Organization Overview

> Organization Overview

Vision
Working together to make it happen.
Mission
We thrive on helping governments by delivering impartial and professional conference services, with innovative solutions.

Mandate

The Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat (CICS) is an impartial agency whose mandate is to provide administrative support and planning services for federal-provincial-territorial and provincial-territorial conferences of first ministers, ministers and deputy ministers, throughout Canada.

The Secretariat’s services are available to federal, provincial and territorial government departments that are called upon to organize and chair such meetings.

Being truly intergovernmental in nature, the agency is funded by the federal and provincial governments and its staff is comprised of federal, provincial and territorial public servants.

Photo of a conference room

Objective

Our primary objective is to relieve client departments of the numerous technical and administrative tasks associated with the planning and conducting of multilateral conferences, thereby enabling participants to concentrate on substantive intergovernmental policy issues. CICS provides continuous, effective and impartial administrative support to these meetings.

Core Values

Excellence

We strive to fulfill the requirements of our mandate through teamwork.

Respect

We offer a collegial and rewarding work environment that fosters trust, civility, dignity and fairness.

Integrity

We conduct ourselves in an ethical, honest and transparent manner and with financial probity.

Organizational Structure

The Secretariat is divided into the following sectors:

Serves as the executive office of CICS. Its function is to provide support to the Secretary in her day-to-day activities as the Deputy Head of the agency.
Delivers the agency’s core mandate by providing services and advice to the Chair and Co-Chairs with the planning, organizing and the logistics management related to senior level intergovernmental conferences.
Conference Services personnel are a mix of federal, provincial and/or territorial government employees. Additional personnel such as interpreters, translators, technicians and security guards are contracted to join the teams at each conference site, as required.
Responsible for information management, information technology and library services to the organization. It also maintains a permanent archive of audio-visual records, documents and a selection of photographs from various conferences served by CICS.
Responsible for the agency’s financial, human resources, procurement and security services. This includes providing functional direction and guidance to managers and staff in the delivery of conference services.