Is it five minutes? Okay.
My questions are about changes to the presentation of the estimates. In particular, I appreciate that at the very least now, department-specific items are going to go to the appropriate committee for study.
However, as I have said throughout this process, that doesn't mean a lot of people can get answers to the questions they want to ask. I think parliamentarians want to be able to ask good and detailed questions about particularly new program approvals, so that applies especially to new budget items.
I think the PBO concurs in that analysis, in terms of it being good that these particular committees are now going to have to look at those votes. It says specifically that, “While these are important improvements to the process, it does not address the issue of parliamentarians voting on items which have yet to be scrutinized or refined by the Treasury Board.”
Further, if you look at GCpedia, which is a place where civil servants can go to get answers to questions they might have related to their work, there is a question: “I don't recognize some of the budget measures. How do I have them removed from my main estimates?” The response on GCpedia is, “TBS worked with the Department of Finance to identify the spending measures that require appropriations.” It goes on, in question 4: “I don't agree with some of the amounts and descriptions of the Budget measures. How do I have them revised in my Main Estimates?” The answer is, “Amounts cannot be adjusted.”
Presumably, those departmental officials are going to be reporting to committees and having to answer questions. Clearly, there's a bit of concern.
Another question that was asked, question 7, read: “Most of my organization's Budget measures have not yet been approved by Treasury Board. What can I say about those measures at a committee appearance?” The answer is, “Give brief, high-level responses.... Avoid referring to policy questions or program design issues that have yet to be discussed in Cabinet or Treasury Board.” As a parliamentarian who is going to be approving funding for these new programs, one of the major issues, as recognized by the Parliamentary Budget Office, is....
In the old system, for all its faults—and it was not a perfect system—by the time that parliamentarians were being asked to approve funding, departments had done their homework. They knew what the program was. It had gone through the detailed and rigorous costing process at Treasury Board. Parliamentarians could ask questions about the program, and the answers at least existed in principle. Even if parliamentarians might not have been able to get a straight answer about the program from the minister or departmental official, at least we knew that the answer was there. If you maybe put the question the right way, you might be able to unearth something, or if you filed the right kind of request, either an Order Paper question or an access to information request, you might get the answer.
The changes to this year's estimates notwithstanding, we're in a position where we've moved from a system where detailed answers about what the government intended to do with the money existed, to a system where those answers do not exist. In fact, civil servants are asking the question, “If I don't know where this money came from or how it ended up in my budget, can I get it out of there?” The answer is, “No.” Then a further question, “What kind of answer do I give?” And the answer is, “Well, just stick to the high-level stuff, because we know you don't have it figured out. You may not have even known that it was going to be in your departmental estimates.”
How, as a parliamentarian, am I supposed to have confidence in the revised estimates process when I know that the departments appearing before my committee don't actually know how they're going to be spending the money they're asking me to approve? Why should we accept that?
Treasury Board also has an oversight function. If departments came to Treasury Board and said, “We don't yet know how we're going to spend the money. We don't know how many FTEs we're going to need. We don't know where we're going to house the space. We don't know how much of the program money is going to be used for direct transfers to Canadians, because they fall into a certain category. We've got a ballpark idea of what we kind of want to do. We think this is a pretty good number, and when Treasury Board approves the money, we'll tell you later what we did with it. We'll write you a report and send it your way. Then, if you have questions, the money will be out the door. It's already spent. There's nobody to go back on that. But you'll know how it was spent, because once we spend it, we'll know how we were going to spend it.”
Surely you wouldn't accept that standard at Treasury Board. Why do you think parliamentarians should accept a lesser definition of oversight?
