The influential House of Commons public accounts committee has chastised Agriculture Canada for what it says is a 20-year history of ignoring recommendations to develop a better way to evaluate the effectiveness of its farm income support programs.
“The committee is concerned that the department has not learned lessons from previous income support programs when it introduces new programs,” the all-party committee said in a late-June report tabled in Parliament.
It recommended that at the end of each program’s life, a thorough evaluation of impacts, successes and failures be done and published so the same flaws are not built into successor programs.
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The committee noted that Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization and many of its successor programs have been criticized for late payment delivery and the frustration caused to farmers and their accountants because they are unable to predict how much the program will pay out.
MPs on the committee suggested that after 70 years of experience designing and delivering farm support programs, the department should have gotten it right by now.
“(Agriculture Canada) has been supporting producers with income support programs since the 1930s,” said the report.
“However, as the auditor general has pointed out in numerous audit chapters, the department has not managed these income support programs in the most effective ways.”
MPs also criticized the department because it had not punished five CAIS employees who were found to be in a potential conflict of interest because they worked on their own time preparing CAIS application forms for farmers.
When she appeared before the committee April 1, deputy agriculture minister Yaprak Baltacioglu faced a barrage of hostile and impatient questions from MPs who complained that senior departmental managers did not act quickly enough when they became aware of the problem.
“The committee was greatly disturbed to learn that the conflict of interest provisions of the Values and Ethic Code were violated in the processing of CAIS applications,” the report said.
“The committee was more disturbed, however, to learn that even after the audit discovered that some CAIS employees were found to be in violation (of the ethics code), they were not sanctioned in any way.”
Some of the most fiery questions from MPs were about whether CAIS files handled by the employees had been audited.
Baltacioglu later wrote the Commons committee promising that the files would be “segregated and revalidated to ensure they were processed appropriately and according to program rules.”
The report praised her promises but also asked that the department report back to the committee on the results of the re-evaluation.
