Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for having invited us today. It is my pleasure to tell you about our database.
The expenditure database was released in April. I'm just going to do a quick demonstration of the features that are available within the database and describe the information that is also available there.
Before we start, though, please keep in mind that the information you're going to see is all available publicly, either in public accounts or in departmental quarterly financial reports, so there's nothing secret about it.
The expenditure database is hosted on the Treasury Board website. If you are searching for it as a member of Parliament or the public, the easiest way to find it is through Google: just Google the expenditure database and it should be the top hit on most computers. Once you click on the link from Google, it will bring you to this web page here, with the Treasury Board of Canada's website.
You'll see here on the landing page that there's a brief overview of how to navigate the expenditure database, and from there you can just select this link to pick the government organization that you would like to look at.
Users can search for organizations using a number of means, either by selecting from a list of ministries and the organizations that fall within them or by selecting from alphabetical lists or a list of organizations by the magnitude of their expenditures. Alternately, you can use the same Google search feature that you might be familiar with. In this case, we'll select Indian and Northern Affairs Canada—and I'll just select it here. We're going to use this organization as the organization to demonstrate the features for the entire presentation today.
Once you arrive at the web page for Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada, you're presented with some quick summary information. There's some non-financial information about the organization, the legal title, who the responsible minister is, and also a bit about the mandate of the organization.
If you look on the right-hand side, you'll see other organizations that fall within the same ministry.
Scrolling down, you're presented with several panels of financial information. This is a quick summary to give you a flavour of the operational results of the organization.
As you'll see, for current year information, 2013-14 in this case, we've taken information from quarterly financial reports to present current year authorities and to show, in this case, what has been provided through main estimates and supplementary estimates (A). As well, we have the statement of authorities and expenditures, as reported in quarterly financial reports, and expenditures by standard object.
Just to give an example, if we click on the details of the statement of authorities and expenditures, it will take you to the familiar header, and scrolling down provides you with a bit more information about exactly what is shown within this page.
Where it becomes more interesting, though, is below, where we present a graphical presentation of exactly what the department's expenditures looked like by the different types of voted or statutory expenditures. You'll see in the case of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada that grants and contributions are the largest portion of the department's expenditures, whereas there are others here that you can also explore.
Beyond the graphical presentation, we give you the goods. We give you the data in a form where you can compare the actual operating results as presented in the quarterly financial reports.
In this case, if you were to take an example of the operating results for this department, you could compare immediately the 2013-14 results to the 2012-13 results and see that there was quite an increase, from about $1.16 billion last year to $1.4 billion this year. So it begs the question immediately, what happened here? It gives you an indication of something important that has changed in the financials.
That's the power of this information. It presents you immediately with the financial results, and then, at the same time, you can, within the same page, scroll up to the actual quarterly financial results and click on that to be brought to the department's own report, for additional context. In this case, if you search through the quarterly financial report, you'll find context about that increase. In this case, there is a table that will detail all of these specific elements that resulted in the operating variance year to year.
I won't dwell on that. I'm going to go back to our original set of financial summary panels. You'll see that was the current year financial information. We also present historical financial information. In this case, I'm going to show an example of expenditures by program. This is a topic that is quite popular in terms of financial and operating results. By clicking on the details for this tab here, we're again brought to the same header, with some brief information about the department, a description of what expenditures by programs actually mean, and then a few interesting graphics that are also searchable here. These graphics provide you with a quick look at the trend for any particular program you're interested in. In this case, I'll search for one related to education, and you'll see there is one result here and it provides you with the trend of expenditures for this department on education. You'll see that's quite steady over the past three years.
Similarly, we provide the data table that underlies all of these graphics, and you'll see that for Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada there is quite a list of programs. You can get the straight data here, which is also available through open data, for further analysis.
Going back once again to our financial panels, I'd like to show that we also have started adding selected topics for additional detail. In this case, we have added in transfer payments, which is information recently released by Public Works and Government Services Canada in a very useful electronic format. If we select the details for these programs here, we're brought again to a further graphical presentation of expenditures by transfer payments, by fiscal year. As you see, you can select any fiscal year that you're interested in, and there is a quick graphical summary of those expenditures by fiscal year.
Similarly, you can search for a specific transfer payment within this tool. Let's say we would like to look at residential schools. There are actually quite a number of transfer payments related to this, so selecting one you can see immediately what the total budgetary authority was for these transfer payments and what the expenditures are related to those. If you wish to look only at either the total budgetary or the expenditures, you can click to de-select or focus on only one of them at a time. Similarly, the data table is available below with all of these.
One feature that I would like to highlight, just in bringing this to a close, is the expenditures by program. Under the details for expenditures by program, there is a feature we built into the expenditure database that allows you to compare programs that are similarly named across government. By scrolling to the data table at the bottom, the example I like to choose is for internal services, because it has often been reported in the press.
By clicking on internal services for 2011-12, you will see that a table is brought up that shows the expenditures of that department on internal services within the context of all departments reporting internal services for the government. By scrolling to the bottom, you can get a government total for spending on internal services.
Now, this is very interesting, as far as an analytical tool goes, because that total is not provided somewhere in the Public Accounts of Canada. We have taken the labour away from having to add up all of those items individually, and with a click you can get that information at a Government of Canada level.
With that, my demonstration is concluded, and I would like to turn it back to Mr. Matthews.
