Yes.
Thank you very much. It's an honour to be here. I have a longstanding interest in accountability to Parliament and within government. I've met some of the people here before at other committee meetings, and it's nice to see familiar faces.
The focus of my remarks today is going to be on the Gomery commission recommendations in relation to the Federal Accountability Act. I thought I would take that approach, because I was senior research adviser to the Gomery commission, so I've had a chance to observe how it works, what it came up with, and the reasoning for the recommendations. That's what I'd like to address in the context of the Federal Accountability Act. I will talk about three major things, and probably some more minor ones, and there are more in the written submission that I provided last week.
One, I wanted to talk about deputy ministers, the deputy ministerial community, and deputy ministerial accountability. Two, I want to talk about the Public Appointments Commission. Three, I would like to make some general remarks about the broad issue of agents of Parliament and the role of Parliament in accountability. I say all of this in the context that the main focus of my academic research has been on Parliament. I think the role of Parliament is often under-stressed and under-appreciated in these sorts of things. Parliament has a right to define who is accountable to it, and how, and in what manner they are accountable to it.
It seems to me that what is happening in the Federal Accountability Act in relation to the accountability of deputy ministers and heads of agencies is a matter of identifying them as holding responsibilities in their own right and Parliament wanting to see how they perform their functions and their duties. This is not unusual in parliamentary government. In fact, Canada has been almost at the extreme end in its thinking about ministerial responsibility, saying that ministers must be responsible for everything and the only persons who can be responsible before Parliament. I didn't agree with that, and neither the Gomery commission nor the Federal Accountability Act agrees with that.
So the recommendations on the accountability of deputy ministers and heads of agencies as accounting officers before parliamentary committees, primarily the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, is similar in the two. There is some difference in the process through which disagreements can be resolved, but that is not terribly important. The important thing is that it's recognized that senior public servants have responsibilities and duties in their own right, and these duties and responsibilities, at least many of them, do not belong to ministers, and that they should be accountable before parliamentary committees in their own right and not on behalf of ministers.
The place where this becomes difficult is in trying to define the boundary between the responsibilities of public servants and those of ministers. The procedure through which ministers, as the Treasury Board has proposed in the act, can overrule the accounting officers, the deputy ministers and heads of agencies, is a means of establishing that boundary. If a deputy minister objects to a proposal and is overruled by a minister, then the responsibility belongs to the minister. It's very clear, if a deputy minister feels it's within his or her purview and is not overruled, then the responsibility rests with the deputy ministers.
I want to emphasize that to make this system work is going to involve a lot of work on the part of the Treasury Board, a lot of work on the part of Parliament, and particularly the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. They're going to have to reach some understanding of what the responsibilities of the accounting officers involve. It will involve what's normally called regularity, in other words following the rules and the laws that will involve propriety, acting in a proper manner, and to some extent it will involve economy, but it will not involve questions of effectiveness or even of value for money, or the purpose of programs or the policies behind programs.
In the initial stage, I think the responsibilities of accounting officers should be clearly in the areas of regularity and propriety. As the committee and the public servants and the Treasury Board learn to work together, they can go further if it's the wish of all sides.
Many of the recommendations of the commission dealt with the length of tenure of deputy ministers in offices and departments and with the method of appointments of deputy minister. Without going into details, the concern behind them was that the commission felt, as Justice Gomery has made very clear, that deputy ministers did not in his opinion pay adequate attention to their management duties.
The intention was, through the accounting officer approach and through the longer tenure of deputies and through the appointing procedure, to make a system in which deputy ministers were clearly assigned duties, stayed around long enough to make sure they had some power and could exercise it over management of a department, and then were ultimately held accountable and had to defend themselves in public for what they had done.
This was an effort, as I say, to refocus the deputy ministerial community and heads of agencies more towards their management duties. Something would have to give in that, but that was not a worry in the commission's sense.
The next point I want to talk about is the Public Appointments Commission, which is very much in line with the appointments proposal for boards and chief executive officers of government agencies proposed by Gomery.
The thinking there was that these appointments have to be made in an open and transparent way that recognizes the principles of merit and non-partisanship and recognizes the diversity and variety of the Canadian nation.
I will give you an example of appointments I think should be made that way but have not been in the past, and that's of the chairman and members of the board of the Public Service Commission. The duty of the Public Service Commission is to ensure that appointments in the public service are made in an open and transparent way, are advertised, that all Canadians have equal access to them, that they meet the principles of merit and non-partisanship, and that diversity is recognized in them. Yet at present there is no guarantee in the procedure for appointing the members of the commission who are supposed to ensure this that they are made in that manner. I think the Public Appointments Commission is a very important part of the act.
The last thing I will remark on relates both to Parliament and to thinking about accountability generally. I have a concern—this is a personal concern—that the act asks too much of Parliament in terms of the number of agents of Parliament that Parliament will wind up with and in terms of the efforts to keep their own agents accountable and in line.
I express it as a concern, and it fits into another concern I have, that the thinking behind the Gomery commission on responsibility and accountability was, to rephrase an old expression, that you should choose wisely and entrust liberally. In other words, you choose the right people and give them the powers in the belief and faith that they will act responsibly, and then you hold them accountable at the end.
The Gomery commission boiled down its views on the accountability and responsibilities of deputy ministers by saying that if they are faced with an issue they're doubtful about, they should ask themselves two questions: first, can I defend this adequately before the public accounts committee, and second—since the public accounts committee represents Parliament, which represents the people of Canada—the question could be phrased as, can I defend this decision satisfactorily in a public forum?
What's implied in here is a sense of responsibility. The commission did not recommend any more regulations, rules, or oversight agencies; it felt that we had enough. The problem was that these weren't observed, not that we needed more. I have a concern that the Federal Accountability Act goes too far in the direction of more oversight agencies, more varieties of accountability and more mistrust of public servants, more efforts to control and command and punish, and less attention than I would like to see on ensuring that the public servants themselves have a sense of responsibility that they follow in their work.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.