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.