[Translation]
Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on consular services to Canadians abroad.
This audit examined how Global Affairs Canada responded to requests for consular assistance from Canadians travelling or living abroad. Canadians requested things like help during an international crisis such as a natural disaster, new travel documents to replace lost or stolen passports, or even assistance because they had been arrested or detained abroad.
[English]
We found that Global Affairs Canada was able to deploy staff quickly to help Canadians during a crisis in a foreign country and that it updated its online travel advisories as crises evolved. We also found that the department was able to issue urgent travel documents quickly through its missions abroad.
However, we found that in about two-thirds of the cases we examined involving a Canadian arrested or detained abroad, consular officers hadn't contacted the detained Canadian within 24 hours of being notified, as required. Consular officers were able to contact most of these individuals within a month, but some were never contacted. When a consular officer did contact a Canadian arrested or detained abroad, it was usually by email or telephone and not in person. In-person contact is important for assessing the well-being of individuals and determining how much help they need.
Significantly, we found that Global Affairs Canada took too long to assess allegations of the possible mistreatment or torture of Canadians detained abroad.
[Translation]
ln 2004, Justice Dennis O'Connor investigated the actions of Canadian officials in relation to the arrest and detention of Maher Arar. In his report, Justice O'Connor recommended that Global Affairs Canada train its staff to identify signs of torture and mistreatment, and inform the minister quickly of those cases.
We found that, more than a decade later, Global Affairs Canada's approach to cases of arrest and detention was still not sufficient. The department provided its consular officers with only general training on how to conduct prison visits and how to identify signs that torture or mistreatment had occurred. Also, we found that, in one case, the department took seven months to inform the minister about the likely torture of a detained Canadian.
These gaps are critical for Canadians in distress. Global Affairs Canada must ensure that its consular officers are properly prepared and supported to help Canadians arrested or detained abroad.
[English]
When we looked at the level of service provided by missions abroad, we found inconsistent performance. For example, four of the 10 highest volume missions didn't meet their performance targets for the timely delivery of regular passports. Also, Global Affairs Canada didn't allocate its resources to adjust to varying workloads at its missions to ensure an effective and consistent level of service.
Finally, we found that Global Affairs Canada didn't track the performance of most of its consular services because of poor data quality. This lack of tracking made it difficult for the department to know whether it was deploying its staff in a way that best delivered the services that the government had promised to Canadians travelling or living abroad.
We made seven recommendations and Global Affairs Canada agreed with all of them.
Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. In a strange sort of way, it's always a pleasure for me to come to public accounts.
I want to thank the Office of the Auditor General for this important audit, which, as always, will enable us to improve our consular services to Canadians.
As deputy minister, I also want to convey my profound respect and gratitude to consular officers at headquarters and in missions around the world for the dedication, the compassion, and the competence that they exercise on behalf of Canadians.
Let me give you, to begin, some contextual data that will shed light on how Global Affairs Canada provides consular services to Canadians abroad.
[Translation]
Travelling has become easier and more affordable, and communication almost instantaneous. As a result, Canadians are vacationing, working, studying, retiring and simply living abroad in ever greater numbers. An estimated 2.8 million Canadians currently live outside Canada, and Canadians made almost 52 million trips abroad in 2016—an increase of approximately 4% from 10 years ago.
Global Affairs Canada manages a network of 260 points of service around the world, and there are more than 800 officials either wholly or partially responsible for providing consular service. For Global Affairs Canada, serving Canadians abroad is a major function of the department.
[English]
Consular work has a wide variety of functions. It includes issues as varied as providing travel information about foreign countries to help Canadians make safer and smarter travel decisions, visiting Canadians detained abroad, assisting with the identification and repatriation of deceased Canadians, and seeking clemency for the death penalty of Canadians detained abroad and under that prospect. We also provide services on behalf of other government departments, such as processing of applications for passports or for citizenship certificates, which are proof of citizenship.
We have seen an increase in requests for consular assistance by Canadians abroad. Consular officers opened over 277,000 new consular cases in 2017, an increase of 4% over the number of cases in 2016.
The majority, about 98%, of cases are of a routine or administrative nature and are typically resolved quickly and directly at the diplomatic mission. The remaining 2%—that's roughly 6,000 cases every year—require complex interactions involving intensive engagement with local authorities and host governments.
At the heart of every consular case is a personal situation involving a Canadian citizen abroad and a network of consular officials who are ready and proud to help. I can assure you, members of the committee and Mr. Chair, that we make every effort to contact our citizens who are arrested or detained abroad as soon as we are informed.
Frequently, challenges with access and difficult local contexts must be overcome. We are always looking for ways to improve. To ensure this, we will be putting additional training in place and introducing new tools to improve monitoring and service delivery.
We recognize the need for targeted training for consular officers to allow them to calibrate their response in light of the different operating environments in which they work, sometimes with multiple police forces, immigration officials, prison authorities, and regional and provincial governments, as well as the specific context of each case.
These responses can put consular officers in difficult situations, and we are committed to ensuring their safety and that of the Canadians they are assisting. We have already piloted enhanced training in regard to the safe conduct of prison visits, and we will extend this to all consular officers.
We have also begun the process of modernizing our case management information systems, which will further enhance the quality control and monitoring capabilities, improve our data quality, and reinforce the application of consistent service standards and the documentation of these efforts—all issues to which the Auditor General has just referred.
Global Affairs Canada takes allegations of mistreatment or torture of Canadians detained abroad very seriously, and we consistently take immediate steps to address such allegations. We are pleased that the report found that in all cases of such allegations consular officials at missions abroad took immediate and direct action on the ground to respond to these situations and advocate for the safety and well-being of Canadians.
We can do better. In line with the findings, we are taking additional steps to ensure that ministers are promptly notified in writing at the onset, when allegations of mistreatment or torture are first made, as well as when sufficient information is available to ascertain if they are founded.
Global Affairs Canada is always looking for ways to improve Canada's consular services with the objective to best serve the needs of Canadians abroad. This is a constant process of improvement, based notably on the experience of our consular officers, the feedback of clients, and our analysis of trends.
[Translation]
Passport services are another example of this trend.
For example, in the year following the implementation of the Electronic Travel Authorization, the eTA, requirements, many Canadians resident abroad needed to acquire Canadian passports. As a result, affected missions abroad experienced a 23% increase in all passport application volumes, a 47% increase in proof of citizenship application volumes, and a 70% increase in new passport applications.
In 2017, Global Affairs Canada opened over 200,000 new cases for passport services.
[English]
While the majority, almost 90%, met service standards, some missions could not respond to the significant surge. Additional resourcing has now been put in place to ensure that demand can be met to address the backlog, and we have improved the agility of our resourcing system.
We recognize the importance of ensuring appropriate oversight and monitoring of passport delivery services, and we strive to deliver high-quality, efficient passport services to continue to meet the needs of Canadians abroad. We're constantly re-evaluating and improving the way we work. With a view to improving consular service standards overall, we have begun reviewing the resource allocation methodology to ensure that the distribution of resources responds to trends and is optimized across the mission network to continue to ensure an effective, consistent level of service abroad.
We're pleased that the Auditor General recognized the department for its successful consular assistance during international crises, including promptly updating our online travel advisories so that Canadians have access to the information they need to make smart travel choices. Expert staff is ready to assist Canadians who require assistance abroad. This includes the support of the emergency watch and response centre, which deals with calls on a 24-7 basis from around the world, and a standard rapid deployment team made up of specially trained experienced officials ready to deploy on hours' notice to anywhere they are needed.
This team helped Canadians during the serious earthquake in Nepal in 2015 and were on the ground in the fall of 2017 across the Caribbean during hurricanes Irma and Maria, where they were instrumental in supplementing our local responses.
We already recognize the important role of lessons-learned reports in continually improving emergency response for Canadians following a significant emergency event requiring activation of our emergency response team. This is why we're currently developing a standardized department-wide approach to ensure lessons learned are more consistently captured, assessed, and implemented across different types of emergencies.
[Translation]
Global Affairs Canada has already started to provide targeted advice to Canadians, with its external communications plan, in order to extend its reach through additional targeted briefings and outreach.
We have conducted public opinion research with Canadian travellers to better understand their preparations for travel, the information they need and their expectations of consular services, as well as the channels they use to access such information. We know that Canada's efforts to strengthen ties with the world—through study and international business linkages, for example—mean that demand will continue to increase for consular services.
[English]
We are committed to providing professional, agile, timely, and dedicated consular services to meet this growing demand and modernize the consular program. Over the coming months, we plan to improve communications to equip Canadians to better prepare for travel and help keep them safer abroad; to provide timely, appropriate, and professional assistance to Canadians when they most need our help, in line with our service standards; to continue to modernize the consular digital platform; to strengthen support to our network of consular officials to ensure they have the necessary tools and training for modern consular service delivery; and to leverage bilateral engagements and seek partnerships to serve Canadians better.
I can assure you that we remain firmly committed to supporting Canadians abroad—we know there are few issues more important to parliamentarians than this—and to providing timely and appropriate consular services.
[Translation]
I would like to thank the honourable members of the committee for their attention.
My colleague Heather Jeffrey and I are available to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I thank the witnesses for being here today. I also thank Mr. Ferguson for the work that's been done on this audit.
While I agree with most Canadians that the general record of consular services is very good, I have to say that I am quite disturbed by the findings regarding the treatment of Canadians arrested or detained abroad. I actually think this is an unacceptable finding, and I say that as someone who, before becoming a member of Parliament, worked as an international human rights observer. I have done prison visits in Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Canada, and I have been in a position of advocating for improved treatment and negotiating release for those unlawfully detained.
Therefore, I actually find some of the things in this report, even though they're presented in very mild language, quite disturbing. When you say that we have, maybe, 1,600 arrested or detained in a given year, and that fewer than half are contacted within 24 hours, and that most of them are not contacted in person, that means we have over 1,000 Canadians at some point in the year who aren't contacted within 24 hours—which is the critical period in detentions.
As well, if you go further into the report, it says that in the sample, about 5% were not contacted at all, which would mean we'd have up to 80 Canadians during the year never being contacted by their government when in detention. I don't think this is a very good record.
My first questions are to Mr. Ferguson, about the study.
In your report, you focused on one part of the contact for those arrested, but in section 7.37 you talk about consular services also meaning informing family members, advocating for fair treatment, and advocating for general well-being. Did you study the record on those, or were you focused on merely the first step of that, which is contacting the Canadians who had been detained? I don't see the evidence of that in the report.
I would thank all of you for attending today. As a committee we are taken by this last...it was almost like a wake-up call to, not our committee but it should be to the public service. We go through this Auditor General's report and then, not so much just looking at the report regarding consular services but Mr. Shugart, as a deputy minister, I think there were other things in his report, and more specifically in his message, that if I were a deputy minister I would be paying very close attention to.
Although it originally refers to the Phoenix pay system and first nations, indigenous groups, he talks about “incomprehensible failure” in some cases of governments to deliver. He also speaks about the culture of government, which is the departments. This is not the culture of the government that's in power. This is the government, the federal bureaucracy and public service.
In former Auditor General's reports he has talked about not delivering the results that we really expect for Canadians and how the focus sometimes is on the short term but not the long term, so that Canadians can be benefited. We're pleased when we see that you have an action plan. We're pleased when we see incremental, first of all, acceptance of his report and then movement in your action plan. I would just encourage you to take that action plan, as I know....
Mr. Shugart, you've appeared here before in other capacities and we've appreciated it, but I would really encourage you to take the concerns expressed by our Auditor General about the culture of government and in some cases.... He talks about cases where, under the Phoenix system and indigenous systems, sometimes ministers were not adequately given the information in a timely process. To a lesser degree it may be pointed out here. I would certainly encourage you to take that message that he gives very seriously as we, not only in your department but in all departments, seek to better the culture of government.
That, I can tell you, is the goal of our committee, to enhance the culture of government and to be certain that Canadians are, first of all, served well.
We thank you for the way you that you serve.
I see you want to make a—