Evidence of meeting #144 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was signatures.
A recording is available from Parliament.
February 28th, 2019 / 12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Chris Bittle Liberal St. Catharines, ON
I asked Mr. Reid if he could send us an electronic copy. I don't perceive there being an issue, but if we can just get the copy sent to us, we can come back next time with an answer.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
We'll send it out to all members of the committee by email in both official languages today.
Hamilton Centre, NDP
I mentioned at an earlier gathering that in terms of the Standing Orders, the public accounts committee may be looking at forwarding a recommendation for change to this committee.
The meeting before this one was public accounts. I asked again if a majority is interested in getting those changes through. There is, so I would expect that shortly after we get back we will be receiving a request from that committee to look at some standing order changes vis-à-vis public accounts. It's not complicated and it shouldn't take a lot of time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
In 10 words or less, could you give us a sense of what they're about?
Hamilton Centre, NDP
Yes, I can. There are two changes.
One is to insert into the mandate the word “non-partisan” to make it clear that public accounts is a different creature because of its oversight responsibilities.
Then the second one is to ensure that we don't repeat the absolute democratic nightmare that we went though—I won't say when—when a new government came in and wiped out all of the work that was being done by the public accounts committee.
There's a lot of tracking that goes on. There are commitments that are made from departments when they come, and some of those have timelines that can take up to a couple of years to be fulfilled. We have a system now that allows us to track every utterance, every promise and every commitment made, and we were halfway through developing some draft reports when all of that was just wiped out, based on the argument from the new members that they didn't know anything about it, so they weren't going to deal with it.
We want to bring in some changes so that no government can ever do that again when it comes to the oversight capacity of public accounts to hold the government of the day to account.
Those are the two major items.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Could you try to urge people to do that quickly during the break time? Then we could do it on the 21st of April, maybe.
Hamilton Centre, NDP
All right. As fortune would have it, I've been tasked with bringing back the recommendations to the committee, so I'll get on that post-haste and see if I can meet that deadline.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
You can table them with the clerk so we have the 48 hours, and then....
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Thanks.
Is there anything else for the good of the nation?
That was a good meeting. The meeting is now adjourned.