Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) Committee on May 30th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

You've left about 30 seconds, Mr. Owen.

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

I'd like you to reinforce that, if you might.

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

Yes, I say that, and I'd be happy to speak a little more about it.

When you grant the Information Commissioner order-making power, you change the dynamics of the relationship with the agencies he's overseeing. On one day of the week, the Information Commissioner would be seeking to persuade people to do what he believes is the right thing to do and release certain information. The next week, he may be ordering them to do it.

Over the years, Commissioner Reid said he gets 95%-plus compliance with requests. It's very high. It's the controversial and difficult cases that get the publicity. In most cases, mediation, persuasion, and publicity work very effectively.

I think there's a false modesty among some commissioners who think they have to have real power. If you give them real power, they can make mistakes; they can order inappropriate actions. Then to whom are they held accountable?

I am a firm believer in the ombudsman model.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Professor Thomas.

Madame Lavallée.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I very much appreciate your presentation and your brief, Mr. Thomas. I would like to have had time to read it carefully and to ask you questions about the information it contains. Unfortunately, this committee is in a rush and the government is trying to get Bill C-2 passed as quickly as possible by speeding up all the procedures.That does not allow us to weigh the consequences and impact of this bill, which seem to us...

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Maybe you could get to your question, Madame Lavallée. This is your preamble to every question. Please get to your question.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Am I not allowed to make as long a preamble as I wish?

[Benoît Sauvageau, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

No, that's a new censure procedure, I think.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I'm very surprised. That is the first time I've been told that I am not allowed to have as long a preamble as I wish. I will nevertheless continue and introduce my subject, so to speak.

You told us that coming after the sponsorship scandal, Bill C-2 perhaps went a little bit too far in the other direction. I would like you to tell us what aspect of Bill C-2 symbolizes this pendulum.

There are also some implications of the bill that should be weighed and we do not have the time to do so. I do not know whether I am allowed to say that we do not have much time to weigh the implications of the bill. Some members of the public service are in fact paralyzed as perhaps are some senior officials who would hesitate to meet with a lobbyist or who would hold informal rather than official meetings, so that they would not be required to provide information.

I would like to hear what you have to say about this, so that Bill C-2 is not just a bill that plays on public perception, but one that introduces a number of new procedures that would really restore public confidence and establish a new culture within government.

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

First, when you introduce a wide-ranging series of changes like this, there undoubtedly will be unforeseen consequences. But you could sit in this room all summer long and probably not predict everything that's going to happen. There will be unintended consequences. It's very hard, and I wish social scientists like yours truly had more wisdom to say how particular changes will reverberate throughout the system, how they'll have impacts throughout the system.

We want a public service that is a learning organization. We want creativity. We want innovation. We want prudent risk-taking. But every time a public servant makes a mistake, if we want to haul them before the committee, or we want to have the Auditor General pounce on them and report it, or we require that deputy ministers not buy their own notebooks to write down notes from their minister and things like that....

I mean, you can go overboard with this. I see the spokespersons for the government saying that they don't want excessive rules. I was a consultant to the chief financial officers association, which has been before this committee, on their most recent volume. I contributed to that. I think you can have excessive amounts of control and the government will never operate perfectly. There will be mistakes.

One of the problems is that we're trying to create a public service culture of prudent risk-taking in a parliamentary culture that is unforgiving in terms of mistakes. Those two cultures don't mesh. There's a tension there. I'm saying, have all the partisan debates you want over legislation and big budget issues, but when it comes to scrutiny of the operations of government, relax the partisanship, or find a higher quality of partisanship, which is more constructive.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

You spoke about a tribunal to protect whistleblowers. I do not want to misinterpret what you said, but I understood that you thought it would be preferable for the Public Service Staff Relations Board to play this role. Did I understand you correctly? Could you go into more detail on this subject please?

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

This is not as well informed an answer as I would like to give. It partly comes out of a certain conservatism on my part with regard to changing institutions. It also comes out of a sense of economy, that you have institutions that can do more than one thing. You have to be careful what functions you combine in institutions. I've led three seminars on whistle-blowing for the Ontario government, and Manitoba has a whistle-blowing law in process now: they're placing it with existing institutions.

As we multiply the institutions and these oversight and appeal bodies of various kinds, we're proliferating them, and it just seems there's an existing organization.

The one drawback to the Public Service Labour Relations Board may be that whistle-blowing may be seen purely in employment terms, that it's about job security. And when we read the reports of the public service integrity officer, he highlights the fact that most of the complaints coming to him are from disgruntled employees who feel they've been disciplined unfairly. Whistle-blowing is about more than dealing with employment problems. It's much broader than that. That's the only misgiving I have about leaving it at the Public Service Labour Relations Board.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Dewar.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you.

And thank you for a very concise and in-depth presentation. So many questions come out of it and some of the ideas you've presented. I'm going to start off focusing on an area we haven't really talked about a lot--or at least when I've been present: the budget oversight and the mandate. You talked about comparing it to the American Congressional Budget Office. I think that was born out of the Watergate scenario.

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

It was 1974.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

So it was just around the time.

And you know, obviously with the idea of tightening up financial accountability.... One of the things that is interesting in the bill--I don't know if it caught your eye--is to give cost estimates for private members' bills, which is interesting, because usually you're not allowed to spend money when you're presenting a private member's bill. But there's no initiative to look at government bills. I'd like to get your comment on that, or the logic. Maybe you're not the person to speak to it. It would be important public policy to have that; if you're going to give cost estimates for private members' bills, then you should do the same for government bills.

I'm really interested and very concerned about the estimates process. If we go back to where this bill came from, the Gomery commission, it was about concerns about oversight of spending and the fact that spending became outside of accountability, if you can say that.

I'm a new member of Parliament. I represent a predominantly public service riding, and they said, to a person, when I talked to them: We don't need more overlays like the previous government was intending; we need to be able to breathe a little, to talk about outcome-based policy again, which used to be the way; we want to get there, and we need to come up with some of our own ideas to get there.

But on the estimates--and you've studied provincial governments--it seems to me they do it differently. There's more attention, more time taken to look at the estimates. And here it seems to be--and we saw this with Gomery.... Certainly what came out of there is that attention is given to the public accounts after the money has been spent. And talking to some people, former parliamentarians, it used to be different here in Ottawa. But certainly the experience, and if you could just....

The second question is about the estimates process in other provinces and how that might get to your point about taking the partisanship out of that component, looking at money, cost-benefit analysis, and where it should be placed--at the beginning or at the end of the equation.

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

First, on the CBO, it does very credible work in terms of estimating the costs of new programs, but the congressional apparatus is so much bigger, and the institutional rivalry in Congress, even when it's controlled by the same party as the President, is so strong that there's motivation there to look in depth.

And congressmen, particularly on the Senate side, have huge personal staffs of their own. That is a big industry. It doesn't mean that they still get it right. The multi-year budget forecasts of spending and revenues have been way, way off, particularly as you get way up.

That was one of the reasons there have been arguments recently to give Parliament more capability in terms of economic and fiscal forecasting, but we shouldn't presume that just because we attach an office to Parliament that we're going to get the forecasting part of it.

I was around here in 1971-72 as a parliamentary intern. I was involved back then at looking at the supply process, and we've been debating supply and the weakness of the supply process since then.

My report to the Treasury Board back in the late nineties asked why MPs are more interested in vindicators than in indicators. Why can't we spend time looking carefully at what we spend and what we get for the money we spend? And it's not just because the information is inadequate. I think even the more sophisticated....

We have to find, maybe, a separate committee that can select part of the estimates and study it in depth, and maybe go on a cycle and find that small, dedicated band of MPs who are prepared to spend a lot of time on it.

I admire this committee. I'm not saying this just to flatter you, but I know a number of people around this committee who have spent time in the past working on the machinery-of-government issues. There is no political gain to be had from that whatsoever, unless there's a rousing scandal of some kind. Mostly, it's unrewarded in political terms to do that, but somebody has to do it.

So I would say, take a minority of MPs who are interested in that, give them adequate staff to go on a cycle, and pick years. And then have the capacity for Parliament to hold up the passing of the estimates. Because we did away with the ability to block spending, and now most of the estimates are deemed to be reported and passed by the House. So it's a kind of ritual we go through, but they never get really examined.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Is it different at the provincial level?

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

At the provincial level in my province, in other provinces, it often occurs on the floor of the legislature. There is more media coverage of it. There is still the political gamesmanship that goes on, but that's to be expected, I guess.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Rob Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you for your presentation. I can certainly relate to some of what you're saying about these performance reports and about other reports on supply, also.

When we do have limited staff, and we try to look at some of this raw material and make some sense out of it, it is a pretty daunting task. So I think we are taking steps in the right direction.

You mentioned that Congress has a much larger staff than ours. I'd be interested in hearing a bit about that, because we can always use more help in doing the work we're doing.

But on the Public Service Staff Relations Board, there has been some debate about that. I'm certainly not interested in creating extra layers of bureaucracy or duplication, but I think we want to set up institutions that are going to work and make the situation better.

There has been discussion in this committee about extending some protections, not only for government employees, but also for contractors and federal government grant recipients. And also there has been discussion on federally funded researchers.

That being the case, when you look at what the traditional mandate of the Public Service Staff Relations Board has been--and you've already expressed the one reservation, whether this is only going to be dealt with in an employment context.... Does setting up a new body--that approach--make a little more sense if we did, in fact, extend some of the reach to federally funded researchers, and so on?

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

Mr. Moore, it's been a very tricky issue. As I followed this debate over the last decade, we have gone round and round in terms of identifying institutions that could possibly play this role. Now we've come to the point where we've rejected the Public Service Commission and rejected some offshoot of the Auditor General that was once proposed.

You make some compelling points, particularly the point that more and more governments don't do things directly; they do them through third parties, in whose hands, then, public money is put at risk. In those circumstances, it seems to me prudent to allow employees of those organizations, and even citizens on the receiving end, to say that there's a problem here with this money. We had a situation with Hydra House, a for-profit operation for developmentally challenged adults in Manitoba, that became hugely controversial. There were Cadillacs, trips, cruises, and all the rest of it. It was a real mess. Yet there was no avenue, no channel available through which the people who knew these things were going on could get that information to the right people. I'm fully supportive of the idea that it accountability shouldn't stop at the boundaries of government. It's got to go beyond it now.

In the United States now there are even proposals to amend the Whistleblower Protection Act to cover money being spent through state governments. I don't want to wrestle with the provinces on that one, but a lot of money is spent through other orders of government, by both provinces and municipalities. Presumably there can be misuse of public money in those circumstances as well.

Again, I guess at some point you have to ask yourself how much trust you want, and how much control, and how you balance that. You can't have everybody being investigated all the time; it's got to be in exceptional cases only.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

You also made a remark that hit home with me. I understand we as MPs have to have that direct input. You mentioned something about a pre-legislation scrutiny commissioner. I don't think that's where we want to go. We have a job we were elected to do on behalf of our constituents and on behalf of Canadians. I'm wondering specifically what product you think would be useful in helping members of Parliament digest and make sense of the estimates and performance reports so that we can give input.

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

I've had a lot of experience with this stuff. A number of years ago I did a paper for the Auditor General--I don't know whether she would share it with you--on the subject of quality information for parliamentarians. The problem is there are 308 of you. I don't mean that you're a problem because there are 308 of you, but because you've all got different interests. One type of information or one way of presenting information may be suitable for your interests and your way of doing analysis and asking questions, but may not be suitable for some other member.

I think there may be something to be said for having a committee on public spending, which is a joint committee of the House of Commons and the Senate. I've done work for the Senate, and though it is a much maligned and ridiculed institution, it does far more good work than it's given credit for, largely through its committees conducting investigations. They are, in effect, evaluations of departments and programs. Because senators don't have the pressures of time, and don't have the re-election concerns, they do some very useful work that doesn't get much publicity but that nonetheless has an impact on the thinking of departments.

If I were designing something, I might think about a joint committee with a small dedicated group of MPs working alongside senators, and with a significant staff capability to tackle this really tough job of understanding what government finances are like, how spending operates, and so on.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Professor Thomas, we have come to the end. Thank you, sir, for coming and giving us your thoughts.