1997 ANNUAL REPORT, PROVINCIAL AUDITOR: MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICES
CONTENTS
Thursday 25 June 1998
1997 Annual Report, Provincial Auditor:
Section 3.04, transfer payment agency accountability and governance
Ministry of Community and Social Services
Ms Suzanne Herbert, deputy minister
Mr Kevin Costante, assistant deputy minister, program management division
STANDING COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC ACCOUNTS
Chair / Président
Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East / -Est L)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président
Mr Richard Patten (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
Mr Marcel Beaubien (Lambton PC)
Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East / -Est L)
Mr Bill Grimmett (Muskoka-Georgian Bay /
Muskoka-Baie-Georgienne PC)
Mr Jean-Marc Lalonde (Prescott and Russell / Prescott et Russell L)
Ms Shelley Martel (Sudbury East / -Est ND)
Mr Richard Patten (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
Mr Peter L. Preston (Brant-Haldimand PC)
Mr Joseph N. Tascona (Simcoe Centre / -Centre PC)
Mr Terence H. Young (Halton Centre / -Centre PC)
Substitutions / Membres remplaçants
MR JOHN L. PARKER (YORK EAST / -EST PC)
Also taking part / Autres participants et participantes
Mr Michael A. Brown (Algoma-Manitoulin L)
Clerk pro tem / Greffier par intérim
Mr Tom Prins
Staff / Personnel
MS ELAINE CAMPBELL, RESEARCH OFFICER, LEGISLATIVE RESEARCH SERVICE
1997 ANNUAL REPORT, PROVINCIAL AUDITOR: MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICES
Consideration of section 3.04, transfer payment agency accountability and governance.
The Vice-Chair (Mr Richard Patten): Welcome to the standing committee on public accounts. Do you have a presentation you want to give?
Ms Suzanne Herbert: I have, if that is fine with the committee.
The Vice-Chair: We'd like to welcome you. Please proceed with your presentation, and then some members will either make comments or ask questions of you.
Ms Herbert: That would be fine. First of all, to introduce myself, I am Suzanne Herbert. I am the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Community and Social Services. I have beside me Angela Forest, who is the acting ADM for corporate resources and corporate policy. I'd like to take a few minutes just to give you some remarks and then we'll move through.
Mr Chairman and members of the committee, I am pleased to reply to your request to respond to the transfer payment accountability and governance audit section of the 1997 report of the Provincial Auditor.
Before I turn to the specific points in the auditor's report, I would like to share a quick overview of the ministry and the kinds of services it provides and promotes. This overview will give a helpful perspective to our discussion about the ministry's relations with transfer payment agencies.
The responsibilities of our ministry are among the most significant of the Ontario government. This fiscal year, our combined operating and capital budget is about $7.9 billion, and we have more than 7,000 employees.
Our ministry supports and invests in families and communities to encourage responsibility and accountability; adults, so they can live as independently as possible; and in a services system in which children are safe and people most in need receive support.
Our ministry is guided by the principles of shared responsibility, accountability, integrated and client-focused services, and fairness.
The Ministry of Community and Social Services has two core businesses. One of our core businesses is to provide assistance to about 1.1 million Ontario residents who require income assistance.
Our second core business is to provide social and community services. Our goal here is to provide effective and accountable services to those who need them most, and to invest more of our resources in early intervention and prevention services.
The type of support that falls under this category includes funding for child welfare, children's mental health and young offender services; funding for child care services for low-income families with young children; funding to help support children and adults with developmental disabilities; and adult services, such as support for people with disabilities and for victims of domestic violence and their children.
Along with the Ministry of Health, the Ontario Women's Directorate and the Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat, the ministry also supports the Aboriginal Healing and Wellness strategy, which aims to improve health and reduce violence in First Nations communities.
Ministry staff are working to implement reforms in almost every part of our business. One of our priorities is child welfare reform. The ministry is responding to public concern that more needs to be done to protect the province's most vulnerable children. Additional funding has been earmarked to provide better training for front-line workers, increase the number of child protection staff and revitalize foster care.
The ministry continues to focus on early intervention and prevention for children at risk. Our Healthy Babies, Healthy Children initiative, a vital new program that identifies and arranges support for at-risk newborns and their families, is well under way.
We are also implementing the multi-year Making Services Work for People initiative. The goal here is to restructure social services to better meet client needs. We are introducing changes to make the system more efficient and effective for the people it serves.
I would like to turn now to the specific issues before us today. I want to acknowledge the important role played by the Provincial Auditor in calling for the greatest possible accountability and for the prudent and responsible use of taxpayers' funds.
Any organization selected for an audit -- and we have many times been selected for an audit -- will naturally feel the heat of the spotlight, but that's a good thing. It's one more incentive for the members of that organization to work efficiently and professionally and to strive to be accountable for one's actions, decisions and relations with other organizations.
We are here today to discuss the auditor's findings with regard to the accountability and governance of transfer payment agencies. The audit, carried out in the 1996-97 fiscal year, was a new type of auditing exercise for the ministry and for the auditor. We learned much from the process and welcomed the auditor's report, which was tabled in the Legislature on November 25, 1997, and agree with his findings.
I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about what the ministry means when it uses the term "transfer payment agency." The ministry plans, arranges and funds a great many services, but most of them are delivered by community-based, mostly non-profit, agencies. These are known as TPAs. The ministry works with more than 3,100 such transfer payment agencies and in the 1997-98 fiscal year provided them with about $2.1 billion in funding.
The TPAs include a range of organizations and groups, such as child care centres, women's shelters, hostels, group homes, associations for community living, first nations groups, municipalities, children's aid societies and child and family intervention programs.
As the auditor noted, many of the ministry's TPAs owe their beginnings to dedicated, grass-roots groups of volunteers who initially provided social services in their communities with little or no public funding.
The auditor also observed that services delivered by the TPAs have expanded over time, owing to increased social need and to a general trend towards community-based care. To this day, many of our social services are delivered by community-based agencies with volunteer boards of directors. They receive provincial funding, but they are independent organizations that must meet the requirements of the Corporations Act. Our ministry is accountable for the services provided with our funding, but we do not manage individual agencies.
A number of the TPAs we support also receive funds from other sources, such as other levels of government, the private sector, foundations and fund-raising activities.
The objectives of the auditor were to assess whether the ministry had established and communicated to its TPAs reasonable expectations for their accountability and governance and whether the ministry had procedures in place to determine whether transfer payment agencies were meeting ministry expectations.
As I mentioned earlier, many of the TPAs began as charitable, volunteer agencies that sprang to life to meet local needs. They carried out important functions and still do, but traditionally, it has been difficult to measure their outcomes. This is widely true in the field of soft, or human, services. We certainly are far from building the science of governance and accountability in the world of human services that we need to have.
Nevertheless, we have been taking clear steps to ensure that transfer payment agencies use provincial funding in an accountable and responsive manner. At the same time, we respect the need for TPAs to function efficiently and, for the most part, independently.
The auditor has raised a number of legitimate concerns about accountability and governance. Much work remains to be done in this area, but I do wish to say that across government and in this ministry very real efforts have already been made to ensure improved accountability and governance over the part of the TPAs.
I will take a minute to talk about business planning. It's been three years now that all ministries have been required to produce an annual business plan. The process of developing the business plan is perhaps as crucial as the final document itself. It requires ministry staff to focus on our current and future priorities, to state our goals, and to set forth ways to measure and evaluate our efforts in reaching them. This process also makes us keep an eye on the accountability of TPAs and the results they achieve.
The auditor noted that the ministry should attempt, where practical, to establish measurable and meaningful service outcomes to help determine whether TPA services are effective, appropriate and represent value for money. The ministry agrees with the need to set out measurable performance targets and indicators, compare results to targets and monitor the cost of achieving results. Establishing and monitoring service outcomes is a complex undertaking, and we've begun to address this concern in stages.
As part of our 1997-98 annual business plan, the ministry established initial performance measures for its accountability to the government and to the public.
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I'd like to take a moment to describe how we are refining our existing performance measures and developing additional measures with regard to child welfare and young offenders.
We have developed a standard risk assessment model that all children's aid societies must use to determine eligibility for services and to assess children's safety. We have enhanced training for child protection workers. We are developing new technology to help workers get the information they need to protect children. By reviewing more than 3,000 child abuse and neglect cases, we have conducted an external examination of the case management practices of all 55 children's aid societies. We commissioned an external review of the way the ministry upholds its legal responsibilities to hold children's aid societies accountable for their work.
The step-by-step reform will continue to improve our management of the child welfare system as well as the management of child protection services by children's aid societies. The ministry will continue to set out clear directions and expectations for boards of directors of CASs. The ministry will set standards in key areas and monitor compliance, and we will enhance our own ability to monitor children's aid societies. We will develop a comprehensive child welfare database for the purpose of collecting and analysing child welfare outcomes in Ontario, and we are developing a new funding framework for children's aid societies that will ensure more equitable funding based on province-wide benchmarks.
One way that we will determine the effectiveness of our efforts to reduce youth crime will be to introduce reduced recidivism as a new performance measure. The auditor has also recommended that to ensure that funding for services is equitable and appropriate, the ministry should critically assess requests for funding and ensure that the amounts approved reflects a demand for and the value of the services in question. Actually, the ministry already does this in the course of its annual budget negotiations with each TPA, and we recognize that we need to increase our efforts to rationalize service costs.
Recently, the ministry completed a study on the levels of support provided for residential care programs and developmental services. We sought to find ways to quantify the residential support provided to individuals and promote a more equitable distribution of resources. Stakeholder groups involved in developmental services expressed concern about the study, and as a result, we have asked a community-based advisory group to review the study results and report back to the ministry.
With respect to children's services, ministry staff know that funding now varies for individuals with similar needs and that there is a requirement to rationalize costs. Our levels-of-support project will set provincial benchmarks linking funding to appropriate levels.
The auditor also raised the need to improve the effectiveness of the ministry's annual program expenditure reconciliation, or APER, as we call it. The auditor suggested that to obtain useful information for subsequent funding decisions, the ministry should ensure that the reconciliations and that the TPA's financial statements contain enough detail to allow for the detection of ineligible expenditure items.
We agree with the auditor on this point and we've taken steps to inform agencies about the ministry's financial policies. The ministry's APER form and instructions underwent an extensive revision this year. The APER instruction package we issued to agencies contained all the relevant policies, including extensive lists of eligible and ineligible expenditures.
The auditor also suggested some means by which the ministry could more effectively oversee services delivered by TPAs, and the ministry agrees that it must ensure that TPA representatives understand and agree to their roles and responsibilities. We are developing a comprehensive performance management system that links business planning, performance contracts and service management.
Additionally, the ministry has just recently implemented its services management information system in all of its area and local offices. The system helps us monitor the financial management process and performance of TPAs.
The auditor went on to suggest that the ministry establish the roles and responsibilities of boards of directors in terms of their accountability to the government. He also suggested that we provide guidance on operating procedures to meet ministry program objectives economically, efficiently and effectively. The ministry agrees that it must define the results it seeks from the TPA boards of directors, that it should monitor and measure results and that it should evaluate any given agency's performance in light of its contract with the government.
Governance policy is sufficiently important to us that we have now established a locus of responsibility for it within the ministry. I would add that despite all of this work, we still have some way to go in knitting our governance framework together. We are currently working on an analysis of gaps in ministry governance policy, and once we've had a chance to review the results, we will determine what further actions need to be taken.
As I mentioned at the outset, the ministry has a complex but extraordinarily important agenda. We recognize that the public rightfully demands increased accountability from government, and that includes the nature of our ties to the transfer payment agencies that we fund.
I'm pleased to have had this chance to share an overview and I look forward to answering any questions the committee has.
Mr Chair, may I take a minute to introduce my assistant deputy minister of program management division, Kevin Costante.
The Vice-Chair: Welcome. We'll start with the government side. We'll do 10-minute rounds.
Mr Terence H. Young (Halton Centre): I'd like to reconfirm what you said. You said you have 3,100 mostly non-profit agencies that deliver the services; $2.1 billion in funding --
Ms Herbert: That go to those agencies.
Mr Young: That go to those agencies. I'd like to ask you, with regard to accountability, how do they report to you? Let me tell you where I'm going with this. Is there any kind of standardized reporting form or do you provide them with a software program or do they all use a similar software program so that you can look at financial benchmarks on operating costs, and then also the performance measures as well, so you'd have an apples-to-apples comparison? I know that might not always be possible, because each community differs and the needs they serve differ. But, for instance, children's aid societies would be similar, at least there would be many similarities in each community.
So what I'm wondering about is the operational cost -- how do you measure it and is it standardized? -- and then, on the delivery of services, how you're improving it to make sure they're getting the absolutely best services for the dollar.
Ms Herbert: All our transfer payment agencies have a service contract with the ministry. That's a standard contract that outlines their obligations to the ministry and the ministry's obligations to them. Included as part of the contractual obligation is financial reporting on a quarterly basis. As well, because we have now in place an information system across the province, it enables us to take that information and roll it up to head office. That's a fairly recent achievement.
Mr Young: Could you describe how that works, please?
Ms Herbert: What would happen is that an agency would send its reporting into the area office, which would then input it into the information system.
Mr Young: So it's still done on paper?
Ms Herbert: Yes. Our intention, and we're exploring this, is to see if we can't do it by software. Our first goal was to try and get the ministry's internal information system organized.
Mr Young: How are you doing with that?
Ms Herbert: Well, it's been introduced this year and it has the usual, normal bugs you get when you put a brand-new information system in place, but it appears to be working.
What I would have to tell the committee, though, and I would have to tell you in response to your question, what we haven't done and what we're working on is standardized benchmarks for costs. We've done substantial work in child welfare and we've looked at other jurisdictions across the country and across the United States to see what some benchmarks are that we might use in child welfare. We just recently received approval to take out a new funding formula, based on benchmarks, to the children's aid societies. It'll probably take us a couple of years to roll it out. Then we will be able to answer the question you have asked, which is, can you compare apples to apples?
Mr Young: Let me give you an example. There's one children's aid society I know of that at one point had signed a lease which in a former economy, seven, eight or nine years ago, was probably the going rate for rent. But as the taxpayers told all levels of government, "We don't have any more money, so you've got to look for better ways to do things." In looking at it, it seemed very high. Then they couldn't get out of it; they'd signed a five-year contract.
I'm wondering, is there a time when you get your directors together, just to pick children's aid societies, but not only them, and share ideas so that you have not just benchmarking but best practices for a whole range of administrative things? Is there a time when that happens?
Ms Herbert: The ministry, and usually the provincial organization that supports it -- so if we use the children's aid societies, there's an association of children's aid societies for Ontario. What we would do is sit down together. The directors of CASs meet at least once a year and often twice a year. The ministry is invited to those sessions and there we do some best-practice sharing. Certainly in the development of the benchmarks for CASs, that work has been done with the CASs. They have an advisory committee that advises us on that.
Where we would propose to go, if I can use your administrative example, is that we would set a cap for administrative costs and then what we would do is allow the CASs, within that defined administrative benchmark, to choose how they spent that money on their administrative costs. Some may put more money into leases and less into software. But what we want to be clear on is what amount of money the province is prepared to spend for administration and what a clear definition of administration is.
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Mr Young: That's on the administrative side. On the service delivery side, how are you improving service delivery and accountability for service delivery?
Ms Herbert: Two ways. The province, when it was clear that the children's aid societies were not meeting their service demands, immediately announced $15 million, which in essence translates into about 220 new staff across the province. That's been under way for some time; the allocation of that money is out and societies are hiring their staff. The government also announced in the budget, over three years, $170 million which will go out to the children's aid societies for a variety of purposes.
In putting that money out, what we're going to use are the new benchmarks. There, what we've done is looked at what's adequate: case load ratios; what are adequate foster care rates; what are benchmarks that will improve the system and allow some consistency both in service levels and in funding benchmarks across the province.
Mr Marcel Beaubien (Lambton): Thank you very much for your presentation. I'm glad to see that you mentioned standardizing of benchmarks for costs. You did not talk about it during your presentation, but in the discussion with Mr Young you brought it to the fore. I want to direct my question with regard to residential care. Whether it's low, medium or high service, we have a wide range of daily costs for care. Why?
Ms Herbert: There are probably two main reasons I can give you. One is history. If you started your program in the days when there was lots of money and there always appeared to be lots of money, that became what we would call your historical base funding. Depending on when you came into the system and established your program, you might have had a more generous allocation of funding. On the other hand, there is a legitimate and wide-ranging level of support that individuals need, so programs designed for different levels will receive different levels of funding.
I think the problem the ministry's been struggling with is, how do we know in a more clear and scientific, if I might use that word, as opposed to instinctive, approach to how you set those budget levels, how you measure hours of care, staff costs, staff salaries?
We've been working very hard, particularly in the developmental services area, to establish what we call levels of support that will give us some opportunity to measure the support an individual needs and then apply a costing factor to it. Once we have that tool in place it will allow us to more rationally move money around the system. As we develop new community-based programs, because the government is reinvesting its money from the closure of institutions into the community, we'll have a better rational decision-making process for budgeting.
Mr Beaubien: It's a personal observation on my behalf, I guess, but I have an agency in my constituency that has been doing a very good job for a long time, and the community and I think an awful lot of people would vouch for that. I agree with your assessment of why we have a difference in costs: probably habit and when the system was started. But this particular agency always seems to be under the gun by the regional office or from your ministry. I think they're very cost-effective and they provide a very good level of service. I think sometimes they are an embarrassment to other agencies because they provide the service at less than half the cost that many other agencies provide the same service somewhere else.
We also have a study with regard to one-stop access to services, which I'm very supportive of, which makes an awful lot of sense. But when we're looking at residential care in the ministry and the experts tell us they're trying to get the young person, and I'm not talking about healthy babies here, I'm talking about young adults, to reconnect with their family, what I have difficulty understanding -- because I am not a social worker and I'm not a social expert; however, I think I'm a reasonable person -- is in many cases there's no family to connect with, yet the ministry wants to reduce the residential care. It is a known fact that young male adults offend at twice the rate young female adults do, at least by today's standards. Yet they want to reduce the number of residential care beds in the community for young males and young females to the same level. Can you explain that to me? What is the rationale behind that?
Ms Herbert: I'm going to ask Kevin to respond to that.
Mr Kevin Costante: Part of the rationale is that we find that residential care in terms of dollars per day is the most expensive type of assistance or support that we can provide to young people. When we're trying to reduce the number of beds, it is really to move that money more into community supports to provide assistance to a larger number of young people. So it's really trying to stretch the dollars and also trying to deal with them in their own community in a much more inclusive way that maintains them there as opposed to having them put into more expensive residential care. Obviously that's not a 100% solution; you have to have a mix of both. It's trying to find that right balance that we always struggle with.
The Vice-Chair: We're running out of time. We have to go to the Liberal caucus. Did you get an answer to your question, Mr Beaubien?
Mr Beaubien: I'll come back next time around.
Mr Jean-Marc Lalonde (Prescott and Russell): Thank you again for coming down to explain to us in more detail the changes that happen in your program. I will have to leave pretty shortly because I have to speak on the next bill, but I do have a few questions.
You mentioned, Ms Herbert, that you have standardized the benchmark and also that you're using a funding formula. My question is, when you standardize the benchmark, are you taking into consideration the rural areas vis-à-vis the urban sector? Because if we look at the CAC, for example, it would require for the same number of pupils, the same number of children that you have to take care of, a lot more social workers to work with those people because of the travelling they have to do. If I look in my riding, for example, but it's the same up north and in other areas, the employees might spend a couple of hours on the road before they reach the homes of those people. Have you taken this into consideration?
Ms Herbert: What we're looking at is a range within each benchmark. We recognize, particularly in northern Ontario and large rural jurisdictions, that the time of travel and the cost of travel are factors. So as we look at each benchmark, there will be a range of benchmarks. In fact my ADM, who is responsible for operations, has on his plate right now a task to look at the cost factors between rural jurisdictions and urban jurisdictions. We are aware of that issue and trying to build it in.
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Mr Lalonde: I'm glad you mentioned this, because when I look at the Ministry of Education, they have completely forgotten to look at it. When it comes to looking at space availability for children in the classroom, the standards are the same in the urban area as they are for the rural area. So they have to take into consideration the travelling.
It was also mentioned that you have 31 non-profit agencies. Not to go into detail, but is it possible to send to our office a list of those agencies that you recognize?
Ms Herbert: It was 3,100 transfer payment agencies, and we do keep a regular mailing list. If you would like that, we can provide it.
Mr Lalonde: My last question before I go into the House is, I was told just a couple weeks ago of some changes that your ministry came up with, especially in the FBA. The employees were advised on June 2 that the changes were happening, and it took effect on June 1. I don't know how you channel the information to the agencies or to the municipalities. This is creating a real headache not to only the social workers but also to the constituents.
Ms Herbert: I assume we're talking about the proclamation of our new legislation, which came on June 1, the Ontario Disability Support Program Act. That act has been in the House and under way, I guess, for about the last year. There was substantial training done in the months of April and May, and there were communication packages that were sent out during that same time period. I certainly don't doubt that what the workers told you was correct. I would hope that's a glitch and I would be pleased to follow up if you have the locations.
Mr Lalonde: The people who had applied to be recognized under the FBA program had received notice on May 29, for example, that they had to appear in front of a committee or board on June 10. Everything was settled, they had everything in writing and all of a sudden they find out after June 2 that this does not apply any more, that they have to wait until they get their forms from your ministry here in Toronto and it's not to be handled by the municipality any more. Was there no flexibility in this case, the fact that the families were advised prior to June 1 that they had to appear?
Ms Herbert: If this was around an appeal for their family benefits, people who appealed before the act was actually proclaimed will be heard under the old tribunal system. If they appealed after June 1, they will be heard under the new tribunal system. So there is an ability to, we use the term "grandfather" the cases that were coming forward under the old legislation, so we will slowly close out those people who are in that appeal system. I don't know if I'm exactly answering your question, though.
Mr Lalonde: In this case it was not going to the appeal board; it was just that they were called in to be interviewed to see if they qualified. But prior to going over there they had to have a doctor's examination and everything. So this whole process has to be done over again, and it's costing money not to the government but to the applicant.
Ms Herbert: It would really depend on the date they actually filled out their application form and the referral took place. If it came in before the proclamation of the act, they would be treated under the old legislation. If their application was taken after June 1, they would be treated under the new legislation. So it really comes down to the date their application was taken.
Mr Lalonde: Sorry if I have to rush, because as I say I've got to speak in the House. There's more than one family who received confirmation that to qualify under FBA they had to appear in front of this board or committee that you had formed, or an employee. The form was accepted and the constituents received a letter that they had to appear on June 10 -- it was not the appeal -- to see if they would qualify under the system.
Ms Herbert: We're just conferring here, because the only other board might be the medical adjudication unit. If you would like to give us the details, or send the details to my office, I'll be glad to follow up. We're just not quite sure of the circumstance.
Mr Lalonde: We have more than one. If I just pick up your card before I leave --
Ms Herbert: Yes.
Mr Lalonde: Sorry, Mr Chair. Someone is supposed to be replacing me.
The Vice-Chair: You're the whip.
Ms Shelley Martel (Sudbury East): I would like to take a look at the area of service outcomes and then from there that association with how you develop a level of funding. You specifically mentioned that you had been doing work in the developmental service area where you're starting to look at the levels of support, what level is needed and how you apply your funding tool to that.
If I can use a specific example, I suspect all of us have been lobbied by the Association for Community Living because they had, at least up until a few months ago, some serious concerns with the framework that you've outlined in your new policy. I met twice with our association, both in Sudbury and in my own constituency, and also received letters from the provincial organization. My concern is the setting of appropriate outcomes and whether or not what is being asked of people with respect to this particular area is appropriate.
The argument I was given is that the board felt very clearly that part of their level of funding was to be looking at whether their clients were improving, where they were using fewer services as an outcome. Their argument to us was: "These are clients who are not going to improve in any significant way, shape or form. We may be able to get them into day programs, although we have waiting lists, but to all intents and purposes if the client group were to measure an outcome based on a decreased level of service, or that somehow they're going to be able to improve, is just not an appropriate outcome. So if funding is linked to that, they're going to lose all the way around."
Maybe you can explain to me what's happening in the area because I know the letters I saw from the provincial organization expressed similar concerns and you said earlier that you are trying to work with the TPAs involved to sort this out. But if that's the problem that you're having with community living, do you not anticipate having similar problems when you're looking at outcomes, be it for young offenders, be it for any number of the other transfer agencies that you deal with?
Ms Herbert: I'll make a few comments, and then Kevin may have something to add. This is a very sensitive area; there is no doubt about it. Where in this province there has been the most measurement of care needs has been in the long-term-care area measuring what are care needs for the formulation of per diem rates.
In the developmental services sector, they feel that the measurement of illness, if you like, how much care you need from an illness perspective, higher care meaning you're more ill, is inappropriate, because they feel that people with disabilities shouldn't be treated as if they're ill. We've been struggling to find a way to measure care needs without casting it as an illness. If you cast it as lifelong support and look for outcomes which measure wellness, it does carry you down the track of looking to see how people are improving with their care.
The ministry's intention is not to use the levels of support tool to take money away, but it is the ministry's intention to look at a way, to go back to the previous question, that we can more adequately see how money is being spent and for whom. We may have in parts of the province people who are receiving, if I can use an example, 24-hour care because they moved out of institutions in the mid-1960s and late 1960s when we thought that people who moved out of institutions could only live in group homes. What we know now is that many of those individuals can live quite happily with support in independent living.
There's a real need to look at who is getting service where in the province. Unfortunately, back when we started this process, we did try to measure what the associations would call illness -- if I can use some examples, toileting and bladder control, all those measurements of how much staff time you need -- and the associations were very clear that they thought that was inappropriate. That's about the time you probably received your letters.
What we've done since then is meet with them and try to come up with other measures that both adequately describe the level of care that individuals need and also recognize that people need lifelong support and the support will change at different points in their life and also that are sensitive to building a level of support that's based on a medical model as opposed to based on a wellness model. So we are struggling with how to ascribe this.
Then, of course, associations are nervous that perhaps this means that some of their money might go to another association that has a higher level of support requirements. It makes people anxious. Our intent right now is just to get a picture of who is receiving service at what level in the province.
Mr Costante: I don't know if there's much more I can add to that. We've had several meetings with the group that includes OACL, and there's a lot more work to do. They've been long, hard meetings, as they've been described to me.
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Ms Martel: Further to that and following up from where my colleague Mr Lalonde was, how do you take into account what might be very varying levels of ancillary services? For example, if we are dealing with clients of the Ontario Association for Community Living, they would have adults in their care who also have behavioural problems and there are efforts being made to access services in the community, that is going to be more difficult, depending on where those clients are being served. If that's folded in as part of an outcome, that also causes a problem. You have a great difference in terms of waiting lists and people's ability to access service. Is that also being folded in in terms of what you're looking at as an outcome?
Mr Costante: Part of the struggle is to try to keep the discussion around levels of care measurement really on the residential component, because, you're right, all of the other support pieces, psychiatric, medical, can all be very different and infinitely complex. So it's to try to separate those out, and sometimes that's difficult, but that's the process we go through so that you've put a box around the things you're trying to measure and don't get into a whole bunch of other disciplines that have their own measurements and varying weights that need to be added to it.
Ms Martel: Am I safe in saying that the framework end is not in effect at this point in time?
Mr Costante: We're in essentially a consultative process, having shared with them some of the outcomes of some earlier work we'd done. We're trying to work out with, in this case, the developmental services sector something that everyone can agree on. There's a lot of buy-in for it. That's the stage we're at.
Ms Martel: In the same way, under developmental services, a comment struck me earlier with respect to youth crime and looking at recidivism rates as an outcome. Can you just explain to me further what you're looking at in this?
Ms Herbert: The ministry has had a lot of activity under way in the last four or five years on the young offender system, looking at best practices and research about what works to reduce youth crime and what works to keep people only at the very front door of the young offender system and not into the more intrusive parts of the young offender system, like secure custody.
While we've been doing a lot of research and a lot of program planning, what we haven't been able to do is measure whether kids come back into the criminal system once they've left. This is true, actually, across the country, that we've been unable to measure whether our programs are successful, because we haven't been able to measure whether kids turn back up on a charge when they're 18 as opposed to when they're 14, because we can only follow the system through to a certain point.
We're part of a national research study looking at establishing a way to measure recidivism. Then we can actually see whether our program assumptions are correct, that if you work with young offenders in a particular way or if they're sentenced in a particular way, that will have an impact on whether they're going to reoffend or not reoffend. So we've been doing a fair amount of good research, and then as a performance measure in our public business plan we've committed to being able to measure recidivism in Ontario.
Ms Martel: When you're dealing with your transfer payment agencies, in terms of both reconciliation measures and trying to look at governance and other accountability questions, who has responsibility, is it the director in the area office, to deal with the transfer payment agencies and their jurisdiction with respect to reconciliation and other governance issues, or do you have dedicated staff in the ministry or another part of the ministry to look at that, and how many?
Ms Herbert: In the particular case of reconciliations, the area offices are accountable for doing the reconciliations. They report their reconciliation results to Kevin, as the ADM of the program management division. As well, at head office we keep a group of staff who have some expertise in this area to help the area offices. But the primary locus of responsibility is at the area office.
Mr Beaubien: I'd like to go back to residential care. It's interesting that you mentioned in your reply to Ms Martel's question that you don't have any way of measuring whether the young person reoffends or gets back into the system down the road. I want to tie this back to my earlier question on residential care. I agree with the system you're trying to introduce to reconnect the young person to the family. It's got a lot of merit. However, what I have an awful lot of difficulty rationalizing is getting rid of the residential care or some of the residential care level that we are providing now when we have not measured the output or we have no indication of what the output is.
If we look at what has happened in the States -- I met with a social worker, who happens to be a PhD, by the way, from Tennessee -- apparently in the States, at least in Tennessee, they tried this exercise of trying to connect the young person to the family, but they did not reduce the level of residential care they had at that time. Why is it that we in Ontario want to follow this process but we are reducing the number of residential care beds?
I agree it's expensive, and I don't know what "expensive" means, but if looking after a kid is costing $80 a day and we're doing a good job with that person, I'm willing to pay that. I may not be willing to pay $250 a day, but some residential care facilities can provide it at $80 a day. Can you explain that to me?
Ms Herbert: I think the key question is always, what's the right service for this child that will ensure that they become productive adults and reduce their future cost to the taxpayer? For some children, residential care is the right option, there's no doubt about it. For other children, it has not proved to be effective. Through research and clinical practice, it's important that we're matching the right kids with the right program, or what happens is that you may have someone in an expensive program for whom you're paying high cost just to contain them, not to reconnect them, not to make them productive citizens but just to keep them somewhere. On the other hand, you might put a child in a program like that and it really helps them and is exactly what they need to help them grow up healthier than they were when they went into the program. Really the question is a match.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, residential care was thought to be the panacea; it would solve all problems. Take kids away from their families, put them in group homes, and somehow by paying staff and having a psychiatrist you'll make them better. We know now, through practice and through research, that it's not a panacea. It works with some children but not with all children.
The real question is, what's the right balance at the right cost? The ministry is struggling with the answer to that question. We do believe, as Kevin has said, that it's time to begin to shift the residential system, which grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and begin to shift some of those costs to prevention and early intervention, to move money into serving those kids when they're younger in the hopes that they'll never need high-cost, expensive residential care.
I don't know the particular circumstances in your community, and it does vary by community across the province, but that's the approach we're taking generally.
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Mr Beaubien: I agree it's difficult, and I don't want to zero in on one particular agency, because I have discussed this with the director. You're trying to get the proper match, and we have low, medium and high care. But then when you talk to directors of the facility, and I'm only going by the information I'm given, they say, "The kids we handle here are basically at the same level of that other facility."
Why I'm a real stickler on this one is because your ministry, in my region, is trying to cut the residential care at $80 a day, but the ones at $180 to $250 a day remain untouched. I have difficulty -- I'll buy your argument on this side of the equation, but why is it that the argument doesn't apply on the other side of the equation?
Ms Herbert: Just to go back to establishing levels of support, the picture that you painted is exactly why we need to have a levels-of-support benchmark, so that we can begin to measure why there are cost differences and why they are legitimate or not. There may some very real and very legitimate reasons why some programs are more expensive than others. It would have to do with the nature of the child and also what the clinical support costs are that are built in to serve that child.
At this point the ministry may know -- I think the Provincial Auditor would say this, if I can pretend to be the Provincial Auditor for a minute -- that what the ministry doesn't have is a system which is rational and explainable beyond history and what the area office can describe as the program elements. We need to be better able to describe the level of support and how it matches the child's needs, and that's the piece of work we have under way right now.
Mr Beaubien: Basically you're telling me you're realizing that measuring the output, the results at the end of the day, must come to the fore.
Ms Herbert: Exactly.
Mr Beaubien: Another quick question, if I may. When you're talking about the standard risk model for children handled by the children's aid society, as Mr Lalonde pointed out, are there different standards or criteria for rural as opposed to urban, or are they all treated the same way?
Ms Herbert: The risk assessment model has just been introduced and is used in all CASs across the province. It allows for some room for worker judgement, which we would all want to have, but it prompts the worker to ask and assess the same questions and the same environmental issues standards across the province. It will tease out regional differences. There are differences, for example in a risk assessment, if you were doing it on a first nations community north of Red Lake, than you might in Chatham or in Windsor. So there are some differences brought to bear, but generally the risk assessment tool is the same across the province.
Mr Young: I saw on the news last night there was a protest. Some OPSEU workers were protesting, and I understand there was a press conference yesterday. What they were protesting was a proposal for alternative service delivery plans for young offenders facilities. I know that a lot of the unionized workers provide excellent service and excellent care, and there are others who may not be in unions who could also do the same, but I think the issue is the standards, and you set the standards. I would like to know what you're doing to establish the standards so that any young people served in the new model will be served as well or better.
Ms Herbert: I'll let Kevin describe the standards to you. I would just say that in our secure custody system the ministry has directly provided some programs with its own staff and then we have had transfer payment agencies provide the same program in other parts of the province. We've had what we call a mixed system -- the same program, admittance through the court proceedings -- but roughly half of them have been run by the ministry and half of them by transfer payment agencies.
Having said that, Kevin, you may want to talk a little bit about standard setting.
Mr Costante: First of all, as Sue said, we demand the same standards of our own directly operated facilities as we would demand of the transfer payment operators. Essentially we want to make sure they're in compliance with the legislation, in this case the Child and Family Services Act. As well, we have a young offenders' manual that lays out a number of policies that we expect each operator and our own agencies to follow, things like standards around programs and services, security, staffing, safety and emergency procedures, and policies around behavioural intervention. Those are all laid out in a fair amount of detail. We expect each agency to comply with those standards and go beyond if they wish.
Mr Young: How do you enforce the standards?
Mr Costante: Essentially, we have an annual licensing process and we have program supervisors who deal on a regular basis with those.
Mr Young: Do they talk to them? Do they go into the facilities and walk around?
Mr Costante: Yes.
Mr Young: Do they do that sporadically? Do they just drop in, or do they make an appointment and go and see them on their best day?
Mr Costante: It's done on a regular basis. It can be a mix of sporadic and on an appointment basis.
Mr Young: Let me just tell you why I'm concerned. During the OPSEU strike I went to Syl Apps because children had been locked in their cells for two days, only allowed out to go to the washroom. That portion of the strike internally was actually quite illegal. I'm very concerned about this. I think you have to drop in. I think you have to surprise facilities. Would you agree?
Mr Costante: Yes, I would agree.
Mr Michael A. Brown (Algoma-Manitoulin): I'm also interested in some of these direct accountability issues, particularly around volunteer boards. Volunteer boards are great things, with people interested in the community who serve on them, but it's been my experience they're not always broadly based in the community and that uncharitable people might even refer to them as almost private clubs. They often reflect a very small number of people and the organizations often have a very small number of actual members and often don't seem very interested in recruiting broadly in the community.
I'm just wondering, does the ministry have any kinds of criteria relating to these not-for-profit organizations that provide service to make sure their membership and their boards are reflective of the broader community?
Ms Herbert: First of all, all the boards of course have to meet the Corporations Act, and for those that are not-for-profit, most of them generally have to meet the federal requirements for charitable organizations.
The ministry has been struggling to find the right balance between the independence of boards and the desire to keep them community-based for all the reasons you outlined, and at the same time make sure that boards represent their communities and understand their role as boards to govern the programs. In the children's aid example that I used, there we are going to prescribe some more stringent requirements around community representation and the nature of expertise that's required on a board that is in the child protection business.
We also have what I would call some best-practice requirements that we suggest boards use. The United Way has very good board development programs and we've encouraged our agencies to use the United Way board development programs. It is a struggle to find the right balance. Our belief is that if we can be clear with boards about what we expect around board training and about community membership, and then if we're clear about what we expect them to govern and what the outcome and benchmarks of the program should be, that whole package would be a good balance between our need to have them represent their communities and our need to have them deliver programs, but you raise a good point, particularly for small agencies.
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Mr Michael Brown: It's not just small agencies. I represent geographically a very large chunk of the province of Ontario. You will find, for various reasons, that certain agencies are fairly broad-based geographically where others seem to be, for whatever reason, fairly narrowly geographically based.
I have an example which happens not to be in your area but in the Ministry of Health, where recently a volunteer board, who are unpaid and are all good folks, were electing their board of directors. In this instance, they had not done much of a job of recruiting members, and one geographic portion of the area decided that they were quite miffed they had no representation and sold a lot of memberships.
The ensuing angst at the board that they may be taken over -- I presume what happened is they got very excited about the fact they might be taken over by a relatively small geographic area -- resulted in the executive director making a number of phone calls and disallowing quite a number of memberships and that sort of thing. This was in health, but it could have been in your ministry just as easily.
I sometimes come back to that: Is this a private club? How do we broaden the base? Do you have criteria? You suggested you encourage, but do you have criteria that say, "Look, you really have to actively recruit people to be members"? Because most of these agencies do have a strong interest across the community and yet often don't, in my experience.
Ms Herbert: We do not at this point prescribe membership as part of our contractual relationship with boards.
Mr Michael Brown: So there's not a strict accountability in terms of --
Ms Herbert: I think we have been keeping our focus on making sure that boards have the right expertise to govern their programs, and then, the other side, were they delivering value for the dollars and the service outcomes that we were demanding? Those have been the two pieces that we have been concentrating on.
Mr Michael Brown: My own view is that part of that is making sure they're broadly enough based that the community will enforce some of that.
Ms Herbert: That's a good point.
Mr Michael Brown: Micromanaging from your point of view is impossible; otherwise, you'd just do it yourself. What you need, if you wish to maintain standards -- the province obviously does not have enough people going in to inspect and probably never could under any circumstances, but particularly now. The way you will get reasonable standards is at the community level where they actually know what's going on in their own communities.
Ms Herbert: Yes. The element of a board's accountability to its own community is a very important accountability measure. I agree with you.
Mr Michael Brown: Is the ministry considering any kind of minimum number, a percentage of population or some kind of criteria to make sure? My experience is they can always get members. The problem is, most people don't even know that you can become a member.
Ms Herbert: In the CAS, the child welfare area, which is where we're doing the most work on boards right now, that's one of the elements we have under consideration. In our whole attempt to grapple with governance and accountability, we have really focused on starting on child welfare first and then on levels of support in the disability area. What we do in those two program areas will then pull out to the rest of our programs, so we are looking at what we need to have prescribed in boards in the child welfare area.
Mr Michael Brown: Given that often the agencies we are concerned with deal with our children, are you satisfied that your internal mechanisms for determining outcomes are satisfactory both from the point of view of value for money and from the point of view of optimizing the outcome for children, which isn't always the same?
Ms Herbert: I don't know whether it's a career-limiting move for a deputy to directly answer a question like that, though what I would tell you is, no, I'm not satisfied. I think we have a lot of work to do in the ministry. I think we've made a really good start. The Provincial Auditor's report was very helpful, but we have some measure to go before we get there. Where we're furthest along is in child welfare and in our services to people with disabilities, both of which are our largest program budget areas, but we have not covered all the bases, and that's what we're working towards.
Ms Martel: Let me follow up on that point, because it brings me back to a concern that the auditor raised in terms of their overall audit observations. You made it clear to the committee that the greatest amount of work that has been done around governance and accountability comes in developmental services and child welfare. I think that some of the work you're doing in child welfare is not driven so much by the auditor's report as by the results of the inquests, which is fair enough.
Having said that, it appears that a large number of transfer agencies that you have -- in the other areas there's been very little work done, or some work done, but certainly not all the work that needs to be done. In what areas, then, is the ministry looking to either outsource or privatize?
The reason I ask the question, because it also came from the auditor's report, is, if that's where the ministry is heading in other areas where some of this important work has to be done, how would I have any comfort at all that the public dollar is going to be spent any better?
Ms Herbert: The ministry has announced that it is going to what we call alternative service delivery in the young offender secure custody area, which is the question that was asked earlier. The other area that's been under way for some time, for 20 years in fact, is the closing of our large facilities for the developmentally handicapped, who are moving out into the community. The government is reinvesting the dollars that it takes to run institutions and putting those out into community programs, primarily residential supports. That's one of the reasons we've been working hard on levels of support in the developmental services sector. Those are the two areas where the ministry has been moving out of its own directly operated services and into community-based programs.
Ms Martel: In terms of your mix for the residential support, what is your mix of non-profit agencies providing residential service and for-profit agencies providing residential service? Is that a fair question?
Mr Costante: This is off the top of my head, so give or take a few. I think of the 103 or 104 young offenders facilities that we have -- that's both open and secure -- around a dozen are for-profit and the rest are all not-for-profit, with the exception of seven that are directly run by the province. So seven run by the province, about a dozen by for-profit, and the rest are all transfer payment non-profit agencies.
Ms Martel: What about on the side of developmental services? You talked about the ministry closing --
Mr Costante: I'm not aware of any, but we could check.
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Ms Martel: So at this point I would have no reason to be concerned yet about what's happening on the residential side for developmental clients. But on the young offenders side, I didn't get a sense that clearly a lot of work had been done. We talked about the need to have outcomes actually measured around recidivism etc. Why would the ministry be making any move to outsource in that area when, from what I've gathered here today, some of the important issues around outcomes, accountability and governance are not really resolved?
Ms Herbert: The ministry's business plan talks about the ministry's desire to move out of direct delivery as a long-term goal. In the young offender area we had been, my guess would be, for about the last 12 or 14 years moving our young offender system to a community-based system. In the previous administration that initiative was stopped. So this is kind of a historical movement because of the ministry's belief that it shouldn't be in the direct delivery business any longer. Also the philosophy that the ministry has had over many years is that programs can be run and are better held accountable in the communities than they are directly run in large settings by the government.
It's been a long-term approach that the ministry has taken. Our young offender system is for 12- to 16-year-olds, and we've long wanted to make sure that the system was tied to the children's services system world, which the ministry does not directly run, rather than to a more traditional correctional model. Part of the ministry's thinking was that you needed to tie our community-based young offender programs to the children's community and keep those kids close to home. It's been a long-term kind of philosophical approach that the ministry has taken.
Kevin, I don't know if you want to go back to how we're managing the standards. This is one program where we really do have province-wide standards. We have one provincial director who manages the placement of children. It is a tightly managed program with a legislative and directive system.
Mr Costante: I spoke about that in my earlier comments.
Ms Martel: Can you tell me how many inspectors the ministry has to deal with transfer payment agencies?
Ms Herbert: We have several kinds. We have licensing officers, and I can't -- unless, Peter, you can pull a number out, my numbers gentleman here. We have licensing officers across the province who licence a differing number of programs and then we have program supervisors. Those would be our primary monitors in the community.
I'm sorry. I'm unable to give them to you off the top of my head, but we can provide that to you.
Ms Martel: I would be interested in having a sense of -- I'm assuming your program supervisors actually go into facilities as well?
Ms Herbert: Yes.
Ms Martel: So both sets.
Ms Herbert: Yes.
Ms Martel: That would be interesting, because then we could have some sense of that number compared to 34,000 TPAs and what the likelihood realistically is of what kind of inspection level you can maintain given those numbers.
The final question that I have has to do with the Management Board directive around transfer payment accountability. We were told earlier by the auditor's staff that they have been able to have some input into the development of the new directive, which it appears will be tighter than the one that has been in place since 1989. Can you give the committee some sense of what areas will be tightened up with respect to what you've been doing or matching your work against now, which is a 1989 document?
Ms Herbert: I'm just looking back. I actually had this earmarked in my speech and I decided you would probably be bored if I read you back the accountability initiative, so I'm just flipping back to that section in my speech.
I think what the accountability directive really pushes us harder on is benchmarking, and benchmarking in soft services. We recently completed a review of North American jurisdictions to see what other people had already developed in benchmarking in human services, because if there were some good ideas out there, we didn't want to have to spend a lot of time creating them. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of measurement of outcomes; there is a lot of measurement of process. I think that's really the challenge that the new accountability directive is going to push us on.
If I can go back to the young offender example, we can measure how many children we have in the young offender system. We can measure how in our small system they come in and out. We can measure whether their program is a good program or not, but we can't tell you whether it has an impact on keeping them out.
It's the same if we talk about children's programs. Does having a child in a residential program have an impact on the quality of their later life? It's those kinds of benchmarks, outcomes for dollars, that are very difficult for us to measure and that we're really struggling with. I'm hopeful, though. There's a lot of dialogue going on about this, certainly in the province of Ontario, and across Canada. I'm hopeful we're going to develop some very key outcomes. The trick is to not develop the wrong ones, but to develop some very key outcomes in our program areas. We've tried in our public business plan to be clear about what those outcomes will be. But it is a struggle.
Mr Joseph N. Tascona (Simcoe Centre): There's been a lot of concern about the child protection system in Ontario lately, poor information sharing, increasing caseloads, children at risk while they're in the care of children's aid societies. What is the ministry doing to make sure that the children's aid societies do what they're supposed to do, which is to protect children?
Ms Herbert: The most significant item that has been introduced across the province is the standard risk assessment model, so that we're measuring adequately whether children are at risk or not. As well, we've provided more front-line staff. We have a massive training program under way for front-line children's aid society workers right now.
The government has just announced that it will be looking to see whether it needs to change the legislation, the Child and Family Services Act, to better protect children, particularly in the area of the definition of "neglect." The act does not define "neglect" and there have been, over the years since the act came into place, a number of judicial decisions which have made it more difficult for societies to judge neglect. The ministry commissioned three reports, one a legislative report that was chaired by Judge Hatton to look at the legislation and make recommendations to the ministry. Judge Hatton's report does indeed recommend that we do legislative change and my minister has been clear that she's prepared to look at legislative change.
We also commissioned a report that looked at the ministry and whether the ministry was doing its job in monitoring CASs. That report makes a number of recommendations about how the ministry needs to improve its own capacity and ability to monitor CASs. We'll be undertaking that work in the fall.
As well, we reviewed in about six weeks' time -- we put four teams of child welfare experts together who went out and did a case file audit on 3,000 files across the province to tell us whether CASs were managing their mandate in the meantime, until we could get all the reforms in place. That review revealed that 86% of the standards were met, but it made some recommendations for further improvement, so we're following up on that as well.
Mr Tascona: With respect to neglect, would there be any changes in terms of the outcomes or remedies with respect to that?
Ms Herbert: Yes. We're doing our policy work now obviously around how one might do definitions. We'll do some consultation with the CASs and other interested parties about whether we've got the definition correct and then we'll have to go back and see if that changes our benchmarks in any way.
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Mr John L. Parker (York East): I'd like to ask you about the issue of alternative service delivery. We've heard a lot about this, not only in this ministry but other ministries as well. It goes by various names, in some cases "privatization" or "outsourcing." Bob Rae used the expression, "Governments have to get out of the business of rowing the boat and concentrate on their main job, which is steering the boat." That's a concept that certainly I endorse. I think it has strong support, not only across Ontario but throughout the western world, as governments have found that they've got too deeply involved in actually delivering every last aspect of service. They've found that has interfered with their ability to direct policy and make changes in policy as new needs and challenges are identified and as flaws in the old ways are found.
I personally see that as the right way to go. I'm interested in your comments on initiatives your ministry has undertaken in that direction. In particular, my concern is, as we go down that road, and I think that's a road governments inevitably must go down, how can we ensure that quality control is maintained, and how can you at the steering end ensure that you maintain guaranteed quality and standards of service as you move to outside agencies delivering services?
Ms Herbert: In the scenario you describe there's no doubt, if we are going to steer and not row, that what becomes really important is that we have the right accountability system in place. Otherwise, we're measuring the wrong things or we're not measuring at all and we can't provide some sense of quality assurance.
I think we would come at it in two different ways in our ministry. One is to ensure we have the right outcome measurements, that we have the right benchmarks established. But then we want to make sure we have the right monitoring procedures in place. In the different transfer payment services we fund, we need to make sure that the monitoring mechanisms fit the nature of the service. In child protection, for example, which is one of the most crucial areas in the province in terms of wanting to make sure the CASs are doing their jobs, we might have a much more intrusive monitoring system than perhaps in a program that we might fund on a partial basis that has fewer safety and security issues around it.
We've also got to figure out the right monitoring mechanism to fit the program. We actually believe that we have a good continuum of monitoring mechanisms to be put in place, depending on the nature of the program. For example, in child care we license. In our children's group homes we license. In our child welfare area we're going to prescribe a new set of monitoring activities. We have to be able to describe what the service is that we're buying and how we want it to be delivered, and then we have to prescribe the right set of monitoring techniques.
Mr Parker: Are there any particular initiatives to increase accountability and establish more quantitative performance measures that you've already undertaken in this area since the last time you reported to this committee?
Ms Herbert: In presenting today, we've probably covered most of them. I would also say, because we haven't talked about this, that we've also done some work in our family violence area, our shelters for women and families who suffer from family violence, again looking at benchmarks and outcomes, and looking at some new reporting requirements in that program area as well. That's probably the one area I didn't cover in my earlier comments.
The Vice-Chair: Deputy, do you see how quickly time passes when you're having fun? I want to thank you, and your staff as well, on behalf of the committee members for joining us. We look forward to future follow-up.
Committee members, the research officer has asked for some guidance in the report and the report-writing phase. Do you have any initial thoughts? Do you want to make a comment on this?
Ms Elaine Campbell: Depending on the committee's response to my initial question, there may only be one question. I was wondering if it was the committee's wish that I spend time over the summer preparing a draft report for consideration early next fall.
The Vice-Chair: Sure.
Ms Campbell: Do I have some time to ask a few more questions?
The Vice-Chair: Yes, go ahead.
Ms Campbell: Since it is the committee's wish, I would like to remind you just what we've done since February. We looked at six individual sections of the auditor's 1997 annual report. Four of those were done in February and March, when there was a chance to spend some time discussing what might go in a final report. We also had time to develop questions and send those questions to the individual ministries. Those responses have all been received and have been circulated to the members of the committee.
I think there was only one response in which a ministry said they would be getting back with further information. That was in the Ministry of Health with respect to public health. They were going to be providing some information in November, I believe, on immunization rates.
We've done two more sections of the auditor's report this month. There was no opportunity for discussion about a general direction after those sessions. We've also looked at part 5 of the auditor's report, which discussed accounts receivable activity. That's when we looked at the Central Collection Service. We spent one meeting looking at the 1996-97 public accounts and the reporting of contingency funds with the Ministry of Finance. Then last week after the discussion about the Ministry of the Environment's conservation and prevention division, the auditor made a brief presentation on his recent report on the year 2000 and the millennium bug, which leads to my next question: Would you want all of these activities covered in the report?
Mr Young: How many pages are you talking about, Elaine?
Ms Campbell: I hope it's shorter than last year's report.
Mr Young: How long was last year's report?
Ms Campbell: We did 13 sections of the auditor's report last year and I think it ended up being 80 pages at the end.
Mr Young: I think there should be reporting covering the areas. I don't want to give you direction on how much detail should be there, because you're the best person to judge that.
Ms Campbell: One thing I could do in the draft is incorporate a series of questions at relevant spots within the body where I ask for more direction from the committee members and whether there should be a greater focus on one area than another.
Mr Young: What do you think, Shelley?
Ms Martel: It seems to me that whatever we've got done we should do. Part of the problem last year was that a big chunk of the report was not timely because it had gone on for so long. It's far better for us to do what we have than to hold these until we get some more stuff in the fall.
Ms Campbell: Just a few more questions. I would suggest using the revised background notes format for the introduction to each of the sections. With respect to the body, I was wondering if I should focus on those particular aspects of the auditor's report which were actually discussed in the committee, or should I stick to what was said in the basic background notes, supplementing that with the discussion from each of the sessions with ministry staff?
Mr Young: I would prefer that you supplement it with discussions of what came up.
Ms Campbell: So talk about everything that was covered in the auditor's report very briefly.
Mr Young: Mike, are you okay with that?
Mr Michael Brown: Yes.
Ms Campbell: As I've mentioned before, I'll put questions in the draft. I am also wondering if it might be possible in terms of overall organization to follow some of the suggestions the auditor had when he was presenting the contents of his report to the committee and the subcommittee in terms of theme. I think it would be very easy to organize the various sections under specific themes so the report might flow a bit better and it might be a little easier to make specific points as well. Some of the themes the auditor had used were the transfer payment accountability, managing provincial finances and transfer of delivery.
Just a few more things. Is it the committee's wish that I put some possible draft recommendations in the body of the paper?
Mr Young: Sure.
Ms Campbell: When would the members like to receive the draft, in early September?
Mr Young: What was the timing last year? I wasn't here last year.
Ms Campbell: Last year it dragged on for quite a while. I think we actually started discussions in mid-May, after the break in May, and we didn't really get around to discussing the final report until September, but we were looking at sections of it. I think we had been through pretty well everything a second time by the end of June and we just had a bit of work to do on the assistive devices section that we did last which took a bit more time.
Mr Young: What's your view, Shelley?
The Vice-Chair: Some time in September?
Ms Campbell: I could get it out in early September.
The Vice-Chair: September would be fine, I think.
Mr Young: Mike?
Mr Michael Brown: September.
Ms Campbell: Thank you very much.
The Vice-Chair: Okay, we are adjourned.
The committee adjourned at 1200.