Government Operations Committee on May 28th, 2013

[Bill Matthews]

I think if you improve the narrative to explain why there are changes in program spending planned versus actual, you achieve the same thing. A change to program vote would not solve the issue we bumped into around the $3.1 billion.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Well, I think that if we changed the program vote to programs, then that would oblige the officials to track that properly, and that means the $3.1 billion would have been better tracked.

[Bill Matthews]

I can give you an example. Think about Infrastructure Canada. They're constantly reprofiling money because they're difficult to realize. The economic action plan put additional money into existing programs. At the end of the year, the department was unable to spend part of that program money. What are they reprofiling: the new money, the old money, or a mix of both?

If you don't have a stand-alone program for new money, it just gets mixed in with an existing program and you'll lose sight of it. On the $3.1 billion issue, if you're just adding money to existing programs and you're into reprofiles and lapses, it's impossible to tell which money lapsed, the new money or the old money.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Perhaps we're both right, because I don't think you disagreed with me when I said the Auditor General said that part of the $3.1 billion problem was transfers from one program to another. Had the government been voting according to program in those years, the officials would have been obliged to better monitor that money, because that's the money on which the votes are based, and I think we might have had less of a problem with the $3.1 billion. That's another argument to go in the direction we're proposing.

[Bill Matthews]

My view on the programs is if you have a good narrative explaining changes, as we do now in the RPPs and supplementary estimates data by program, I think you can achieve the same sort of thing.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Okay.

There have been studies over many decades to try to change the estimates process. They've all pretty well failed. It seems to me that we haven't yet succeeded, but we're kind of on the cusp of a possible success in that the government has shown some degree of interest, and yet they're now bound up with these problems of whether it's $40 million over five years or $50 million or $30 million.

What can we do as a committee to try to make this happen for the first time in hundreds of years?

[Bill Matthews]

I have a couple of comments. These were going to be my closing remarks, but I'll pre-empt myself.

This committee started its work back in February 2012, if I recall correctly. Since that time, there have already been substantial improvements. Some were planned already, but a great many of them were the result of the work of this committee. So I think it's fair to say there has already been some success.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Not on the major thing.

[Bill Matthews]

What I would say is while we're dealing with departments to see if the cost can be lowered, because that's what we have been tasked to do, because of the additional information that is now furnished to Parliament, I would actually ask committee members to take a pause, take a breath, play with the new system, and ask themselves again the question about the vote structure. Since we first started discussing program votes and strategic outcome votes, there is now much more information available to parliamentarians on that front.

The question for me is one of information versus control, and we've had a few exchanges on that already today. I would ask committee members to take a pause, play with the new information. We have some homework to do, but I would suggest committee members look at the system with the information they have now and ask if that does the trick or if a change in vote structure with the new information is still necessary.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

You're telling us to pull back.

[Bill Matthews]

I'm not saying to pull back. I'm saying you have more information at your disposal now than you did when we started. We need to take some time to work with departments. It's not going to be weeks. It's going to be a couple of months before we've had that discussion. You will have supplementary estimates (A) in front of you in the next few weeks. It might be a good time to ask yourselves whether this additional information does the trick, or whether you are still interested in having a new vote structure.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Mr. Matthews.

Thank you, John. Your time is well past.

Kelly Block.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I echo the comments of my colleagues in terms of thanking you for being here. It's always good to hear from you folks. I do appreciate all of the effort and work that has gone into getting us to this place.

I think I'm onside with you in terms of the need to know versus the right to act. Obviously, more information is key for us, and stewarding that information in a way that makes sense is really what we have been trying to get at through this study.

You provided a good segue into a question I have. It follows up on what you've indicated is the time that's needed to determine if there are savings that can be achieved by getting down the number that was proposed and working with departments to create a better level of confidence in terms of moving in a different direction.

I want to ask whether any of this work that you would do within the departments with their financial data dovetails at all with Shared Services Canada and some of the work that's going on to bring all of that IT under that organization.

[Bill Matthews]

The work in terms of moving to a potentially common financial system is right now outside the scope of Shared Services Canada. They're very much focused, if I recall correctly, on data centres, e-mail, and servers. I may have it wrong, but that's my recollection.

On the question of moving to a common financial system, that work is being done in two places. The Office of the Comptroller General is working to develop common business processes with a view to fewer systems, and the chief information officer for the Government of Canada is also looking at common systems. To my knowledge that's where that work is sitting, not with Shared Services Canada just yet.

[Sally Thornton]

Yes, it does dovetail with those changes.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Okay, that's good to know.

I have a follow-up question regarding the comments to my colleague in terms of getting comfortable with what we have in place now and seeing if later on there could be a move towards something else. Do you see the changes that could be made in terms of the vote structure? At the level we would vote on different issues, do you see that we could make this decision to vote at a strategic outcome level, but that down the road we could move to something that drills down a bit more if parliamentarians really felt that this was not meeting the need that they have as parliamentarians?

[Bill Matthews]

You could. They key thing is if you're changing the way Parliament controls, that changes the way departments manage. If we went to strategic outcome, we would have departments reprogram their financial systems and their supporting business processes. To change it and push it one level down would again be a form of a systems change, probably not as drastic, but I'm speculating here. Any time you're dealing with systems changes, you are dealing with some time and some money. It would require yet another change.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you.

[Sally Thornton]

One of the issues we have, though, is also reducing the number of times we change, because we do need to track both behaviour and expenditures over time. If we change once the vote structure, we will still have to maintain our reporting on the current vote structure to understand what's happening. But if we keep changing it, we lose that ability to map historically what has happened to where we are in the future.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Kelly.

Thank you, Ms. Thornton.

Next we're going to Mathieu Ravignat.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you for being here.

I'm on both sides, that is, information and democratic control. I like both of those.

I want to ask you a question about the $3.1 billion. It is alarming and troubling that it wasn't caught earlier. I think that should cause the secretariat, and the entire public service, to do some major thinking and reflecting. It's a lot of money and it's a question of respect for taxpayers. In your answer, you said it was about the narrative, that you'd give a better narrative or you'd ensure a narrative in the RPP. What obligates departments and ministries to ensure the narrative is present in the RPPs?

[Bill Matthews]

I'll get Sally to add some context around my answer, but we do work with departments to establish standards in terms of what goes into an RPP, DPR, as well as the content that goes into estimates and the quarterly financial statements. There are standards from a government perspective. We do review departmental content to make sure it lines up with what we expect. At the end of the day, if you're dealing with RPPs and DPRs, ministers are accountable to sign those things. If you're looking at things like some of the reporting in house, you have deputy ministers who are accounting officers under the FAA, so they have a role there as well.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

This is where you lose me. You lose me because decisions of this magnitude can still be made in a non-transparent way and decisions can be made with regard to the quality of information presented to parliamentarians. In the RPP, that puts into question accountability. We still have a situation where there's too much power in cabinet, there's too much power in the PMO, and not enough of it with regard to these major transfers of funds in the hands of Parliament.

It's not comforting. It doesn't make me sleep better knowing that the inclusion of this information is on a voluntary basis with regard to the narrative and that the decision is in the minister's office.

[Bill Matthews]

I wouldn't say it's voluntary because Treasury Board, as an organization, has the authority to issue policy and it's up to the departments to comply with that policy. All I'll say in the narrative is it's early days still, but we've noticed substantial improvement in the content as we've moved to standardize RPPs as well as what's in the estimates. Really, I think I can just leave it at that.