Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.

With me is Mark Mahabir, director of policy and general counsel.

We are pleased to be here to present the findings of our Research and Comparative Analysis Report of Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs and Indigenous Services Canada, which we were honoured to prepare at the request of the committee.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer supports Parliament by providing independent and nonpartisan economic and financial analysis to parliamentarians. As the legislation states, we provide this analysis for the purposes of raising the quality of parliamentary debate and promoting greater budget transparency and accountability.

Consistent with the PBO's legislated mandate, at the request of this committee, my office prepared an independent analysis of the estimates of the Department of the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs and the Department of Indigenous Services Canada.

Our report presents analysis for the 2015-16 to 2022-23 period. Over this time, financial resources allocated to the provision of indigenous services have increased significantly. To evaluate how effective the organizations providing these services were in using these resources, a quantitative and qualitative approach using publicly available data was employed.

The analysis conducted indicates that the increased spending did not result in a commensurate improvement in the ability of these organizations to achieve the goals they had set for themselves. This was partly driven by the volatility in the departmental result indicators. Many of these indicators were added or removed over the course of the period, preventing results from being collected due to data collection lags. Some indicators lack target values and completion dates altogether. Based on the qualitative review, the departments' ability to achieve the targets specified has declined.

We would be pleased to respond to any questions you may have regarding our analysis or any other PBO work.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Transcript

Discussions (0)