Government Operations Committee on Nov. 20th, 2012

[Bill Matthews]

I'll start and then turn to my colleague.

That figure covers some infrastructure-type funding around actually getting water conditions improved. The Health Canada piece is around water quality monitoring as well as some education in the communities themselves to do some teaching on monitoring water quality, to raise awareness, and those types of things.

Whether it covers the full spectrum of what you've asked for, I'm not quite certain. Sally, do you want to add anything on that?

[Sally Thornton]

Basically it's to focus on the capital construction and on operation and maintenance of on-reserve water and waste water facilities. Upgrading of infrastructure is done through the contribution agreements with first nations.

The focus of this one, though, is really much more on training operators and increasing the number of trainers going on site and mentoring than on the legislation. This is about the infrastructure.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

In other words, it doesn't cover that undertaking to negotiate the regulation?

[Sally Thornton]

The funds in these supplementary estimates do not.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you very much, Linda.

Next, for the Conservatives, we have Bernard Trottier.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for coming in today.

I was just looking at the 2011-12 departmental performance reports. In there you cite the report on plans and priorities, but it's just in the 2011-12 report on plans and priorities that you mention priorities 1 and 2. The top two priorities out of five are, number one, to support the government in ensuring value for money and sound financial management, and, number two, to advance initiatives to modernize government operations.

Are those still the top two priorities within the Treasury Board Secretariat?

[Alister Smith]

Well, yes, our priority, I think, is still to support the government in becoming leaner and more efficient, containing costs, modernizing processes, and strengthening our management.

The comprehensive review of spending was one element of that, but there's a much broader agenda to modernize and make more efficient all of our government processes, under which we refer to some of our own internal processes that we are trying to streamline and improve.

Mr. Cannan mentioned the subcommittee on government administration, which is also engaged in trying to find more efficient ways of doing business as a government. These remain high priorities for us.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

One group that we've had in this committee in the past year is Shared Services Canada, which represents a major horizontal approach to government that's being implemented. It's not listed within the supplementary estimates as a horizontal item—

[Alister Smith]

No.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

—but I think it is a horizontal construct within the federal government. Is Shared Services Canada having an impact today, this year? It's gone beyond planning, and it's actually implementing things that are driving efficiencies across government ministries and departments.

[Alister Smith]

Absolutely.

As you know, Shared Services Canada consolidates a number of very crucial back-office IT elements for us: email systems, data centres, networks. Resources have been transferred to create the organization. The organization has been stood up and is engaged in improving all of those areas of government.

It's a long-term plan, of course, to consolidate and standardize our IT systems and back-office functions, but it's a very good example of the kind of efficiency and modernization measures that the government's taking.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Is the implementation of some of those Shared Services Canada initiatives reflected in some of the head count and payroll items within the supplementary estimates?

[Alister Smith]

Well, indeed, modernizing and reducing unnecessary operational spending does require better IT in general and better business processes as well, which underlie IT, so without something like Shared Services Canada, I think you would be at a disadvantage. It certainly will provide a good basis for further modernization of all those back-office processes. There's no question.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Beyond information technology and information services, and I suppose some of the contracts that are out there, and some of the real estate, are there further business processes that the Treasury Board Secretariat is looking to consolidate across departments? I think of things like accounts payable and other back-office things that don't necessarily affect front-line services to citizens. What kinds of initiatives are you looking at within the Treasury Board Secretariat?

[Alister Smith]

I think that's an important point. These don't affect services to Canadians directly, although a more efficient government will provide better services to Canadians down the road, but certainly there are many ways in which we can continue to improve some of our internal processes.

I mentioned this common human resource business process. It's very important to be able to standardize the way you do HR management across government. It becomes easier to transfer employees and to have common approaches to staffing and classification and recruitment. It's the same thing on the finance side and the same thing on the financial systems side. It's the same in other areas as well.

There are a lot of ways in which we can become more efficient and a lot of ways in which we can improve business processes. We can continue to make economies in travel. We can make better use of video conferencing. We can undertake a large number of other useful reforms to standardize, consolidate, and improve the efficiency of government.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

The supplementary estimates focus on the inputs, i.e., the costs. The other important and critical part of the ledger is the outputs and services that the Treasury Board Secretariat is able to provide. What's your quick summary of the services you're able to provide despite some reductions on the input side?

[Alister Smith]

Well, as a central agency, we work with other departments in the approvals of their spending and in the authorities they require for contracting and other things. In that sense, we can improve the services we provide to other departments by being more efficient internally.

Christine mentioned some of the efficiencies that she has introduced in her sector, and Sally and Bill in their sector. They work with departments. All of that makes government more efficient, and therefore, one hopes, provides more efficient services to the public as well.

Sally may want to add something.

[Sally Thornton]

Mr. Smith mentioned financial systems. The upcoming potential to have clustering and sharing of services in financial systems goes right back to your report on the scrutiny of estimates and recommendation 2. The timing is perfect. If we can get in and leverage the ongoing work to centralize, upgrade, and consolidate financial systems, that will seriously make a positive impact and enable us to better meet the change in vote structure.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Bernard.

Thank you, Ms. Thornton.

I think it's nice that people actually make reference to the recommendations of our committee report. They are not only aware of it, but they can cite references and sources. It's heartening.

John McCallum is next.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.

I think there was perhaps a lack of clarity in my question the last time. When I was talking about cuts in program sub-activities, I meant to be referring to Treasury Board itself, and not to the whole of government.

I notice from your website that you do show expenditure reductions for five very broad frameworks or policy areas: management framework, people framework, expenditure management, financial management, and internal services. If one wants to do a meaningful analysis of where the expenditure reductions have come, this doesn't really get us anywhere, because it's so broad as to be virtually meaningless in terms of any kind of analysis.

My question to you is whether you can provide us with information at a more disaggregated level by sub-activity. Can you take each of those five areas and break them down into smaller chunks so that we can better understand what is going on?

[Alister Smith]

As you mention, we show those reductions in terms of our program activity areas, so you're right: that's a more general category. For example, that's expenditure management in Bill's and Sally's area or on the financial management side. Within those areas, yes, there are multiple sub-areas, which is where we do actually bring into play these new processes that I was discussing earlier.

Christine can provide you with some examples on just what we have been trying to do within the corporate services side.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

But my question is whether you cannot give us examples—give us dollar numbers—of cuts by sub-activity within each of those large categories.

[Alister Smith]

We generally have not asked departments, and that would include ourselves, to break it down in that way. We have mainly worked up to the program activity area with the reductions in each of those general areas within our organization, so it's a little bit difficult to provide that level of detail. We're talking about thousands of sub-activity areas within government—thousands—and that's part of the difficulty.

I also would mention that when you're changing a process, especially at that level of granularity, you're changing several subprogram areas. If Christine brings in a new process for streamlining our accounts payable within the organization, she may be affecting three or four different sub-areas.