Evidence of meeting #150 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was million.
A video is available from Parliament.
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
Mr. McCauley, Treasury Board's responsibility to provide due diligence and to work to ensure good value for tax dollars extends to every government department and agency, and it is exerted at all cabinet committees in which I participate.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I have two last questions for you.
Did you get involved in any other reviews of previous contracts of the previous government, as you did with Project Resolve?
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
Actually, one of the areas that we've become very involved in is the area of digital, for instance. One of the situations—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Are there specific contracts that you got involved with at the same level as you did with Project Resolve upon taking over the Treasury Board two weeks into your mandate?
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
Mr. McCauley, this was a—
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
On a point of order, Chair, my understanding is that we are here to review the estimates. There are billions of dollars being spent here, and this is supposed to be the open and transparent mechanism whereby parliamentarians can review the expenditures of the government through Treasury Board.
It just seems to me that Mr. McCauley's line of questioning isn't relevant to the topic of today's meeting. I'm sure his constituents, as well as many taxpayers in Canada, want to know why these funds are being expended—
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
—and I just wonder why he's missing his opportunity and not asking those questions of the minister.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you for your point of order.
In response to that, Mr. Peterson, I can tell you that certainly in my capacity as chair I have the discretion to determine what is and what is not relevant. I have been listening fairly intently to the testimony. I can tell you that there is some relevance that I can see, certainly in the sense that even in the minister's opening comments he mentioned the massive expenditure at Fisheries and Oceans for three icebreakers.
There were also other references to procurement within the government and within the supplementary (A)s, and Mr. McCauley's line of questioning, while it is perhaps walking a bit of a narrow line, is still dealing with those issues. I do see that there are relevant issues here.
Mr. McCauley, you have about 20 seconds left.
Conservative
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
Mr. McCauley, I've said, as I've said in the House, that I do my job—
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
—as Treasury Board president, and I do it—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
—did you discuss or interfere with any other projects—
November 1st, 2018 / 3:50 p.m.
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
When we—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
—signed by the previous government? I'm not asking about what you spoke about in the House, Minister.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Gentlemen, what I'll try to do in my role as an impartial referee is to ensure that both the questioner and the minister have adequate time to give proper questions and adequate responses. I take my role extremely seriously in that, so in this case I will be certainly adjudicating. If I think the minister is rambling on and not speaking to a direct question, I will interject myself, but at this point in time I think he's been doing an adequate job of providing the information that he's been asked for.
We'll now move to Mr. MacGregor.
Welcome to our committee, sir. You have seven minutes.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
I appreciate it, Chair. Thank you very much.
Minister, thank you for appearing today. I want to go to the subject of vote 40 and recognize the work of Mr. Blaikie in highlighting this issue during the main estimates.
Parliament did authorize $7 billion, but in what we have before us we can see that about $2.7 billion has been spent, leaving $4.3 billion unspent. One of the chief reasons that we heard from your government for this vote 40 was that you wanted to authorize the spending so it could be used as soon as possible once the plans were ready and a Treasury Board submission was complete.
We see in the supplementary estimates (A) that you're not even close to allocating all the money. These items that have been allocated since the main estimates, couldn't they have come under the supplementary estimates through the Treasury Board submissions process so that we parliamentarians could have had better oversight and better-informed authorization of where the money is actually going?
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
Thank you very much for your question, Mr. MacGregor.
Actually, so far, $2.9 billion has been allocated. That's 45% of the amount of the total vote 40, as Brian has informed me, which is on track. If you look at where we are in the fiscal year, that is, we are on track in terms of that.
Further, for the detail on this, you can go to the website sources and the uses of the budget implementation vote by department and see this information. The granularity of this is very significant.
For instance, the “Combatting Aggressive International Tax Avoidance” budget funding was $4,885,000. Allocated so far is $3,966,360. You can take a look at “Protecting air travellers”, where you can see that the $240,612,000 has been fully allocated. For “Strengthening Canada's Food Safety”, with $15,700,000 in budget funding, so far $12,700,000—
NDP
President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government
The level of granularity and transparency on this is actually very significant.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
The crux of my question was that in order to give better parliamentary oversight, given that so much money is still left unspent, could not this have come through supplementary estimates to give us, as a parliamentary body, the chance to have better oversight, rather than approving a $7-billion fund for your department to spend as necessary? It seems to me that they could have been introduced right here and now for us to actually have a look at the needs of each department and then to approve them on each line item.