Government Operations Committee on May 7th, 2012

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you, Professor.

I'm going to pick up where you left off in a minute.

It must have been an exciting time here in Parliament in 1972 with the general election going on. I think it ended up being 109 to 107. I'd be interested in your reflections on that and on what type of estimates review went on in 1972 after that particular election.

I want to go back to the Parliamentary Budget Office. I could see a process that had the Parliamentary Budget Officer and his department work with a committee like this or a large committee like the super committee you were discussing. If they actually focused as much on performance as they did on the estimates, I could see them providing members of Parliament with more workable data, as you were talking about.

As a member of Parliament, and as a member of a committee, you could actually approach the Parliamentary Budget Office to basically do a study and produce a report for you with specific information and specific questions about specific departments or specific programs in departments. Do you think that would produce more usable and more worthwhile information for us as parliamentarians?

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

I think that would be the case. They're called committee secretaries in the Australian Parliament, but they're a head of a branch, really. Each committee has a number of staff members and these people are well-educated, well-qualified. Some are even Ph.D.-level people, such as those on their economics committee. They prepare questions for members of Parliament. We know that on some budgetary issues there will be party differences. If you were the Conservative member of Parliament, they would ask you what you wanted to ask and what information you needed for those kinds of questions, and they would go and find what you needed. So when you have the deputy minister of finance sitting in front of you, you have hard-hitting, probing questions. It's done with a civilized tone. You're not there to embarrass someone for the sake of embarrassing him. But they can't fob you off with non-answers either, because you have backup. That's what ideally should be the case.

I've talked to a lot of public servants. They're not afraid to come before House of Commons committees because of their supposedly being out of their depth in terms of their knowledge, but they're concerned about the unpredictability of committees. They know what a member of Parliament is going to ask. Some of them would like to have an intelligent dialogue on what the evidence suggests about how well this or that particular program is performing. So that's where you need to go. You need staff support enabling you not to become captive of some Parliamentary Budget Office or something like that, but to use constructively to guide your agenda and ensure that you get to the bottom of the issues you want to investigate.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

When you spoke about adding senators to this committee, you said that it would lower the temperature and make it a less partisan exercise. No one else has brought that forward, so I haven't had a chance to think about it. However, would it also allow the Prime Minister to appoint specific people who bring a lot of expertise in public finance to Parliament? Someone like David Dodge would jump right out at you.

Do you think the Prime Ministers of the day would use this opportunity to bring some expertise in public finance to this committee, and would that be a good thing?

[Prof. Paul Thomas]

That would be a very good thing. I know the Senate is not regarded as a legitimate body in the 21st century when it's appointed by the Prime Minister. On the other hand, senators often have distinguished careers in business or politics. For a decade I was the Duff Roblin Professor of Government. There was no finer senator, in my eyes at least, than Duff Roblin, who was government House leader and tried to make the Senate committees work.

So I think senators can contribute. We're moving, supposedly, gradually, incrementally towards an elected senate, and then you're going to have to address the issues of the Senate's role in approving spending and taxing decisions, just as they do in Australia. We've had deadlocks and double dissolutions of the two Houses of Parliament when there was an impasse and the government wasn't getting its money. You don't want a Senate that's too powerful. There are senators who regularly go to work, day in and day out, on these committee and try to do an objective job of asking the right questions. It would be good for the senators and the members of Parliament, I think, to work alongside one another.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

Professor Thomas, thank you very much for joining us. You're our last external witness. We have the Department of Finance and Treasury Board coming on Wednesday, and then we're going to start discussing what we'd like to see in a report. So thank you very much for your input. It was excellent today.

With that, I'll call for the adjournment of the committee.

[An hon. member]

So moved.

[The Vice Chair, Mr. Mike Wallace]

We are adjourned.