44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 11, 2023 11:00AM
- Dec/11/23 2:53:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if the Conservatives had wanted to make life easier for first nations people, they would not have voted against so many measures that first nations leaders need and are essential to running good communities, things like education, emergency management, water infrastructure and the building of homes.
These are the kinds of things that Conservatives voted against last week. They have never been there for indigenous people, and they continue to vote against them.
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- Dec/11/23 6:02:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first, as I said, we have to get those who helped us and those leaders, the former Afghan women MPs I talked about, to safety. They are the ones who will eventually go back to Afghanistan, not all of them but some of them, someday, or maybe even their kids, depending on how long this takes, to actually lead that change. That is number one: We have to get out the people who are those leaders of change within Afghanistan.
Second, which was talked about in certain speeches, is supporting those opposition groups. This is where it gets tricky for the west. We like to believe that our standards and our rigid code around human rights and everything, the way we expect people in this country to behave, would apply uniformly across the globe. They do not. Some of the groups that we may want to help are not necessarily going to play by that rule book all the time. It sometimes becomes a tricky situation of trying to pick and support those groups that are less bad. That is where it gets tricky.
That is what we need to do. I am a big believer that in certain things, with the Taliban in particular, where we in the west kind of messed up when I look at it over 20 years, maybe we should have drawn more lines in the sand with respect to the Taliban, or not the Taliban but the Afghan government at the time, telling them not to cross the line, that there are certain expectations and that if they cross a certain line, that is when NATO and the international community will step in and make a difference.
I think that whatever opposition groups we could provide support to, to try to get that change, we need to do that in order to get the Taliban out.
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- Dec/11/23 7:23:18 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, as I begin my comments tonight on the Department of Indigenous Services, I want to take a moment to congratulate the newly elected national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Cindy Woodhouse. Also, as an MP from Saskatchewan, I would like to congratulate David Pratt on running a great campaign and on a strong second-place finish.
Speaking of the AFN, last week, as chiefs from across the country gathered here in Ottawa, I had the opportunity to meet with many of these leaders. I always come away impressed with how the leadership is focused on finding ways to improve the lives of the people that they serve. More and more of these discussions revolve around trying to find ways to end the failing path that forces them to come to Ottawa to fight for programming dollars.
The waste of time, energy and resources for first nations leaders, who are put in a position to compete with other first nations to see who can best fill out forms or who can hire the right lobbyists or endlessly spend money on outside consultants to make sure applications are done just right for somebody sitting at a desk in Ottawa, needs to end.
It is time for first nations people to make their own decisions. What they need is less made-in-Ottawa, not more Ottawa.
Unfortunately, when looking at the indigenous services department, or ISC as I will refer to it, it is clear why major change is needed.
I would like to spend a few minutes talking specifically about the results of this department.
ISC sets targets under its four core responsibilities. In 2022-23, ISC sought to achieve 45 results. Progress toward meeting these results was measured using 83 separate indicators. A result status is assigned to each indicator based on the measured outcome, or the actual result.
Of the 83 indicators, only 14, or 17%, of them met their target; 19, or 23%, have no result available; and 37, or 45%, are to be achieved at some point in the future. To extend this out a little bit, over the last five years, there were 367 indicators and the results are actually very similar, as 17% met their target, 23% have no result available and 46% are to be achieved sometime in the future.
Additionally, there is this internal services component of the department, which, according to public accounts, increased from $146 million in 2018 to $296 million in 2023.
The solution now is to take a whole new approach and to implement a renewed departmental results framework for 2023-24. By the way, they did this for the 2019-20 year already. ISC will roll all four core responsibilities into one new core responsibility.
Remember, this is a department that claims that it plans to meet 45% of the targets it sets for itself sometime in the future. I guess that future will never come.
This department spends more time playing bureaucratic games by changing target-setting schemes than working on solving the actual challenges indigenous people face.
This is a department that has increased its planned spending from about $9.3 billion in 2018-19 to $39.6 billion in 2022-23, with the same projection for 2023-24. The actual authorities that were approved for 2022-23 were $44.8 billion. Over the same period, it has increased the number of FTEs, or full-time equivalents, from 4,210 to 7,278. Those are significant increases.
I am not the only one who has raised these concerns. On February 1, 2022, at the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, I moved a motion asking the Parliamentary Budget Officer to conduct a research and comparative analysis on the estimates of CIRNAC and ISC from the years 2015-16 to 2022-23.
On May 18, 2022, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released his report. Let me quote from the executive summary of that report:
Financial resources allocated to providing Indigenous services has increased significantly over this period. A quantitative and qualitative approach using publicly available data was employed to evaluate how effective the organizations providing these services were in using these resources.
The analysis conducted indicates that the increased spending did not result in a commensurate improvement in the ability of these organizations to achieve the goals that they had set for themselves. This was partly driven by the volatility in the departmental result indicators. Many were added or removed over the course of the period preventing results from being collected due to data collection lags. Some indicators lack target values and completion dates altogether. Based on the qualitative review the ability to achieve the targets specified has declined.
These are the words of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. They are not my words.
Mr. Ken Coates is a distinguished fellow and director of the indigenous affairs program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He is also the Canada research chair in regional innovation at the University of Saskatchewan. In August 2022, he wrote an article in response to the same PBO report that I referred to. Here is what he said:
Put bluntly, Canada is not getting what it is paying for—and what’s worse, the massive spending is not improving lives in Indigenous communities....
If Canada spends billions on Indigenous affairs, it must mean that we care deeply about First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples.
But it does nothing of the sort. While headlines emphasize dollar amounts, the statistics that tell the actual story of Indigenous well-being—around employment, health, housing conditions, suicide rates, violence and imprisonment, language, cultural revitalization—are much more sombre. When spending vast sums fails to make a substantial difference in many communities, the federal response is too often to double down and spend even more, in the absence of understanding what actually works to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples.
When Mr. Giroux, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, was at INAN to discuss his report, I asked him to comment on what Mr. Coates had said. I asked him whether these results were common to other departments or whether they were unique to CIRNAC and ISC. Mr. Giroux responded by saying:
In short, [I would say] based on the performance indicators that we have analyzed in our report last year, I would tend to agree with Mr. Coates. [That] seems to be consistent....whether it's common among departments, I would say...it's not common to see a level of increase of that magnitude that is not accompanied by a significant improvement in performance indicators.
Mr. Coates went on in his article to say something else: “The government can and does change up targets and metrics, making it difficult to determine actual outcomes. But given the vast expenditures, such a conclusion is tragic.” When I asked Mr. Giroux to comment on this, he said, “I agree with Mr. Coates that there seems to be an outcome problem.” I asked him further, “Do you think there's an accountability issue that's created by these moving, changing targets that aren't consistent?” He replied:
I agree with you.
I don't think it's done on purpose. I think public servants who come up with these indicators genuinely mean to have the best indicators. However, changing them regularly or frequently does not help for accountability and accountability purposes to track a departmental performance over time.
It is a department where, in 2021-2022, 94.6% of the employees, at executive level or above, received performance pay totalling almost $3.3 million. Remember, it is a department that met 18% of its targets in that year. What is worse is that when I drilled a little deeper, I found that over the previous five years, 99.2% of executives at a level three or above received performance pay. This represents the top 33 people in the department in 2018-2019, and that number grew to 56 people by 2022-23.
I asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer about the performance pay system, in response to an answer I got on an Order Paper question. The Order Paper response reads, “Individual performance pay holds executives accountable for individual results and is not related to departmental results, which measure organizational goals.” I asked Mr. Giroux whether he thought there was merit in tying performance pay to organizational achievement rather than just individual achievement. He replied:
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.
If I can be so blunt, it does not require a great deal of management expertise to conclude that the department of indigenous services is failing. Almost every conversation I have with indigenous leaders from across Canada involves commentary around the fact that they are utterly exhausted by the inadequacy and bureaucracy of the department. A leader of a national indigenous organization told me recently that ISC is a machine that eats money. If we want to move down a path of reconciliation, we must at least begin with the truth. I think, unfortunately, that is what the Prime Minister and government fail to admit. After eight years, the government has spent more money with fewer results. It has hired more people with fewer results. It has increased bonuses with fewer results. It has shuffled targets and target-setting procedures with, yes, fewer results. It is time to accept the truth: This is not working.
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- Dec/11/23 8:09:35 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I must say that, as much as I appreciate the concern from the member opposite, I do not agree with her conclusions.
I believe the national government has been working side by side with indigenous community leaders for the last eight years. I think the Prime Minister has clearly demonstrated the nation-to-nation building required to deal with issues such as reconciliation, with financial support in record amounts.
Can the member give a clear indication as to what government prior to this government has done more to improve the relationship between two great nations?
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