Public Accounts Committee on May 14th, 2024

[Erin O'Gorman]

I recommend that you ask Mr. Ossowski.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

No, I'm asking you, as the president of CBSA. Has anyone from CBSA been in contact with Mr. Ossowski in advance of his summons for this Thursday?

[Erin O'Gorman]

If he has asked for documentation, I don't know.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

You don't know. Okay.

We know that the RCMP has raided the home of GC Strategies founder Kristian Firth. I would like to know what documentation CBSA has thus far provided to the RCMP.

[Erin O'Gorman]

I'm not tracking that. The RCMP doesn't come through me for requests of the CBSA. They don't report to me. They will conduct their investigation, and they will seek the information that they feel is necessary. I'm not going to track that. It's an investigation. They are free to come and obtain any information that they feel is necessary.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Your lack of curiosity about an ongoing criminal investigation involving your department is surprising. You're not going to track the information that is being collected or is being asked for, considering that there are quite literally criminal investigations ongoing involving employees at your department. That doesn't trigger any curiosity on your part.

I want to go back on a—

[Erin O'Gorman]

Mr. Chair....

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

It wasn't a question, but—

[Erin O'Gorman]

It's a statement about how I'm conducting myself.

I'm not going to ask people to report to me on whether they've been interviewed by the RCMP or what documents they've been provided. It's an investigation by the police. I am running CBSA, but I am not going to keep logs of what the police do. They will do what they do; they don't report to me. It's not a lack of curiosity; it's respect for the police investigation.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

You are right. The RCMP does not report to you, but the 16,000 employees you noted do report to you, and the documents that are contained within the CBSA's possession are relevant to you as president of the CBSA. The fact that you're not tracking what documents are going out from the CBSA to the RCMP is surprising, frankly, because we know the challenges the CBSA has had with documentation, because of the report we had from the Auditor General—paper trails not existing, paper trails and emails being deleted. We know that Minh Doan's emails magically disappeared.

I want to know what you, as president of the CBSA, are doing to maintain the integrity of the documents within the CBSA so that they are being preserved and kept intact, so that they're not magically disappearing when there is an ongoing RCMP investigation that includes the Canada Border Services Agency. What's being done?

[Erin O'Gorman]

If I asked employees to report to me on what documents they may have provided to the RCMP or in interviews, I would be sitting here being accused of interfering in a police investigation. The RCMP has every right to come and obtain the documents it feels it needs. I don't feel the need to track that. Similarly, when the Auditor General comes in, her staff work with the team to get the documents they need, and nobody reports that to me. I don't interfere with that.

My expectation is—and I've made that clear—that the documents that anybody in those positions, be it the Auditor General or the police, wish to seek and obtain are handed over.

I don't know what you're talking about in terms of the magical disappearance of emails, but I can tell you that the RCMP is gathering the information it feels that it needs.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I can tell you which emails have magically disappeared. They were Minh Doan's, your former—

[Erin O'Gorman]

We don't have evidence of that.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Mr. Chair, I think it's very clear. I see you're defending Mr. Doan, and that's your right, but the fact is that this has been very well litigated in the media in terms of emails disappearing, so I'm concerned about the integrity of the data and the documents that are maintained at the CBSA.

[Erin O'Gorman]

You'll understand if I don't take media articles as a factual basis to act with regard to employee conduct.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

You're saying that the story in The Globe and Mail is false.

[Erin O'Gorman]

I'm saying that we're conducting our own investigation. You're stating that articles in the newspaper are equivalent to determined facts, so I'm saying we continue to look into it; we continue to investigate, and that's the basis upon which any action will be taken.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Up next is Ms. Khalid. You have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I was listening to a lot of the questioning here by my Conservative colleagues. It always astounds me as to how they never let the facts get in the way of the political jargon they put out there. For example, just today we heard that Bahrain was the place where the World Cup and nefarious things happened, but actually the World Cup was in Qatar. I'm not really sure how that really plays out with the narrative of Mr. Nater.

Again, thank you, Ms. O'Gorman, for being here today and for answering questions yet again on this important topic. I think the sentiments of the committee are very much the same in that something happened here and taxpayer dollars were used. We are trying to get to the bottom of what happened and how we can improve the process. I think that your open and honest testimony here has been quite inspiring, so perhaps I'll start with asking you this.

I know the last time you came here you talked about the CBSA's plan moving forward, so perhaps you can start by giving us an update on the plan in response to the Auditor General's recommendations.

[Erin O'Gorman]

Sure. Thank you.

We've made 22 commitments. I commissioned an internal audit as well, and that's under way. That's also giving rise to commitments to address some of the gaps in the processes that existed in the department.

I can group it into a few categories.

One is training and guidance. It needs to be ongoing. I required retraining of executives and managers with delegated authority, and we continue to put out improved guidance.

Quality assurance and controls is our second line of defence, as it were. I don't want to keep finding out about gaps through our audits. That's an expensive way to find out that we don't have coverage and that our documentation isn't in order.

Then there's conflict of interest. I indicated that we've also done some work on that, both on the side of contractors and employees.

Then there's organizational changes. I mentioned something a few times, because it is quite significant in terms of the operations of the department, and this is contracts going through, one by one, to a senior review committee. That's giving rise to a lot of discussions about whether we even need contracts in some cases.

Next is reprioritizing what we need to do.

Then there's bolstering the capacity of our internal procurement team, which has increased by 20%. It's a credit to that team that the attrition rate has decreased to 7% from 35%, so we have a very engaged and knowledgeable team. It's fanned out across the organization to support other divisions and sectors in their procurements.

Then there's improving our information management practices. The policy is quite clear on documents of business value. I don't think there's business value in having 18 emails back and forth versus decision documents that are clear and can be found with all of the other relevant documents, be it in a procurement file or investigation.

Those are the areas we're working across. We're more advanced; we've completed nine of our commitments and should have the rest done in a year. It also speaks to the culture. It's not about new rules and processes. It's about fewer priorities. It's about exposure to where we're going in terms of contracting, where we need contracts, discussions about what we can do internally. It also is happening at the level of the culture of the organization.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thanks very much for that.

I always wonder about the role of the procurement directorate. In a recent article, we found that the organizations or the companies the Conservatives are really going after to try to connect to corruption and the Liberal government were actually brought in by the Harper Conservative government 13 years ago and have then continued the process.

Perhaps you can shed some light on the role of the procurement directorate at the CBSA. How new is this? How does this go beyond governments of the day? Is there actual corruption happening here by ministers or by the Prime Minister?

[Erin O'Gorman]

The procurement group has always existed. They existed in a smaller form and, as I've testified, they existed in a way that they were not the point person on all of the procurements, so that's changed. They're there to assist their colleagues who have to get their work done, and sometimes getting the work done requires outside contractors, whether it's because we don't need that skill set in an ongoing way, or we can't recruit that skill set, or that we need specialized resources for a limited period of time.

They work with their areas across the department to determine what needs to be delivered, whether procurement is necessary and, if so, what's the best way to carry out that procurement and obviously be a liaison with PSPC when those procurements are being led by that department.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Sinclair‑Desgagné, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. O'Gorman, your testimony raises a number of questions. I don't think the issue is which document you're going to provide to the RCMP. The last time we had you at the committee, a few months ago, you were very clear on the fact that your role going forward would be to look to the future, but also to clean up the CBSA and ensure that an incident like ArriveCAN doesn't happen again.

What I see today, and what you may have heard as well, is that a number of agency employees who clearly violated the basic code of conduct not only are still on the job, but have also been promoted. I'm not just talking about Mr. Ailapperuma. Mr. Lauzon and others also behaved inappropriately.

What have you done to clean things up? At the moment, we are not seeing any results. Apart from suspending two employees, you don't seem to have done much of the cleanup that the agency needs.

[Erin O'Gorman]

There are two issues.

One is that it's the ongoing work of the professional integrity division and what they are examining based on the documents that have come forth over the course of the past couple of years. I have made it clear to them that I have expectations that they will deliver high quality as fast as is reasonably possible.

Through the course of looking back, they will come to decisions and recommendations regarding what they've found. They will work with human resources colleagues, and when an investigation is completed, and if it's founded, then the next step is to determine whether there are any mitigating factors and take appropriate discipline.... They have a grid that can compare discipline for various—