That's wonderful.
This question is of great interest to me. I cut my eye teeth—if that's the right expression—on parliamentary finance and government finance in working for the Budget Bureau of the Government of Saskatchewan. One of the things I worked on there was the form of the estimates and the accounting procedures to the legislature. That's where my interest in the accounting officer approach came from, and the estimates have always been of equal interest because I worked on them for many years there.
I'll just go through the comments. The standing committees were reformed in the 1960s. One of the jobs they were given in those reforms was the immediate, medium- and long-term expenditure plans of the departments and the effectiveness of their implementation. You would have thought that this gave the committees all the powers they needed to review departmental finances, financial planning, and the intentions as embodied in the estimates, but members often found dissatisfaction in the process.
In fact, early on, after those reforms of the 1960s, one committee made a substantive report on the estimates that had been referred to it—in other words, a report commenting on them—but the report was not accepted by the Speaker, who ruled that committees cannot make substantive reports on the estimates; they can only approve them as is, or propose a reduction, or propose eliminating them. But they can't do anything else.
This did not make the committees more eager to examine the estimates, and committee attention has dwindled for all the estimates of the government, in all committees, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said, to about 60 hours in a year.
In the past, there were two parliamentary studies of the estimates and the estimates process by committees. In 1995 the House instructed the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to undertake a comprehensive review. Similarly, in 2003 the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates also did that and produced Meaningful Scrutiny: Practical Improvements to the Estimates Process, which was 60 pages long, as opposed to 90 pages from the previous committee.
I would like to quote the 1995 committee report: “One of the witnesses, Dr. Franks”—that's me—“expressed doubts—