Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, your Standing Committee on Government Operations is pleased to provide its report on the review of the 2018 report of the Auditor General of Canada to the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly (Child and Family Services) and commends it to the House.
Before we begin, we would like to recognize the contributions of the Auditor General of Canada, Mr. Michael Ferguson, to the completion of this report. Mr. Ferguson, who passed away on February 2, 2019, was a dedicated public servant who will be greatly missed. We offer our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.
On October 23, 2018, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories tabled the 2018 Report of the Auditor General of Canada to the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly - Child and Family Services. The Standing Committee on Government Operations ("the committee") then convened a public hearing with staff from the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) and with representatives of the Northwest Territories Department of Health and Social Services ("the department") on December 12, 2018.
Like many Northwest Territories residents, Members know and care for those whose lives have been intimately affected by the child and family services (CFS) system. Some have been affected themselves. The CFS system shapes the lives of all children and families involved in it. In doing so, it shapes our territory's future. The importance of this work cannot be overstated.
To address the issues identified by the OAG, the Department of Health and Social Services has committed to achieving major, much-needed change within the next two years. This work is both urgent and challenging, and the stakes are high. Two years is not a long time, unless you are a child in care that is not working.
Roles of the Auditor General of Canada and the Standing Committee on Government Operations
The Auditor General of Canada is an officer of Parliament, with additional auditing responsibility for the territorial governments, including the Government of the Northwest Territories. When delivering financial or performance audits of the GNWT, the Auditor General reports directly to the Legislative Assembly as one of its statutory officers.
The committee, which has oversight responsibility for each of the Assembly's statutory officers, then reviews that report and makes recommendations to the government. This work is part of the committee's core mandate.
Child and Family Services in the Northwest Territories
Under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Social Services, the director of Child and Family Services, assigned by statutory appointment, and the health and social services authorities, including the Northwest Territories and Hay River authorities (NTHSSA and HRSSA) and the Tlicho Community Services Agency (TCSA), work together to deliver services as set out in the Child and Family Services Act and the Child and Family Services Standards and Procedures Manual. Through CFS, the GNWT must fulfill a parent's duties and responsibilities for each child in its care, in addition to providing various other services to children and their families.
As OAG staff told the committee, "The department has a fundamental responsibility for children in care. The department has to figure out how to make that work."
What Did the OAG Look At?
The OAG's report is the latest contribution to a large body of work on CFS, including past OAG audits, standing committee reports, third-party analyses, and internal government documents, such as action plans and annual reports. Much of this prior work is described in detail in Committee Report 16-17(5), issued by our predecessor committee on May 29, 2014. Interested readers may find all committee reports online at the Legislative Assembly's website or through the Legislative Library.
For its 2018 report, the OAG audited the department's and authorities' performance against current laws, policies, and procedures, focusing on whether the department and authorities "met key responsibilities for the protection and well-being of children, youth, and their families, [including] whether [they] had implemented selected recommendations from [the] 2014 audit." Auditors examined 37 child files and 37 foster care files in the Yellowknife, Beaufort-Delta, and Tlicho regions, which together serve as home to 67 percent of children in care in the Northwest Territories, and extended their file review of guardianship agreements and out-of-territory placements across all authorities. The audit also included engagement with child protection workers (CPWs) in all regions.
Overall, the findings are troubling. Service delivery continues to be plagued by "serious deficiencies" and, rather than see improvement, many services have worsened since 2014.
What Did We Look At?
This report is about the OAG's 2018 audit of child and family services. It does not provide a comprehensive review of the CFS system, nor does it examine the Child and Family Services Act or internal CFS policies.
As the standing committee with the responsibility to oversee statutory officers, this committee is concerned with the official findings of the OAG regarding performance and compliance. Our objective is to make recommendations to the GNWT that will result in improved services to children and families and also, as elected officials responsible for the approval of the GNWT's annual budget, to ensure optimal allocation of public resources. Our colleagues on the Standing Committee on Social Development continue to monitor the ongoing delivery of CFS.
It is also important to note that the committee is concerned with overarching management and the direction of departmental business at the senior level, not with the day-to-day performance of front-line and other staff.
The department is developing a quality improvement plan for CFS. This plan should incorporate the recommendations made in this report.
Recommendation 1
The Standing Committee on Government Operations recommends that the Department of Health and Social Services incorporate into its quality improvement plan for child and family services the recommendations made in this report.
General Considerations
Accepting the findings of the Auditor General
The department has previously questioned the OAG's findings regarding CFS. For example, the 2015-2016 annual report of the CFS director states:
"Finally, there is a major limitation in both the Auditor General's findings and the current department audit findings, one that calls into question any conclusions drawn from the findings. Neither the Auditor General nor the Director of Child and Family Services were able to distinguish between 'work not done' and 'work not recorded' using the current methodology."
Similarly, during the public hearing, although departmental staff stated that they respect the OAG's findings, they also spoke of "debate over methodology" and their preference for internal audit results over the OAG's findings.
The committee requested the OAG's perspective on these matters. We determined that the OAG's findings are fully vetted with each audited department. OAG staff said, "We go through a very active process to vet with departments and give them every opportunity to provide any evidence. We vetted all of our findings, and the department and authorities signed off [on all of them]." The OAG dedicated a combined 7,000 hours to their audit.
The committee urges all audited departments to refrain from questioning the OAG's findings once they are accepted.
Timely Receipt of Materials
In 2016 and 2017, the committee recommended that any GNWT department being audited provide the committee with its action or implementation plan no later than three business days before the public hearing. A process convention is presently in development to clarify procedures for the distribution of such documents.
Recommendation 2
The Standing Committee on Government Operations recommends that any government department, board, or agency being audited produce a draft action or implementation plan in response to the audit, provide the committee with a copy of that plan that is consistent with the appropriate process conventions, and present the plan at the committee's public hearing.
Quality Assurance
Some performance parameters for CFS are immediately clear because they are set out in the Child and Family Services Act. Regarding these, the committee concurs with the OAG that 100 percent compliance is the department's legal obligation and that anything less is insufficient.
After the OAG's 2014 report, our predecessor committee recommended that the department and authorities conduct annual compliance audits, and that these audits, along with any subsequent action plans, be shared with the Standing Committee on Social Programs (now called the Standing Committee on Social Development) and tabled in the Legislative Assembly. At that time, the GNWT agreed to these recommendations and cited Building Stronger Families: An Action Plan to Transform Child and Family Services, which included commitments to a common audit tool and reporting template.
Since that time, however, the internal auditing process has been hindered by several issues. The department has dedicated significant resources to attempting to replicate the OAG's process in in its own internal quality assurance work. These attempts have left the department with unusable data, a "broken" audit tool, and inconsistency in reporting across regions.
Considering this, the committee is reminded of advice from the OAG's staff: "If you're going to do the quality assurance work, you have to make sure you have the resources." This will be discussed further under the heading "Assessment of required financial and human resources."
The committee also wishes to raise two additional points.
First, it is important to understand that the department's internal audit process and the work of the OAG are entirely distinct. These differences mean that findings cannot be compared in an "apples-to-apples" way.
The OAG's performance audit covered the period between April 1, 2014, and September 12, 2018. The department's most recent internal audit covered only the period between April 1, 2016, and March 31, 2017.
The OAG examined 37 child files and 37 foster care files and engaged with CFS staff in all regions. The department examined "a sample of 711 child protection and prevention events," including all foster care files within the audit period, and offered an online anonymous survey to staff employed in the authorities.
Second, since becoming aware of the OAG's findings, the department appears to have initiated comprehensive system-wide quality assurance, but failed to address immediate service gaps identified by the OAG. For example, at the public hearing, three months after the OAG's audit was concluded, departmental staff were unable to identify whether unscreened guardians and foster homes had since been screened, and referred instead to plans for system-wide quality assurance.
Departmental staff framed this as a "dilemma," or a choice between "perfect" performance and a "quality improvement approach." But the OAG's report has shown that the department's present "quality improvement approach" resulted in worsened services over time. "Perfection" may be difficult to achieve, but regardless, 100 percent compliance is required by law. The committee echoes its predecessors and urges the department to "begin immediately and in earnest to correct deficiencies in child and family services," even while it continues to develop its medium- and long-term plans.
Recommendation 3
The Standing Committee on Government Operations recommends that the Department of Health and Social Services act immediately to ensure that all gaps in screenings and reviews identified by the Office of the Auditor General, including screening for guardianship agreements and foster homes, are addressed, and that it advise the committee when this is completed.
Recommendation 4
The Standing Committee on Government Operations recommends that the Department of Health and Social Services appear before the appropriate standing committee twice yearly to report on its compliance with the Child and Family Services Act and its progress on its quality improvement plan.
Performance Evaluation Through Measurable Outcomes
However, compliance alone does not ensure that children and families are adequately supported, nor do individual measures, lacking context, provide a complete portrait of performance.
For example, the department has identified increasing rates of children receiving services in the home and increasing rates of voluntary services agreements (VSAs) as demonstrating improved services. Yet the OAG found that monitoring of children at risk under parental care at home had worsened since 2014, and that VSAs require no interaction with child protection workers (CPWs) and may be ended by the parent at any time. To quote directly from the OAG's report:
"In most cases, we found that plan-of-care agreements were not monitored as required, and that the monitoring that did take place focused mostly on parents instead of on the children these plans were intended to protect. For example, we found that, in most cases, HSSAs had some contact with parents, but did not interview children as often as the plans required to make sure they were safe and to assess their health and well-being. We found that this occurred even in some high-risk cases.
We also found that authorities allowed some children to remain under a plan-of-care agreement even when it was clear the conditions were not being met, and sometimes extended these same agreements. Further, in a few cases we examined, authorities allowed a parent to terminate the plan-of-care agreement early without being assured that the child was no longer at risk. These findings are significant because these agreements are often an alternative to removing a child from the home, and the termination of the agreement by the parents may not be in the best interests of a child."
Simply put, more children may have been assigned to receive services at home, but the services received, if any, were subpar and staff often failed to follow up.
To deliver effective services, the department must assess performance over time through both compliance rates and contextualized, client-centred performance measures. These should include desirable long-term outcomes intended to assess whether children engaged with the Child and Family Services system are flourishing over time. These might include social inclusion, for example extracurricular activities or the desire and ability to set and pursue educational or career goals, and other health indicators, for example, educational performance or mental health, as well as quality assurance practices focused on assessing children's satisfaction as "clients" of the system.
The department has accepted the OAG's recommendation that it "identify specific indicators to measure whether the system is achieving the desired results and is better supporting children." This work will be a critical component of the department's work over the next two years.
Recommendation 5
The Standing Committee on Government Operations recommends that the Department of Health and Social Services publicly identify performance indicators, including client-centered outcomes, that it will use to assess improvements in child and family services over time;
And that reporting on these measures be incorporated into the department's annual business plan and the annual report of the director of child and family services.
Mr. Speaker, at this time I'd like to turn the reading of the report over to the honourable Member for Deh Cho. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.