Highlights of the fall 2014 auditor general report

OTTAWA – Highlights from auditor general Michael Ferguson’s fall 2014 report, released Tuesday:

• Veterans Affairs is not providing veterans with timely access to mental health services; the disability benefits program has a complex and time-consuming application process and some vets are forced to wait as long as eight months to find out if they can receive benefits.
•  Many veterans must endure long delays in obtaining medical and service records from National Defence and long wait times for mental health assessments.

READ MORE: Global News special feature on mental health in the military – Invisible Wounds

• The Nutrition North program, which subsidizes the high cost of healthy food in northern communities, does not properly distribute subsidies or ensure savings are properly passed on to consumers.
• Nutrition North, which was intended to foster healthy eating, also subsidizes foods of dubious health value, such as ice cream, bacon and processed cheese spread.
• It’s impossible to fully assess the effectiveness of $13.9 billion in loans Canada and Ontario provided to Chrysler and GM’s Canadian subsidiaries in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis due to a lack of comprehensive reporting to Parliament.
• Library and Archives Canada doesn’t know which departmental records should either be disposed of or archived, and has a backlog of 98,000 boxes of material waiting to be archived – some of it dating back to 1890 – with no plan for how to deal with it.
• Canada’s national sex offender registry may not include some Canadians convicted of crimes abroad because the RCMP doesn’t have access to Foreign Affairs information on convicts released from prisons in other countries.
• Canada’s reverse-osmosis water purifiers, long a marquee element of the Canadian military’s disaster relief efforts, produced only 65 per cent of projected output in the wake of last year’s Typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines, and only 73 per cent of that was ever distributed.
• The military’s Integrated Relocation Program, which compensates members when their work requires them to move, requires better oversight and review.