Government Operations Committee on Feb. 24th, 2009

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

That's great. Thank you very much.

I see general satisfaction around the table, so if there are no further necessary interventions, we'll conclude this part of the meeting.

I'll thank Ms. Barrados, Mr. Lemaire, Mr. Hunt, and the others for attending. Thank you very much. You're now free to leave the room.

Colleagues, we will continue in open meeting just to deal with some future committee business.

The clerk and research have, as we discussed earlier, arranged future meetings so that Thursday of this week, we will be taking up the issue of small and medium enterprises, SMEs. We have the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Department of Public Works, and the Canadian Business Information Technology Network, sometimes known as CABiNET. They have a window on the procurement of information technology from small enterprises. We will continue with that issue in the following week.

The real question comes up a week Thursday, as we attempt to sink our teeth into the stimulus package issue. I'm of the view that we should not be passive. We should be active, as we initially discussed. I know that the finance committee is reviewing the stimulus package as it relates to Bill C-10. It is there now, and there's nothing we can do about the stimulus contained in Bill C-10. The finance committee, of course, is looking at that, and the roll-out could not possibly occur until the Senate has passed that legislation and we've passed it ourselves. However, there are infrastructure moneys contained within current fiscal year budgets, and I think there are some very legitimate questions that should be asked, and I think the two ministers involved in that...the principal minister would be the minister responsible for infrastructure, whom I believe to be the Minister of Transport.

We've had contact with the office of the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, but in the absence of a committee bestowing an invitation, the minister wouldn't want to devote the time to us. I'm inviting members here to provide a firm invitation to the minister. If the minister declined—and I'm sure he would only do it for good reason—we would be in a position to summon the deputy minister on the same issues, who, one would assume, would be just as informed as the minister on these processes. I'm asking members to consider that and in fact to adopt that course, but there may be some discussion on this from members.

So I'll recognize Mr. Warkentin, who had a comment.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

There was some discussion that a good portion of the stimulus was going to come through infrastructure spending. I know that Transport and Finance have had the opportunity to speak with the Minister of Transport, Mr. Baird. I don't know if at this point, as you pointed out, there's nothing in terms of the entire package. I don't think it's just Transport we had suggested we speak to. We were talking about a whole range of different issues surrounding the issue of this stimulus package. Obviously we don't want to replicate the work of Transport or Finance, but there are the inter-workings of this stimulus spending that we had looked to address.

Obviously you've pointed out that nothing has passed as of yet, but we want to ensure that the infrastructure for accountability is in place. I'm not sure, with the absence of legislation at this point, that there's any hope of getting any answers we don't already know, having seen testimony from Transport or Finance, but there are other mechanisms and things we should look at as we establish the ground rules for this stimulus spending.

I think at this point we might want to speak to anybody from the Auditor General's office, certainly to different departments within government. I'm not sure that now would be the time to bring the transport minister, having heard what he had to say before the transport and finance committees. I'm not sure at this point that there's anything he has to contribute that we haven't heard already.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

What about the status of existing infrastructure moneys that have not moved in this fiscal year? I'm not talking about Bill C-10; I'm talking about some billions of dollars that have been targeted in infrastructure, but for reasons probably unrelated to Ottawa the money hasn't moved—you have provincial governments, municipal governments, agreements in process. I think the committee should want to know where that stuff is. Money that should go out in this fiscal year arguably should not be going out six months from now.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

I appreciate that. I guess that wasn't my understanding of what that date had been set aside for. I realize there are a lot of changes in the dates from what we previously had decided upon. First of all, I think we should get some clarity on that, but I think we want to stick to what the original intent of some of these different discussions was. That's the purpose, Mr. Chair, for what we engaged in the last meeting. I appreciate that you have some difficulty getting witnesses when we have prescribed them, but even today it would have been helpful to have kept this meeting for the date we had intended, because there were many of us who didn't get a hand on this report until yesterday afternoon when we arrived here in Ottawa. I think we should keep to what we had originally planned.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

In fairness to your chair, I had no choice but to make the alteration in the dates. We haven't lost any time on the other. We took what was available and moved it up.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

I appreciate that, but if we could keep things within the context....

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

I've had this public service report on my desk for about three months now. It's been out, but in fairness to members, they couldn't have had much preparation because—

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

We'd left Ottawa then.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you; you're quite right about that.

Any other comments on the future agenda? We're looking at a week Thursday. The subject matter is the stimulus spending.

Madame Hall Findlay.

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you.

I have two quick questions. I don't know that, as government operations, our mandate is to look at all of the stimulus package. I know through the work in Finance that we have actually been doing a lot of that. I think we should make sure we focus our efforts in this committee on those aspects of the stimulus package where government operations are specifically involved.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

And they are.

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

I would suggest then, if we are looking specifically at infrastructure, that there absolutely is a role to look at where the government has not been flowing money to date, because I think that does absolutely affect our concerns about ongoing flow. Having said that, I would not personally recommend asking the minister, because having really received virtually no answer from the minister to the same questions in Finance, my preference would be to have some departmental people who may be more forthcoming. So in areas like infrastructure, we did talk about asset sales, some of the real estate pieces. I think those are important aspects, not specifically of the stimulus package, but of the budget.

I just want to make sure we don't look at our responsibilities being the whole stimulus package. It should be government operations and pieces within it. I would want to put my vote in for not necessarily having the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Now that we know what you don't want to do, I have to know what you do want to do.

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

I said I would recommend, from an infrastructure perspective, because that is a big part of this, that we have people from the department, as opposed to the minister—

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Departmental officials, that's fine. Okay.

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

—who may be able to speak specifically to the flowing of funds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Okay.

Mr. Anders.

[Rob Anders, Conservative, Calgary West, AB]

Mr. Chair, why don't we just call the question? I think the discussion is somewhat moot.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

There isn't a question on the floor yet. I'd love to have one.

Are there any questions? Is there a motion to be proposed? We have a subject for the meeting a week from Thursday. The discussion here indicates that we could call departmental officials from Transport and Infrastructure to outline the progress in the current fiscal year with spending.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Did something change, Chair?

Did we not have a discussion on this in a previous meeting, on the specifics?

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

I thought we had this discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

I think the plan was to have a minister as a witness, and it appears now that the minister not only has indicated that he would prefer not to attend, but also that Ms. Hall Findlay doesn't think the minister is going to be very useful.

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

No, but I thought in our last meeting, where we were talking about future business, we covered a lot of this and the planning and what the subjects should be, and my recollection of the last time we talked about a minister was well before that meeting, and at that meeting it was—

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Good. Therefore, the clerk will know exactly what we're going to do on that Thursday meeting. If you're correct, the clerk will have a record of what we discussed—

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

I wasn't actually taking down the details then—