Old issues, same conclusion
AUDITOR GENERAL: Ferguson says feds making little headway on repeat problems
OTTAWA — Canada: Your federal government is an old, slow behemoth, largely concerned with itself, indifferent to improving the lives of its citizens and sticks stubbornly to its inward-looking ways.
That is the rather mournful, angry message in the latest dispatch from auditor general Michael Ferguson, now at the mid-point of his 10-year term in office.
“We see government programs that are not designed to help those who have to navigate them, programs where the focus is more on what civil servants are doing than on what citizens are getting, where delivery times are long, where data is incomplete and where public reporting does not provide a clear picture of what departments have done,” Ferguson says.
Audits come across the same problems in different organizations, he says.
“Even more concerning is that when we come back to audit the same area again, we often find that program results have not improved,” Ferguson writes in a blistering 11-page introduction to the seven reports and three special examinations he laid before Parliament Tuesday morning.
The Department of National Defence — a perennial whipping boy for the auditor general — comes under fire in two separate reports for problems Ferguson and his predecessors long ago identified.
For example, Canada’s generals and admirals hope to command a full-time regular force of 68,000 members by 2018-19, but the auditor general believes it is “unlikely” they will hit that target.
Why?
Because recruiting and training programs are poorly designed. The result? The Armed Forces were 2,000 bodies short of their target size four years ago and are now 4,000 bodies down.
And yet, as Ferguson notes, DND was told about this in 2002 when Jean Chretien was prime minister, again in 2006 as Stephen Harper began his tenure and now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gets the same message.
In one of Ferguson’s first reports in 2012, he warned DND didn’t know what it was doing when it came to estimating the life-cycle costs of the F-35 fighter jet program.
On Tuesday, he said DND doesn’t know what it’s doing for a whole host of other equipment programs when it comes to planning for the costs of maintaining and repairing key pieces of equipment.
Ferguson and his predecessor Sheila Fraser have paid increasing attention to indigenous issues over the last decade and Ferguson did so again in two separate audits released Tuesday that are sobering and upsetting assessments of racism and indifference.
Indigenous offenders, he reported, are far less likely to get out of jail on parole than non-indigenous offenders and are far more likely to be housed in medium- or maximum-security prisons.
Meanwhile, a promise made by the Harper government in 2007 to speed up land claim settlements with First Nations has gone largely unfulfilled.
Ferguson said that’s due to financial cuts and a Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs that does a poor job of helping First Nations through the settlement process.