Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 29th, 2012

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I really found your comments very helpful in helping me understand the carry-forward and the strategic and operating review reductions.

On page 3 of your opening comments, the first point you made was about a reduction in the House officers' budgets. One line caught my attention; you talked about the reduction of printing parliamentary publications.

I think all of us receive bundles of publications in our offices, and we frequently see large piles of them in our lobbies. The one that comes to mind most recently—and I'm not picking on this one—is the Cohen report. There are boxes and boxes of the Cohen report there. I take some solace in the fact that when I get these reports in my office, I put them in the recycle bin, but there are still a lot of printing costs that go into those publications.

I'm wondering who decides how many—well I don't need to know who, but can we somehow reduce the number of things that are printed? Most of us are now using online versions of these publications. It seems to me there is still a huge waste there.

I'm not being critical, but I'm wondering how we can possibly reduce this even further, because there are all kinds of these in the recycle bins. Yes, they get recycled, but the printing costs are huge.

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Absolutely. This did come to the board, and it's part of our strategic and operating review. What you see in the lobbies is often from government departments, and the House of Commons doesn't have control over how many are produced or how often. Often as a member I get the stacks in my office too. You see stacks and stacks in lobbies, and the next day you know where they are.

We've had discussions with Treasury Board about reducing the requirement for the number of things that need to be physically printed or reducing the number of copies that need to be printed. We're responsible for parliamentary publications, order paper, notice paper....

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

I noticed Treasury Board has used a number of memory sticks for their publications, so that's encouraging.

Are there ways that we as parliamentarians could add our voice to the call for reduced numbers of those huge publications that are sitting in our offices and will eventually be in the recycle bin?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Absolutely, there are ways. I think it's fair for me to say this is something Minister Clement has started, with e-tabling and memory sticks and things like that. I think anything you do to encourage ministers to exercise similar restraint on their departments when it comes to printing.... With the advent of technology, with iPads and the ease with which members can access things like the notice paper and order paper, we're constantly looking at phasing out a lot of the things that require physical hard copy. If a member actually wants to have a hard copy for making notes on, then he or she can print it off.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Don't forget the BlackBerry PlayBook, Mr. Speaker. It's an extremely excellent tool.

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Oh, I'm sorry. I should have said with the advent of “tablets”.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You have almost one minute left.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

I'd like to follow up, then, quickly on the $381,000 special requirements for members.

I'm assuming this is for members who have physical challenges they need to meet. Certainly I'm totally supportive of that. Is that primarily the bulk of that figure there?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

It's the complete amount.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

It's the complete amount. Thank you very much.

That's it, Mr. Speaker.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

Would someone from the official opposition like four minutes?

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On page 2 of the notes you gave us, Mr. Speaker, you mentioned "operational efficiencies". I would like to have more details on those measures. Is that possible?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Yes, absolutely. I am going to ask Mr. Watters to tell you about that as I do not have the French version.

[Mark G. Watters]

We targeted four factors in the strategic review exercise: attrition, vacant positions or positions that we were going to eliminate through ongoing initiative reduction, operational efficiencies and budget cuts. The budget cuts were made mainly in areas where we had noted that the budgets allocated to us were not completely used. We therefore proposed cuts to those items.

Then we determined that, based on those options for the House Administration, we would save approximately $13 million over the next three years. For the attrition and vacant positions initiative, we will save approximately $1.7 million this year. By cutting positions already filled as a result of the fact that we are changing the scope of the initiatives, we will save approximately $300,000. As for operational efficiencies, the savings are approximately $600,000. The budget cuts amount to approximately $1 million for this year. That totals approximately $3.7 million for the House Administration.

Attrition and vacant positions are the most significant factor for this year among the initiatives that are part of the strategic review. The department heads really examined their organizations and determined which positions could remain empty and which could be permanently dropped, if you will, in order to achieve the established objectives. That is the most significant item in this element.

The second most significant item is budget cuts. Based on an in-depth budgetary analysis, we really looked at where there was a systematic underutilization of budgets over the years and where we could suggest budget cuts. That is what we did for those budget items.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

All right.

With regard to the idea of combining security staffs, I suppose the idea will be to cut personnel at the same time, will it not? That will have the effect of reducing staff.

[Audrey O'Brien]

We cannot clearly say yet whether that will call for staff cuts. There will obviously be an impact on human resources and collective agreements here and in the Senate, but also at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We know that it is the agency responsible for the parliamentary precinct, outside the buildings themselves. I believe we should not have any spectacular expectations regarding budget and resource cuts. We have all experienced municipal amalgamations, for example, that were supposed to result in stupendous savings, but they never really saw the light of day.

This is a very complex situation. The financial situation regarding budget cuts also comes into play. What I asked the Sergeant-at-Arms and the security employees to do was to work with their colleagues to target security deficiencies and to see, first, whether there were measures to correct those deficiencies that did not require a major investment of resources. I asked them to see whether we could proceed toward a unified security arrangement on a kind of step-by-step basis, if I may use that expression, because it is important not to proceed too fast, precisely in order to avoid causing long-term problems as a result of acting too quickly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Go ahead, Mr. Lukiwski, please, for four minutes.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thanks very much.

I apologize. My interpretation channel was not working, so I'm not sure if I'll be repeating a question that was previously asked.

I want to talk a little bit about reduction in costs on the House administration side.

I know you've detailed that the House of Commons will attempt to reduce its spending by about $30 million over the next several years, which is a good thing. We've talked about some of the service delivery transformation in the House, specifically the one Harold was talking about in going away from hard copy of publications to more online publication. That's a great thing, but in the House administration itself you've identified significant savings, some through attrition and some through elimination of vacant positions. Those are obviously how savings can be realized there.

You talked about service delivery transformation in the administration side. Could you detail a little bit of what that means and what kinds of savings you are referring to?

[Mark G. Watters]

Thank you.

As I was saying a little bit earlier, Mr. Chair, in this year's $3.629 million that we're reducing, the bulk of that is coming through attrition, as the member pointed out, about $1.8 million—$1.752 million—is from attrition and vacant positions.

Another million dollars is from budget reductions. After analyzing our budgets and looking at constant or significant underutilization of those budgets over the years, we've determined that we can move forward with reduced budgets. That was another million dollars. That's $2.8 million of the $3.6 million for this year.

Outside of the world of attrition or retirements, there are employees who would be affected based on service initiatives that we are deciding to cease. Those are called workforce adjustments. There are very few of those for this year, but nonetheless they amount to about $255,000.

Therefore, in the world of operating efficiencies and service delivery transformation, we're looking at about $580,000 for this year. It's a small portion of the $3.8 million.

Some of the things we are doing in that particular space pertain to some of the printing initiatives that we were talking about earlier. We anticipate that over the course of the exercise, we'll reduce the cost of printing by well over a million dollars, and we're starting to move in that direction; this is reflected in this particular item. Moving to a digital environment in which fewer paper copies are produced and more electronic versions are made available is among the initiatives we find in that space.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

As an overall question, I'm assuming you're comfortable that with your projected savings of $30 million over the next several years, the delivery of services that you have been providing for many years won't be affected and you'll be able to find cost efficiencies without affecting services to members or service to the House as an entity. Is that right?

[Audrey O'Brien]

Yes.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Do you have any concerns?

[Audrey O'Brien]

Through you, Mr. Chairman, to Mr. Lukiwski, as Mark was saying, the bulk of the administration budget is in salaries. In looking at the question of attrition and vacancies and what vacancies we can afford to not fill and offer up as part of the savings, we have been very mindful of not reducing the services to members.

When we talk about service transformation, some of that means that the services will be rendered in a different way. For example, the members' financial portal is one of those ways in which we're reducing the burden on everyone.

Something I have asked people to do and to continue to do is to look at services we might be providing or work we might be doing because we have always done it. Does it still need to be done? We're not in the position of departments or agencies that have programs and regular program reviews. There are different ways of doing things. One of the things, for example, is looking at moving towards a more paperless situation. That, as Mark has been saying, is quite important.

One of the things we have to be aware of—and I don't want members to have expectations that will be dashed in the end—is that when we transform work, through, for instance, things like the members' financial portal, there is an initial investment required in terms of IT, but then there is required maintenance.

Something I am doing a little bit of anticipatory fretting about is that once we come through the renovations projects on these wonderful buildings—which we are very excited about—and we come online and the Department of Public Works and Government Services hands over the keys to the Speaker, we become responsible for maintaining all of those things. For instance, we will have the swipe card security systems in offices like La Promenade Building, and all of a sudden there is an extra cost for maintenance, because it moves from their budget to ours.

Those are the kinds of things we are very mindful of, and of course we're mindful of 30 new members due to the Fair Representation Act.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Lukiwski.

Mr. Williamson, you have four minutes.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

Was the carry-forward roughly just under 2% of the budget from last year?