Evidence of meeting #40 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was expenditure.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Allen Schick  Distinguished Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, As an Individual
Jack Stilborn  Retired, Library of Parliament, As an Individual

5:20 p.m.

Retired, Library of Parliament, As an Individual

Jack Stilborn

I think there's a valid case for thinking about at least the normal sequence of budget estimates and so on. It's true that especially in a minority environment Parliament becomes a very unpredictable animal indeed. You could have budgets not getting passed. You could have budgets getting passed and then estimates not getting passed. Any number of things could happen.

I don't think there's necessarily one solution to all of those things. Parliament is the master of its business, and if a situation like that arises, then there are ad hoc remedies that are normally put in place to kind of “tide” things along. That's really about the only thing I can....

5:20 p.m.

Conservative

Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON

Okay.

Another witness, John Williams, suggested that we shouldn't try to reconcile budgets with estimates, in the sense that the budget is really a statement of principles, of objectives. It's at a higher level than the estimates are, and we're tying ourselves in knots when we try to tie the two together. I know another congressional system in which they do try to tie them, and I suppose even some Westminster parliaments have tried to do that. The suggestion was just to kind of look beyond it.

Getting back to your point about the incentives, it's the behaviours these engender that are really more important. I like what you had to say about it—let's think about these human beings, whether it's in the government, in the legislative end of it, or in the bureaucracy. What are the motivations that you can kind of instill in people via incentives and then the processes around them?

Can you just talk about this other notion of committees looking at certain spending instead of looking at it in the macro? So instead of looking at a high-level set of estimates, we could focus narrowly on certain programs instead and take more of a sampling approach. Do you think that would be effective? The current process is very high level, and we try to uncover something, but there's really no in-depth analysis in the committees when it comes to the estimates.

5:25 p.m.

Retired, Library of Parliament, As an Individual

Jack Stilborn

In picking a program and studying it in some detail, and it could be a relatively widely skilled program.... The example I just happen to be personally familiar with is a program that seemed to have about nine lives in Canadian governance, called the court challenges program. It kept getting dispatched and then brought back, and so forth.

I had the experience of working for one of the committees that worked on it. What was interesting to me was that it was a very small program. You could actually have all the people who worked in the program come in as witnesses. So the members had a chance to become familiar, in considerable detail, with just who these people were, what they did, how they worked, etc. There seemed to be a lot of interest generated by the fact that we were looking at something small enough that you could actually get your head around it. There is perhaps some merit in finding a program that would be small enough to do that with.

The only offsetting consideration is that it has to be interesting. I had another experience, with the predecessor to this committee. They decided, as part of the 2003 exercise of their report on the estimates process, that they wanted to try looking at a program in detail. They picked the real property program at Public Works. They had officials come in on successive weeks. The members struggled to attend those meetings before long, because they were just boring. There just didn't seem to be anything that interesting there.

It's a real challenge to pick a program, going back again to this motivation issue I talked about. It has to have some political resonance. Otherwise, it's not going to interest you folks, and it's not going to be visible to voters. It's a challenge.

5:25 p.m.

NDP

The Chair NDP Pat Martin

I'm afraid you're well over time, Bernard, but thank you very much.

That actually concludes our list. We're within a minute of our hour being up. I don't know how the members feel. I think maybe we should just thank Mr. Stilborn for his time.

We note, Mr. Stilborn, that you've continued to write and do research on this subject, even into your retirement. We will benefit especially from a paper you've written, “Parliamentary Review of Estimates: Initiatives and Prospects”. We will certainly fold that into our examination of this. We will lean heavily on the work you did with the committee in 2003. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. We'll benefit from many of the recommendations there.

Thank you for the trouble to come in today, Mr. Stilborn. It was a great pleasure to see you again. You had some very interesting remarks.

With that, we are adjourned. Thank you.