Good morning, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here and to see you and the committee members once again. I'm accompanied this morning by Éric Trottier, our chief financial officer.

The purpose of my appearance this morning is to share with you information about our plans and priorities to explain how we have worked within our relatively small budget to achieve these priorities and how we will continue to do so in the coming year.

Our 2017-2018 annual budget is $5.4 million, and we have a full-time team of approximately 30 employees.

I know you are familiar with our mandate, given the recent legislative review hearings, so I will not spend any time this morning providing you with information or background in that regard.

My priorities, as outlined in my departmental plan, can be summarized briefly.

The first is to focus on operational delivery and efficiency through ongoing assessment of procedures and approaches, which includes ensuring an up-to-date technology infrastructure.

The second is to continue to address the permanent challenge facing organizations such as mine: ensuring we are known and that people understand what we are able to do to help them.

The third is to ensure that we have the right people in my office to carry out our important work. This speaks to another ongoing challenge for a small organization such as mine: recruitment and retention.

A key feature of the plan is to instill a spirit of continuous improvement. The work we do is sensitive, and its impacts are broad, as we have discussed at this committee before. There will always be a better way to do our work, and we have to identify those opportunities to adapt and improve on an ongoing basis. Our approaches to our work can and must change as attitudes toward whistle-blowing change and as the culture of the public service changes over time as a result of collective will and focused collective action.

For example, in the coming year, we are going to be building on what we started two years ago as part of what we call the “LEAN” exercise. This is a thorough assessment of processes and procedures, with the goal of identifying ways to improve effectiveness, including timeliness.

You may have noted that two years ago, in 2015-16, our self-imposed service standards, in their second year of operation, were not being met. This was due not only to unanticipated staff turnover, but also to what I identified as an increasingly burdensome and time-consuming process. Following the LEAN exercise, I am pleased to report that we are back on track and will be reporting in our forthcoming annual report that we have fully met those standards in the year that just passed. I believe those statistics are in a document provided to committee members this morning. In the coming year, we will continue with this initiative, focusing more specifically on investigations, having worked on case analysis last year.

In terms of IMIT priorities, we are going to be working to update our infrastructure to improve, for example, secure remote access to operational files to ensure that staff are fully equipped with the up-to-date tools necessary to do their jobs, wherever those jobs take them across the country. In addition, we are going to be looking at options to our existing case management system, which is a core foundational technological tool and part of our infrastructure. In doing so, we are going to be recognizing that any options must put the protection of sensitive information as a top priority and that this information must be kept separate from shared or government-wide systems.

I have spoken about our communications activities in my previous appearances, but I do wish to underscore the importance of our continuing investment in this regard. Reaching out to public servants with clear, accurate and credible information about their options is not something that can be done only once; it is a permanent challenge and shared responsibility.

While we certainly see an uptake of interest in questions about our office and approaches to our office following the tabling of case reports in Parliament, our efforts to reach out have to be ongoing.

More specifically, with respect to case reports, as you know, I tabled two founded cases of wrongdoing in February. I can tell you this morning, Mr. Chair, that I expect to table another before the House rises for the summer.

Those two February case reports not only triggered significant media attention, but they also triggered an increase in general inquiries to our office and an increase both in disclosures and about reprisals, making the month of March the busiest of the past year.

I would also like to share with you here this morning that I will be reporting in my annual report that we launched 36 investigations in 2016-2017, which is a record number for my office. And we currently have 44 investigations underway. We are, I think it is safe to say, busier now than we ever have been.

That leaves me to touch on my final priority, which is to build a strong team capable of meeting our increasing workload. We're adding to our ranks of case analysts and investigators at this very moment. They are the heart of our operations. We're planning for further hiring in both the operational and the legal sections of my office.

I would like to share the observation that hiring and retention, as I mentioned earlier, are particular challenges for a micro-organization such as mine, given the impact of even a single departure on a small team and, further, given that opportunities for advancement simply don't exist as they do in a larger organization.

Mr. Chair, in conclusion, my office currently has a budget sufficient to carry out its work, including the ability to plan for contingencies. Those contingencies include adapting to new technologies, changes in accommodations to respect both government policies and a growing number of employees, and those expenses that I would say are unforeseeable, such as external legal agent costs, which we have had to deal with in the past, but not in the past fiscal year.

Having said this, I note that the coming year is expected to be one in which the technology- and accommodation-related contingencies actually materialize. My projections are that we'll be able to respond within our existing budget. It's also worth noting, I think, Mr. Chair, that these projections and plans are also consistent with the concerns and desires of my office's employees as they have expressed to us in ongoing consultations with the senior management team.

I will end my opening remarks there, Mr. Chair, and I will be happy to respond to any questions. Thank you.

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