Add $100M to jobs tire fire
$2.7B spent on training wasn’t wasteful enough?
It’s the great contradiction of our time that citizens around the world are looking to governments to reduce their levels of economic stress, at the same time as their faith in the ability of governments to succeed has tanked.
A remarkable exchange at a House of Commons committee meeting this week deserves a wider audience and, fans of big government be warned, it will do nothing to restore that faith.
The Public Accounts committee was meeting to discuss the Auditor General’s spring report, which had been highly critical of training programs for Indigenous Canadians that had have cost the taxpayer $2.7 billion in the last eight years.
Michael Ferguson’s office had labelled the shortcomings of Employment and Social Development Canada an “incomprehensible failure.” ESDC does not provide services, such as occupational skills training, employment counselling and wages subsidies to employers, directly to clients but instead funds Indigenous “agreement holders” to deliver training.
The department is required to monitor the use of funds, which this year total $342 million. But Ferguson’s office found ESDC did not collect the data or define performance indicators to demonstrate whether objectives of getting Indigenous people into stable employment was working. Even more worryingly, the department was allocating funds based on data from the 1996 census, when the Indigenous population was 799,000 (by the 2016 census, it had doubled to 1.6 million).
As Ferguson told the committee, the department could demonstrate its programs had helped some clients find employment.
However, it did not have the information to indicate the nature of the work — whether it was full or part time — or whether the individuals had stayed employed.
In fact, there were plenty of indications that many did not — since the most expensive component of the program — wage subsidies — was often used more than once by the same client, suggesting it was subsidizing employers.
This was the background to the remarkably frank testimony provided by the new deputy minister at ESDC, Graham Flack, at committee. He was asked how it was that the bureaucracy was relying on data that was clearly out of date to provide services that could not be proven to be effective.
Flack said there had been two serious attempts by officials to update the formula used — in 2003 and 2014. But he said, since funding levels had not grown, attempts at reform had been resisted by the government’s Indigenous partners — the agreement holders — because adjustment would see some of them lose funding.
At the same time, he said governments of all stripes were reluctant to risk a political ruckus by making changes that would result in a number of recipients deprived of funding.
Flack, a seasoned veteran of a number of government departments, said in such a scenario there is only one solution — to allocate new funding. In this case, $99.4 million was allocated in budget 2018. “In my experience, that is what it takes to get movement,” he said.
The members of the committee, including the Liberals, appeared stunned that a senior public official had opened the door to the sausage factory to see them being made.
Chandra Arya, the Liberal MP for Nepean, summed up the appalling truth of the matter quite neatly. “Ok, we’re spending $342 million, based on previous commitments and we still don’t know how effective it is. Now, we are putting another $100 million into this. Shouldn’t we hold on until we see how to really set up something to measure it before spending it?” he asked, incredulously.
When it became clear to him that reform of data collection or funding was impossible without throwing another $100 million at the problem, he did not sound reassured.
“In Nepean, I haven’t had any infrastructure funding. We have one railway crossing that is required where an accident occurred and six people died. For us, every single million is very, very important. Here we have spent $2.4 billion, plus about $300 million and we don’t know if that has been used effectively and if any good has come out of that. Don’t you think that is sort of unacceptable?”
The answer to that is an unequivocal yes. The vast rivers of money being spent on training should run to where they will be most effective, not where they will buy political silence.
The one reliable measure we do have of the program’s effectiveness is the unemployment rate. In 2007, the rate for Indigenous Canadians was just under 11 per cent, nearly double the rate for the rest of the population. A decade later it was still 11 per cent.
The government is failing its citizens — Indigenous and non-indigenous.