All right, we'll start with the Constitution. One of the constitutional principles is that all spending must originate with the crown. In other words, on the recommendation of responsible ministers in the cabinet, the government puts forward its spending plans through the office of the Governor General. Along with that, governments have treated the approval or not of their spending plans as a matter of confidence. So you can't vote against the budget or even vote against individual estimate items without the government raising the threat of that amounting to a matter of non-confidence, requiring their MPs to vote with the government. So that limits the parameters within which the committees can be creative in criticizing and trying to change public spending.
There's also the question of whether you would want to go to a system like the American system where very powerful committees in the U.S. Congress, especially on the Senate side as opposed to the House of Representatives side, regularly defeat the President's budget, change it, or delay it, which leads to deadlock and instability. Institutional buck-passing is the way I describe it. No one knows who's to blame, whether the President or some part of Congress. If you transferred some real power to committees to recommend changes, would you worry, would Canadians worry, about relatively inexperienced members of Parliament—perhaps not fully informed of the budgetary choices that have been made inside government, how difficult they were, and all the considerations that went into them—having the right to change that estimates in that way? I'm not saying that there's anything pure or totally rational about the way governments decide budgets, but I'm just saying that they have the whole public service behind them.
In terms of Australia, I gave the committee staff a long paper on the supply process in Australia. I interviewed members of its House of Representatives and elected Senate. The main body in which the government is held accountable in the Australian political system is the Australian Senate, which is elected on a system of proportional representation, which has mainly meant that there's never been a government majority in the Senate. Then they have their calendar year for Parliament blocked out into two main periods, May and October, when Senate committees go to work to examine the estimates. The minister shows up first and spends a day, maybe, or half a day, in front of the committee. They go on from early in the morning, literally 8 o'clock in the morning, for the whole day. The Senate is not sitting at this time. They take this whole block of time over two weeks and they run through departments of government.
There are two main accountability documents in Australia. One is called the parliamentary budget statement, and the second one is called the annual report. The parliamentary budget statement, PBS, gets most of the attention. Public servants are grilled when they come before those committees. There's no government majority. The rules of engagement are better defined: What senators can ask public servants is better defined, as well as what public servants are allowed to answer. I think that it might be helpful in the Canadian context to have clearer rules around that. In Australia, public servants at the senior level, with the permission of their minister, can actually go to brief party caucuses, so there's more informed debate. It's not perfect and Australians are critical of it, but compared to what I've studied in Canada, they make a more meaningful effort and provide scrutiny of the spending plans of governments.