I just think that the way it is now, with the budget speech much anticipated and the pre-budget consultations going on in the finance committee of the House of Commons and so on, there's all that rush to put the budget to bed and get ready for it. It has become the biggest political occasion in the life of Ottawa. And the estimates are an afterthought; they don't count for very much.
You see the dilemma the government is faced with in the current downsizing, where you have a process to conduct lay-offs and to implement the budget decisions about where cuts will be made. So you get criticized if you don't say up front what you're proposing to do. On the other hand, you don't allow for due process to give public servants a chance to hear what their fate is going to be in downsizing.
I'm on the National Statistics Council and we were at a meeting recently. We heard what they have to go through to come to terms with the reduction in their core operating budget. It's a long process that has to be undergone. So you won't have immediate fallout from estimates.
The other thing I would say is this. When the estimates were compressed between the budget and the summer adjournment, many people thought that with departmental performance plans and priorities, DPPs and DPRs, you might carry over into the fall and spend more time in the fall session looking at the performance of departments and agencies. That hasn't happened. Once I read all the estimates hearings for two years of the House of Commons standing committees and I found two references to departmental performance reports and departmental plans and priorities. And I don't know how many MPs have ever asked for the management accountability framework reports, which I study. They're online and they give you a very good insight into what's going right and wrong, and it counts in the pay of the deputy minister and in his or her career path.
Those are informative documents, but you are busy people and don't have the time. I'm a retired academic and can read these and write about them and have opinions about them, but it takes a lot of work.
So I still think you should think about it more on a year-round basis as opposed to that compressed period in the spring when everything is supposed to happen at once.