Government Operations Committee on May 22nd, 2018

[Brian Pagan]

Most of the budget 2018 funding is for programs that will endure more than a single year. Ultimately, as these items are approved, they will all be reflected in departmental plans, and they will be part of—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

But it's not in the departmental plans.

[Brian Pagan]

I'm saying, Mr. McCauley, that they will be. Once it's approved by Treasury Board—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

But what's the point of its being in next year's plan, when you're using the money this year?

[Brian Pagan]

It's that there will be ongoing expenditures once the project has been approved.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Right, and next year's money should go on next year's departmental plan.

The point of the departmental plan is to show results taxpayers are going to receive for this money spent; but it won't actually show....

[Brian Pagan]

Again, supplementary estimates (A), (B), and (C) also are monies provided by Parliament to deliver programs and services, and in many cases—in fact, in most cases—those initiatives are not in the departmental plans either. I take—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

But we'll get ministers before us to defend those, whereas right now we had a minister before us, Minister Qualtrough, who, when we asked her about her $650 million, didn't have an answer. She said, I don't know; ask my staff.

You understand our quandary. We have ministers appearing before us who have no idea what's in their vote 40, and yet we're supposed to just vote on it and sign off on it, saying go ahead, and maybe we'll see it in the departmental plan.

When we asked about the departmental plan, PSPC said their plan results were aspirational, for some of their items. Some of them were set targets, but some were just aspirational targets. What's the point of a departmental plan, if it's not setting actual targets? Now we have items that are in the departmental plan not as firm targets but more as aspirational targets, and we're saying, maybe the money this year will show up in next year's plan.

Do you understand our concern?

[Brian Pagan]

I do, Mr. McCauley, and I am hearing you, but—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It's constant that every person we ask has a different answer.

[Brian Pagan]

Somebody made the point earlier that the $7 billion in the budget implementation vote is not in the departmental plans. That's a truism, and it represents less than 10% of the voted spending this year.

So there is a detailed—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

But $7 billion? You can't just say it's less—

[Brian Pagan]

May I?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

—than 10%: $7 billion is a lot of money.

[Brian Pagan]

There is detailed and specific program and results information for more than 90% of government spending. The $7 billion in the budget implementation vote in most cases has not yet been approved by Treasury Board, and therefore departments can't articulate with the precision that would be required in—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

But Parliament is supposed to approve it in advance, you're saying.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Mr. Blaikie, you have seven minutes.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

I have a technical question about InfoBase, particularly about the screen you're showing.

We're looking at the approximately $7 billion that appears in vote 40, and then you say that you supplement some of the information here with information from the budget, including proposed expenditures. There is a lot of information in the budget that doesn't appear in table A2.11, including information in the back tables for various chapters.

For instance, in the back table of chapter 4 there's apparently a suggested amount for “Establishing Better Rules to Protect the Environment and Grow the Economy”, and it's anticipated that the government will spend $125 million in this fiscal year on that initiative. This doesn't appear anywhere in table A2.11, so authority is not being sought for that spending under vote 40.

Is this information about budget 2018, or is this information about vote 40? What I'm trying to suggest is that these are actually two different things. It's a little bit misleading to say that it's information on budget 2018, because there are many things in the budget, including in the budget tables in the back chapters, that one would think were part of the budget but that aren't part of table A2.11.

That's fair enough—table A2.11 has to do with what we're seeking authority for—but I think this helps emphasize some of the differences between the estimates process and the budget document, a distinction that is being muddied, I would say, with this new vote 40 mechanism.

[Brian Pagan]

You raise a very important point here, which is that the budget is more than just the initiatives that government has articulated for 2018-19. It also includes adjustments to statutory legislation, to tax expenditures, etc. The estimates, by definition, are limited to voted appropriation, so when we say “the budget”, we're speaking specifically to the amounts to be spent on a cash basis for this fiscal year. We are not reflecting the government's intentions with respect to any tax measures or changes in tax expenditures, and that sort of thing. That's a separate—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

This particular item talks about spending that money in support of developing better rules to protect the environment. It is characterized in the budget both in this table and also in the antecedent chapter as money that government intends to spend. Maybe that's money it intends to somehow get through an alteration in statutory authority. That's not clear. It's just not clear.

In any event, that was a technical question because I'm trying to understand, when I go to that, if that is information about vote 40; and therefore, I guess only information in the budget that pertains, strictly speaking, to the vote 40 items would appear there, not other information as appears in other tables of the budget. Fair enough.

[Andrew Gibson]

In order to avoid that confusion, we say “Presented below are the new spending measures listed in Table A2.11 of the 2018 Budget Plan”. Before you do anything—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

So it's just A2.11.

[Andrew Gibson]

Yes. Then if you click on the link, it will take you to table A2.11—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

—which mostly corresponds to the annex in the main estimates, but actually not perfectly. There are a couple of discrepancies.

I'm just saying that this is supposed to benefit me as a parliamentarian and provide some clarity. I think overall there probably is more information, but it's not exactly self-evident. You have been using the term “truism”. Truisms are things that are so obviously true that they are hardly worth mentioning. I wouldn't quite say these are truisms. They may be true, but they are not truisms because it actually takes a bit of work to figure out what's going on, what's represented, and what's not.

I might spend a little bit of my extra time, for the benefit of the committee, running with the analogy of the house renovations and the contractor. Analogies are always prickly things, but I do think the proper characterization of that analogy is not that you're going for a quote, and you're getting it back, and the contractors says he or she expects to spend this and then later reports what the actual expenditure was on the product you wanted. The analogy is a contractor who says he or she would expect to spend this on the roof, and this on the walls, and this on the flooring, but it depends what flooring you pick.

The contractor is asking for approval for a certain amount for the flooring, and a certain amount for the windows, and a certain amount for the roof. Then they're going to go away and make decisions. They're going to make decisions about what shingles you're going to have, and what windows you're going to have, and what flooring you're going to have. When the contractor is done, they will come back and let you know what they did, and they will table the receipts.

As somebody who's living in the home, I would expect you would want that contractor to come back to you and say they've done research on the flooring and here are the different kinds of flooring you could have, and here are the price points. Here's what's in your budget, and here's what's not. Now the contractor would like you to approve the particular things they're going to do with this money.

I would expect that, if a contractor came to me and said here's the budget for the flooring, they're going to go away and pick the floor. They can't spend more than you authorized; they can spend less; but when you come home, you will have new flooring. The contractor will have decided what it is. At that point it's too late to do anything about it other than approving more money for the contractor to rip out the floor and put in the floor you want.

The point about parliamentary oversight is that parliamentarians are supposed to have a pretty good idea of what the money is going to be spent on before they approve the money. If they just say there's a program and they like the idea of that program and that seems like a reasonable number even though you can't fill in all the details, go ahead and spend the money and just report on how you spent it, that wouldn't be good enough for homeowners. They would expect far more hands-on decision-making power in terms of the details of what's being done under that budget item.

I do think it's an apt analogy, but I think it has to be rounded out. I won't speak for my colleagues here, but what I'm asking for—what the NDP is asking for, and I suspect maybe others as well—is it's well enough to say here are our projected expenditures for the year and here's more or less what we want to spend it on. However, in the old process—that is to say, all the approvals that have happened heretofore—parliamentarians, before they approved the money, have been able to put the question to the minister who has already gone through Treasury Board, already figured out how many EFTs are going to be there, and ask those questions before approving.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Mr. Blaikie.

Mr. Peterson, you have the last seven minutes.