound like a lot. But when you house 241,000 public servants, it translates into a lot of space savings.