I'll do the best I can. I don't want to be presumptuous in any way.
My experience is that all elected members I have met with, from all parties, want to see things improve. I've worked with people from all parties for many years, and I've always been convinced of that.
I think that as politicians we often tend to say, “Well, we've done this or we've invested $500 million or we've created this new program, so what do you mean, we're not doing anything?”
In my view, the one thing that I would like to see of Parliament, irrespective of the governing party--which has changed quite often in the last few years--is to talk not about initiatives, but about outcomes, measurable outcomes.
If Parliament tasks this mighty and very resourceful civil service that we have in Canada to produce results that are measurable, then regardless of which party you're in, you will have something you can look at every year or every two years. Outcomes means looking at whether we are actually lowering the rate of poverty in Canada or whether children are going to school. There are ways to measure that.
Last year our office initiated a report on the state of children and youth. We found out that New Brunswick is--like Canada, I'm sure--data rich but information poor. There are a lot of statistics out there, but not many people take the time to analyze them to try to find out what they're really saying, so we've taken it upon ourselves every year to measure child obesity rates, child poverty rates, and teen pregnancy. No matter what government is in power, if a minister tells me they've created this new program or they're investing more money in schools or in health and it is not measurable, in my view it doesn't exist. I think that's true in the business world as well as in the political world. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist; if you can't measure it, you don't know if it's being done.
Officials at the federal level can establish benchmarks that you can look at, regardless of the party you're in, in one or two or three years. They're very resourceful. There are thousands and thousands of civil servants who are very smart. They can establish the benchmarks. Whether you're in government or in opposition, in five years you can know if we made real progress in attacking these issues.
What's embarrassing to me is to see native indigenous Canadians. This is the richest country in the world, and at times the best country in the world in terms of social indices, yet we still support having some of our citizens living in these kinds of conditions.
Today, as we speak, the minister in Fredericton is announcing in the legislature that she is asking my office to review child welfare services on the 15 first nations in New Brunswick. One thing that I'll want to do is establish benchmarks so that we know that we're actually making progress, not that we're spending billions of dollars. That's easy to do, particularly at the federal level, but in my view, measuring where we're going and if we're meeting our goals is the key.