Association of Canadian Archivists

Notes for an address by Sheila Fraser, FCA, Auditor General of Canada, 28 May 2004, Montreal, Quebec

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Good afternoon everyone. I am delighted to address this conference for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it gives me a chance to acknowledge the role of the Association of Canadian Archivists. The ACA and its members have worked hard to preserve Canada’s precious archival resources and to promote greater awareness about the importance of our published heritage. I want to commend you on all your efforts to date.

I’m also pleased to be here because it gives me a chance to talk about a theme that is very close to my heart: the role that records and information play in promoting good governance and accountability.

It’s quite a simple equation, really. Poor management of records and information jeopardizes the government’s ability to manage for results, to report effectively on its performance and to preserve Canada’s legacy and heritage.

What to do about it, of course, is more complex. I don’t have any easy answers, but I’d like to offer a few thoughts today.

Let me start by suggesting that auditors and archivists have more in common than might be obvious at first glance. Perhaps we are even kindred spirits of a sort?

The fact is that good information and records are the lifeblood for both our professions. We simply have a different relationship to them and use them for different ends.

Whereas archivists select information for its historical and cultural value, auditors look for information that can provide evidence of management decisions.

And whereas archivists are concerned about preserving our heritage, auditors are concerned with trying to give assurances of good governance and accountability.

Both professions use rigorous methodologies based on information and documentation. Both archivists and auditors apply professional judgement to make decisions or to give opinions.

All of us need reliable, complete and authentic information if we are to realize our mandates.

There are times, also, when our work intersects. I’ll speak more about this in a few minutes when I look at how well the government is protecting our cultural legacy and heritage.

So, today I would like to look at some of the larger issues connected to information management and accountability.

I’ll give several examples of how poor records and documentation and lack of information have hindered us in our job as auditors.

I’ll also look at how well the government is protecting our cultural heritage and legacy.

Finally, I’ll wrap up with some thoughts about the new Management of Government Information policy, and how archivists, in particular, can help ensure this policy lives up to its potential.

Let me begin, however, with a brief overview of the Office of the Auditor General.

Office of the Auditor General

The Office has been around a long time. In fact, last year we celebrated our 125^th anniversary. That makes us almost as old as Canada itself.

By the way, if you’re in the National Archives, you might come across reports from our third Auditor General, John Fraser.

It’s a common name, but in fact, he was my grandfather’s cousin. Despite appearances, when I set out to study accounting, I never dreamed that I would be carrying on a family tradition!

As you can imagine, the job has changed a lot since John Fraser’s day. In the past, governments focussed their attention on what they spent, what they did and what they produced.

Those first Auditors General, for example, would list every government transaction—right down to the purchase of bootlaces. Those old reports, I understand, could be more than 2,000 pages long.

Today, it is the job of the Auditor General to provide parliamentarians with independent and objective information that helps them decide whether or not government programs are being managed with due regard to giving Canadians value for their tax dollars.

With a budget of some $70 million and some 600 staff, my Office audits most areas of the Canadian government.

In addition to the federal government, which includes about 70 departments and agencies, we also audit about 40 Crown corporations (such as CBC, VIA Rail and Farm Credit Canada ), about 10 departmental corporations and some 60 other organizations.

As a point of comparison, nearly all federal departments and agencies—about 170—are subject to the National Archives of Canada Act.

We also audit the governments of Nunavut , the Yukon and the Northwest Territories as well as some 15 territorial agencies. And we audit two United Nations agencies, including UNESCO.

We do two basic types of auditing—the first is the more well-known financial type, also known as “attest” auditing, and the second is called performance auditing, which you may have heard called value-for-money auditing.

Despite the impression that tends to be conveyed by the media, our mission in life is not to expose government waste and mismanagement—the so-called boondoggles.

At the end of the day, we want our audits to contribute to better-managed government programs and improved government accountability.

But we don’t go through government departments with a fine-toothed comb, looking for signs of squandered money. Nor do we begin audits with an eye to confirming suspected flaws or weaknesses, as some people think.

We approach our selection of performance audits strategically and make our choices based on risk, relevance and significance.

In performance audits, we go beyond the numbers to ask whether government programs were being managed with due regard to economy and efficiency, and with measures in place to determine effectiveness.

Many people don’t realize that performance auditing includes auditing environmental issues—in fact, our Office is a world leader in that area.

This role dates back to 1995 when Parliament created the position of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development within the Office of Auditor General. Today, the position is held by Johanne Gélinas.

Along with her team, she audits how well the federal government is doing in meeting its commitments to sustainable development. Like me, she reports to Parliament on her findings.

Every year we conduct some 30 performance audits of departments and agencies, but if we can’t find and access the right information to complete our audits, the system breaks down. I’d like to talk for a minute about our experience as auditors here.

Our experience as auditors

As I said, our job is to give parliamentarians independent and objective information that helps them hold the government accountable for how it spends public money.

Time and time again, our reports have raised issues related to the quality and completeness of information provided by the government.

In the last few years, there have been a couple of glaring cases where gaps in vital information have stymied our work.

First, there was our audit of how the government managed three contracts with Groupaction, which led to our broader audit of the sponsorship program, advertising activities and public opinion research. Second, there was our audit of the Canadian Firearms Program.

I’ll talk about each in turn.

Groupaction and the Sponsorship Program

Between 1996 and 1999, Public Works and Government Services Canada signed three contracts worth $1.6 million with an advertising firm known as Groupaction. The Minister of the department asked us to do an audit.

We found the contracts so poorly documented that we could not answer key questions. We could not determine how the contractor was selected. Nor could we identify how the government established the price and the terms of reference.

I have to say that this was the most extreme case of missing records that we had ever seen at the Office.

I want to stress, however, that this is not at all typical of how public servants operate.

Following this audit, we launched audits of the Sponsorship Program and federal advertising activities. I’m sure you’ve all heard quite a bit about this in the media. Let me address what we expected to find in the file as auditors.

We expected to find a complete paper trail, including records of decisions, approvals, options considered and contract amendments.

And as you no doubt know, we were disappointed to say the least.

The documentation in the files was poor on two counts. First, in many files there was no analysis of why sponsorship funding was provided to a given event. There was no evidence of value received for the money spent. Nor was there documentation of the results.

Second, in many files we did not see adequate support for the invoices that were paid. There was, in general, little evidence to support the amounts paid. This is a bit like receiving your monthly credit card statement with a total and no details.

Canadian Firearms Program

Our audit of the Canadian Firearms Program, which appeared in my December 2002 report, also attracted a lot of media coverage.

I’m sure you remember hearing about how the program’s costs had escalated dramatically, and apparently, out of control.

While that was bad enough, I was more disturbed by our conclusion—that the Department of Justice did not provide Parliament with sufficient information to allow it effectively to scrutinize the program, to ensure accountability.

It provided little financial information and insufficient explanations for the dramatic increase in the cost of the program.

Ultimately, when our initial review indicated significant shortcomings in the information provided to us, we decided to halt our audit.

Both these audits illustrate the importance of good information and underscore two issues that my Office is deeply concerned about.

The first is that the lack of proper documentation of day-to-day decision-making about the spending of public funds hinders the assessment of those decisions and thus accountability for those decisions.

Without the documentation, we can go only so far as auditors. We can’t provide the assurances and information that Parliament needs to hold government accountable. As a result, our democratic process suffers, and Canadians—sometimes quite literally—pay the price.

The audit of the Canadian Firearms program also points to a broader issue. Lack of sound information on spending, results and performance by programs and departments seriously impedes the ability of Parliament to scrutinize and oversee the expenditure of public funds.

Clearly, if we want improved accountability and transparency, information is crucial.

And it goes even further than that.

Good management of records and information is vital to good governance. It is vital to managing for results. Yet such a vital asset is not always well-managed and well-protected.

Canada’s National Archivist, Dr. Ian Wilson, has remarked on numerous occasions that weak information management is undermining the ability of the Government of Canada to achieve its goals.

He believes that programs as varied as economic development, environmental protection, health and national security may be at risk.

In his final report to Parliament in 2001, my predecessor, Denis Desautels, referred to “the poor quality of records kept in departments.”

My colleague, John Reid, Canada’s Information Commissioner, has gone even further, referring to the “abysmal state of records management in the federal government.”

The emergence of ICTs

Before I talk about our recent audit of the protection of Canada’s cultural heritage, I think it’s important to mention the phenomenal growth of information and communications technologies. This has revolutionized government operations and will continue to do so.

A recent study showed that, worldwide, we are producing nearly double the amount of paper documents in 2003 than we did even in 1999. E-mail now ranks just behind the telephone in terms of traffic. And the information available on the Internet has tripled during the same period.

But there’s a downside. Every day, public servants cope with an overwhelming variety and volume of e-mails, documents, records and files. In each case, they have to decide what’s important and what’s not.

Emerging technologies are capturing information about us electronically like never before. Will our current privacy laws be sufficient? Will we need more controls, more awareness and more consent? Especially given the unprecedented information-sharing taking place through the Government On-line initiative.

At the same time, the new technologies are whetting the public’s appetite for more and better information.

It’s important to recognize that these changes took place in a context of government restructuring and downsizing. Both Mr. Desautels and Mr. Reid have pointed out that administrative cuts in the 1990s were disproportionately hard on records management.

The cuts reduced the number of information handlers, librarians, records clerks and filing secretaries. In so doing, it placed the onus of information management on the shoulders of individual public servants.

Our growing reliance on information and communications technologies and so-called e-governance puts a lot of pressure on public servants.

Instead of sitting in central repositories, records and data are being stored on hard drives or in the heads of thousands of public servants.

Will the right information be available when it’s needed? Can it be captured in the first place if we don’t have knowledgeable people in charge?

Lawyers and other professionals, as well as archivists, are concerned about whether electronic records can be preserved over the long-term.

In an era where decisions get made on BlackBerry handhelds and over mobile phones, the paper trail —which is hard enough to follow at the best of times—is vanishing before our very eyes.

This hinders the public’s ability to access information, a department’s ability to keep track of decisions and to improve performance, and the ability of my Office to conduct effective audits.

As you can imagine, when we do audits, we ask a lot of questions. Many of them are pretty basic questions about the way programs function. We are often surprised at how difficult it is to get the answers.

In fact, this electronic revolution has raised new difficulties and risks for managers and professionals. Those of us who see information as an important asset and want to protect it know that, too often, it is simply deleted as trash.

It is of vital importance that we put in place or reinforce frameworks that tell people how to manage, classify and keep information. We need this so we can rebalance the system to compensate for technological change and the growing number of retirements from the public service.

Without reliable records, we won’t be able to reconstruct the past or understand policy decisions. We risk reinventing the wheel, and quite possibly, repeating past mistakes.

Protecting our legacy and heritage

I would like to turn now to an area of special interest to the ACA, and to me: the chapter of our November 2003 report that focussed on the federal government’s protection of Canada’s cultural heritage.

Our audit focussed on built, archival and published heritage, as well as some collections of federal departments. We found that this heritage has been exposed to serious risks of loss. I’ll give you three examples:

• The National Archives has trouble identifying and collecting documents of historic value;

• More than 90 percent of the National Library of Canada’s collections are housed in buildings with sub-standard conditions for temperature and humidity; and

• More than two-thirds of national historic sites administered by Parks Canada and federal heritage buildings are showing signs of deterioration.

I don’t have to tell you that once a piece of our history is lost, it’s lost forever. If nothing is done, future generations may not have access to key parts of their heritage, or they may have to shoulder higher costs to preserve them.

We identified a number of factors responsible for this state of affairs:

• the continual growth of heritage assets;
• fewer resources available to protect our heritage;
• inadequate information about the condition of the heritage assets;
• inadequate facilities;
• weaknesses in the protection practices of some organizations; and, finally,
• weaknesses in the legal frameworks for protection.

It will not be enough to throw resources at the problems on an ad hoc basis. Our heritage continues to increase, while our resources to protect them are ever more limited. The time has come for a more strategic and global approach for the protection of our cultural heritage.

I would like to focus now on our findings related to archival material.

As you know, the archival heritage protection regime for federal documents has three main stakeholders:

• The Treasury Board Secretariat establishes the federal government’s information management policy;
• Federal departments and agencies apply the information management policy and manage their own records; and
• The National Archives of Canada identifies federal government documents of historic value, preserves them, and helps people access them. The National Archives also has a mandate to facilitate sound management of federal departments’ and agencies’ records, which is a key prerequisite to the Archives’ effective acquisition of records of historic value.

The strength of the protection regime depends on the ability of the three stakeholders to work together. They need to ensure that the information management policy and the National Archivist’s guidelines on records disposal are applied effectively.

As ACA members know, the National Archivist has the power, through a so-called records disposition authority, to determine which records have historic value. He or she can call for the government department or agency to transfer those records to the National Archives when it no longer needs them. This is the theory.

Despite all the efforts by the National Archives, our audit found that the records disposition authorities regime is not working as well as it could. There are three reasons for this:

• First, there is limited coverage by the records disposition authorities.
• Second, many authorities are obsolete.
• And third, departments and agencies do not respect the schedules for records retentions.

The use of inaccurate or inappropriate authorities seriously undermines the ability of the National Archives to fulfil its mandate. It creates the potential for incorrect identification of records of historic value, the destruction of valuable records, and the use of too many resources, both time and space. It also hinders the access of Canadians to these records.

The Archives has tried to modernize the regime for more than 12 years with limited success. It now recognizes that this is a crisis situation, and that the crisis is far from being resolved.

Over the past few years, the Archives has taken leadership on several initiatives to support the Treasury Board Secretariat, as well as departments and agencies, to manage information and electronic records. However, it has not yet been able to analyze whether it can provide all of the support and coaching they need.

The draft of the joint work plan developed in June 2003 with the Treasury Board Secretariat identifies an impressive array of tools to be developed and validated.

Carrying out these projects will require numerous resources that the Archives has not yet estimated. Over the next few years, these tasks will increase the already large workload needed to upgrade the records disposition authorities’ regime.

Our audit also showed that the National Archives does not have specific information on the nature or condition of archival records kept on departmental premises or in the federal records centres. It knows the general condition of its holdings.

However, it does not report on what proportion of the collections is threatened by acidification and what measures are to be taken to ensure their longevity.

As a result, the Archives cannot provide information on the magnitude of this problem or on the progress made in processing the records and the work that remains to be done. Given the lack of such information, it is difficult to establish relevant protection plans with adequate resources.

I know that all these observations will come as no surprise to archivists, regardless of where you work in the public sector.

Reasons for optimism

So what’s the answer? There are no quick fixes, but there are good reasons for optimism.

Several recent initiatives are assessing the government’s capacity to manage records and information. Let me touch on them briefly.

In 2003, National Archives decided to use a new way to appraise public records. It plans to revoke all records disposition authorities now in effect, and replace them with more comprehensive, flexible ones that are centred on the important functions of departments.

Departments are showing interest in adapting the Financial Capability Model, which was developed by my Office, to assess the maturity of records management systems in government.

My Office has also worked with the National Archives to develop the Information Management Capacity Check. Treasury Board has recognized this as an important management tool.

Finally, there is Treasury Board’s Management of Government Information policy, which is one-year-old this month. The policy seeks to ensure that information under the federal government’s control is managed effectively and efficiently throughout its life cycle.

Significantly, it encourages the use of electronic systems to manage information. And it puts individual public servants in charge of information management.

This policy has implications for archivists that go far beyond the preservation of cultural heritage.

Under the policy, the National Archives is responsible for identifying, selecting, acquiring and preserving government records. Information specialists, including archivists, have been tasked with providing tools, advice and guidelines to help all public servants manage information effectively. This is imperative.

As I said earlier, public servants desperately need these tools. With this new policy, they must document their activities and decisions, and apply information management principles, standards and practices. These new responsibilities, coupled with the reality of electronic record keeping, pose a huge challenge.

It will take a major cultural shift in the public service for this policy to take hold. It needs champions who understand the importance of records management, both for the preservation of our cultural heritage and to protect governance.

I can think of no other group so well placed or so well qualified for the job than Canada’s archivists.

Conclusion

So let me end my remarks today by inviting—no, urging—members of the ACA to rise to the challenge.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve tried to show there is a vital relationship between information management, governance and accountability.

In the first place, public service managers need quality information to manage and parliamentarians need quality information to provide oversight. And both auditors and archivists need quality information to do our jobs effectively.

By supporting accountability, transparency and the protection of the public interest, my Office aims to help build stronger public institutions, a better country and a healthier democratic society.

We can’t do it alone. We need your help. And by helping us, you can help yourselves.

Working with the National Archives, you can help develop new tools for preserving, and managing, information. With your experience and expertise, you can make public servants, and all Canadians, more aware of the value of archival records to our heritage.

I urge you to build capacity at senior levels of government with respect to information management.

I urge you to develop ways to verify the accuracy of digital records, which are becoming ever more important.

I urge you to help monitor the new records disposition authorities to make sure they live up to their potential.

I urge you to continue building relationships with your clients in government, so you can better know their needs, expectations and constraints.

I urge you to be more accountable by communicating to Parliament the results you can achieve and the state of the current situation and what needs to be done.

I urge you to take leadership in all these areas now. Time is growing short. You, more than anyone, know that our cultural heritage is at great risk.

When future historians may look back on Canada’s archival material, I want them to look kindly upon us. I want them to know that we did our best in the early 21^st century under difficult conditions.

More than that, I want them to be inspired by our diligence, our commitment to finding workable solutions, our understanding that when we lose our heritage, we lose part of ourselves.

Thank you very much. I wish you all a productive and enjoyable conference.