Public Accounts committee  To talk about our on-site visits, I'll ask Mr. Normand to provide some details. What I would say is that, in most of our audits, we try to make on-site visits to understand the realities that are faced.

Public Accounts committee  Performance indicators are important and should be part of any agreement with a company that receives public funds. It is also important to mention that, when projects are completed, the department must be able to gather information on the progress made. In the case of the 30 projects that had been carried out at the time of our audit, we found that there was no plan to do that follow-up.

Public Accounts committee  My answer to that would be that this is baked into our recommendation on having strengthened project level performance evaluation and monitoring. To your point about climate resilience, identifying the measures that should be in all of these agreements, or that should be standard for a subset of projects, is important.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I would say that making the indicators more specific, measurable, attributable, relevant and time-bound would be something where we saw some improvement over the course of time. I'll give you an example. Instead of saying that there should be an increase in efficiency in the transportation system, what we saw in some examples would be that the number of cars or the volume of materials that pass through will increase from x to y over the course of a year.

Public Accounts committee  As I was saying to Ms. Shanahan, without performance measurement, it is impossible to attribute progress on sustainable development goals to funded projects and to report on them. Therefore, the findings in this part of our report are related to the other findings I mentioned.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I would say that the department uses sustainable development goals, as all departments must. Having said that, I would like to clarify something. In our audit, we found that there were gaps in performance measurement. I hope that, with the improvements that have been made, it will be possible in the future to attribute progress toward achieving sustainable development goals to funded projects.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, thank you. This was a good-news story from the perspective of using information to inform decision-making. We saw that the fund was designed using an evidence-based approach. Likewise, the calls for proposal were based on evidence that the department had gathered. I would point to some examples.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on the national trade corridors fund, which was tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2024. I would like to acknowledge that this hearing is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

Public Accounts committee  I think I would like to answer that question by saying that the role of the Auditor General is critical to democracy. We bring forward impartial, objective and independent advice. We make our recommendations on the basis of facts that have been cleared and have been certified by the departments themselves as accurate.

Public Accounts committee  Your question is built on a foundation of quality information. Take, for example, the fact that every organization in the government essentially has the ability to enter into contracts. Not all of those contracts will be known at PSPC. The big ones will be, but not all of them.

Public Accounts committee  Well, I'm not sure that removing delegation for contracting is the solution, because that will have the negative impact of gumming up all procurement business. There should be some ability for ministers and departments to operate in their spheres. What we really need is a system that allows the government to know what's going on across the way.

Public Accounts committee  It's human resources, or it could be our security section.

Public Accounts committee  In our office, we have a team—

Public Accounts committee  Investigations affecting our office focused on other departments like Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat.

Public Accounts committee  Those cases were investigated by the Department of Public Services and Procurement. For the case involving suppliers, we conducted the investigation.