Public Accounts Committee on Oct. 24th, 2006

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

Thank you very much for your comments, Mr. Williams.

There are a couple of issues I want to address. You mentioned non-partisanship, and Mr. Laforest mentioned the same issue, which is that it can never be divorced from a parliamentary system. I tried to make the same point.

There's no naiveté in proposing that members of Parliament should check their coats at the door when they walk in; however, I think one of the things we're starting to see is that with public accounts committees, in a sense, there's no bubble when MPs walk in.

Mr. Murphy, when you were in Charlottetown, you mentioned this at our conference--that of course public accounts comes right after question period. One of the challenges of having the kind of system we have, where the Auditor General is entirely dependent on legislators to hold the government to account through issuing recommendations, is that it must be very hard for members of Parliament to make that switch, to come out of a question period, the most partisan hour of the day, and go into a public accounts committee meeting that is supposed to be—as you said, if you want to use that continuum example—much more non-partisan.

One of the things we've been seeing in some of the meetings we've had in other jurisdictions is that often newly appointed members of public accounts committees, in newly elected legislatures, don't realize that. There's not much of an understanding of why a public accounts committee is different from other committees.

The other thing is to go back to the observation we made, not in making a normative statement that public accounts committee should be non-partisan, but that they function better, more effectively, when they are non-partisan. I can think of one jurisdiction I visited recently and that I'm working with in which the public accounts committee is paralyzed over a partisan issue. What we're trying to do is put some larger governance issues on the table, so that we can try to get the members of that committee back together talking about an issue that they can agree on.

On the survey issue, I certainly understand your comment that it's not the role of the public accounts committee to serve tea and make witnesses feel good when they're here. But one of the things we've noticed, both in the PAC survey we've done and also in another report, one on departmental public performance reports called Users and Uses, that one of the major cross-cutting themes is the difficulty between bureaucrats and politicians in communicating in the same language. There tends to be frustration on both sides. On the side of the politicians, politicians get very frustrated when bureaucrats start using very technical language that it's not their job to understand. They're dealing with a great number of issues. But bureaucrats tend to also back off and shut down when they perceive that they may find themselves in the middle of a partisan trap.

To use the example of departmental performance reports, we've done a very interesting study on them and have found that in most cases the intended users of those reports—namely legislators, the media, and the public, but let's take legislators—aren't using them. Again, it's because the communication is between two different languages.

The purpose in putting out that idea about the survey was just to ask whether the committee—and I'm not suggesting necessarily this committee, but PACs in general—would be interested in getting a better sense of how to elicit more open questions and how to make witnesses feel more comfortable answering questions, rather than using jargon that makes it very difficult for them to be understood.

I thank you again for your questions, Mr. Williams. I'll stop there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mrs. Black, please.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate being at this committee today. It's my first time at a public accounts committee, and I'm finding it quite interesting. I agree that this committee is where democratic accountability really stands. It is a very important committee.

I know Justice Gomery recommended that the resources for this public accounts committee be expanded. Could you talk about how they could or should be expanded and how any additional resources could be used by this committee?

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

For your first time on the committee, that's a zinger of a question.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

I've had some help from the full-time members of the committee.

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

I want to make a couple of observations before I weigh in on that question. Obviously I understand that as part of the Federal Accountability Act there is a parliamentary budget office, and I think it's still under discussion as to what role that office will play in supporting the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. I think it's also going to support the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates and the Standing Committee on Finance—at least that was my understanding. So there is some question as to what role this potentially could play in increasing the support for oversight committees. Also, I think Mr. Franks made some comments about that when he was here on June 22.

I'll give you my honest opinion. I think the best people to ask would be the researchers from the Library of Parliament, who have been serving the committee for a number of years and would have a really strong sense of what the individual needs of the committee would be.

When we talk about area number four, “Adding Value: reporting and follow-up”, two things come to mind. One is the issue of following up on a government's recommendations. In other words, the public accounts committee issues recommendations that go to the government, and then 150 days later the government is obliged to respond. The question is, when we're talking about the value added by the committee, we're saying, is the public accounts committee actually checking afterwards to see to what extent those recommendations were implemented? That's something that requires a lot of resources. That is the kind of issue that I would imagine a committee would want to look at.

The other thing is that in some jurisdictions, committees are looking at more than the legislative auditor's reports. They're holding their own studies. In one jurisdiction I'm think of—there are actually more—they're looking at the departments' public performance reports and rating them. Similarly, they're looking at contracts over $25,000. These types of activities require a lot of extra research assistance, and this would probably be the area that if we look at our strategy, I imagine would probably be the most effective area.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

The Library of Parliament's research staff has already done a paper on the potential use of additional committee resources, but I thought that your opinion might be helpful to the committee as well.

You mentioned departmental performance reports already. I understand that this committee has expressed some concerns about them. I wondered if you would give us the benefit of your expertise on the idea of reviewing these reports.

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

I'd be delighted to. I appreciate the question because we have a project right now at CCAF. As I mentioned, we put out this report recently, called Users and Uses, which concluded in essence that the intended users of performance reports, namely the media, the members of Parliament or legislators, and private organizations or NGOs are not using those reports.

I think our initial focus was mostly on the legislators and why they're not using them. In my response to Mr. Williams, I sort of implied that part of the reason is the language used. The type of information provided is not something that legislators are finding useful.

At the federal level, there was a very good report done in 2003. It was a subcommittee on the estimates process. There were some very good recommendations in that report. I think they were talking more here about the role of the estimates committee, but I realize that PAC also reviewed an Auditor General's report a couple of years ago on departmental performance reports.

One of the recommendations was that it's understandable that legislative committees really should be the ones using DPRs in the estimates process. But when you're talking about rating the readability of the reports, one suggestion was that another committee might do that.

For the last five years, B.C.'s Auditor General has actually audited—if you want to use the word “audited”—or reviewed and graded departmental performance reports. In theory they're supposed to go to the PAC. In the case of that legislature, as you know, it had only two opposition members, and I don't think the PAC functioned as a result of this. It's another contingency our system relies upon. In theory there would have been a role for the PAC there to look at those reports.

I don't know if that's a helpful answer.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

No, I do appreciate it.

My colleague Joe Comartin, a member of Parliament, commented this week on the fact that MPs may not have all the skills, or be trained enough, to deal with annual estimates. This committee spends two meetings a year, I think, looking at the public accounts.

Do you think committee members and members of Parliament could benefit from some additional training or staff resources, or from being permitted more time to examine the public accounts?

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

It's interesting, because in some of the meetings I've had where we've talked about departmental performance reports and getting members to read them, often the response has been that in fact it's the staff who need the reports to be readable. They have to break down the reports and brief their members on them.

It has nothing to do, of course, with the intelligence of parliamentarians. It has to do with the fact that they're extremely busy. They're dealing with a multitude of subjects on a daily basis, and they don't have time to get in deep and technical on any one issue.

Clearly the role of staff members in that process is absolutely essential, no question about it.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mrs. Black.

Mr. Fitzpatrick.

[Brian Fitzpatrick, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I'll just make a few opening comments or observations on witnesses. This is the committee where, in some instances, the witnesses should be feeling pain when they come here and a lot more pain after they leave. This is not the forum for compassionate conservatism or anything else; it's an area for compassion.

I'm going to make a couple of observations contrasting the private sector with the way government delivers things. I'm sorry if this illustrates a bias, but the systems approach and the total quality management approach in the delivery of programs and services in the private sector is to get into continuous improvement, with active managers who find problems at the onset, find the root cause, and fix the problems so that they don't repeat themselves. With government, we deliver programs and services, and the train wrecks come here. It's an end inspection system.

Most of those people who are in TQM do not believe in end inspection systems. Their systems are so strong that they're not even concerned about failures at the end of the system, and the data generally proves them true. We have an end inspection system here. We deal with failures in the delivery of programs and services. We beat up on witnesses, and so on.

What I generally find is that the bureaucrats will let these things go on forever and a day unless they're discovered. And there is a bias on it. Quite literally, we're trying to do some things with government that I'm not exactly sure government can always do. For bureaucrats, if they're given the gun registry program or something and it's failing and not working, the solution is that if you just give us more manpower or more resources, more computer programs, and spend more money on it, we'll eventually get this thing fixed. I actually think there are elected politicians who figure that if you spent enough money on it, you could get pigs to fly. But there is a limit to what government can do.

I'm biased on that point. We should know what government can do and make it do a good job, but a lot of it should be evaluated to the limits of what government can be doing too, because quite often this is what's happening on these committees. I'd cite the Indian Affairs reports that have come out of this committee over and over again. The same failures are happening over and over again. It's a failure of government.

I'm not exactly sure in my own mind that the solutions we're always proposing are adopted. I'm not sure whether the solutions always get to the root cause of the problem and get the problem fixed either. It's easy, always, to say that the solution is to hire more bureaucrats and spend more money and get more resources there. The private sector people would really dispute that.

So it's our approach to dealing with things. But those are just some observations I'd have on this thing.

The Indian Affairs one really bothers me. I think some things have come back here two or three times, and I'm not exactly sure we've made one iota of progress on them. We have some high-priced people in the bureaucracy who are supposed to be making sure that these things aren't happening and that people are getting first-class service and we're getting to the root of the problems. It's rather frustrating, I think, for anybody who's on here.

I certainly don't know, Geoff, where you're coming from with making witnesses feel more comfortable in this committee, because it's not a committee that I would feel very happy about, with some of these instances, if the people responsible for these programs slept when they got home at night after being here, because they don't deserve to sleep well.

Those are some of my comments, for what they're worth. I wish we had more things in the government that were proactive. I scratch my head as to what the Comptroller General is here for. It seems to me the Comptroller General should be preventing these train wrecks from happening in the first place so that the Auditor General doesn't have reports to give us and we don't have to have these meetings. But those are a few comments I'm just getting off my chest on this matter.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Do you have a response?

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

Thank you very much, Mr. Fitzpatrick, for your comments.

As I recollect from my university days, when it comes to a comparison between the private sector and the public sector in terms of accountability, people say that in the private sector you can make 10% mistakes but turn a profit and be okay, whereas if you try that in the public sector, getting 90% right and 10% wrong, you're in deep trouble. So I think there is sometimes a public sector context there that makes it very difficult.

In terms of the witnesses, again, I would just note the larger issue that CCAF is interested in addressing, which is how to improve the communication--again, no cozy tea parties--between the two sides so that both sides are looking at solutions, and the political side is not getting frustrated by stonewalling. That's really the spirit by which we make that proposal. But I think you're right that there's quite a challenge in that regard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I have a couple of questions before I to go to Mr. Poilievre.

I have two questions, Mr. Dubrow. One involves government responses. That's one area this committee doesn't seem to follow up on too closely. We sometimes spend a lot of time and effort and energy doing our reports. We make, as far as I'm concerned, good recommendations. A lot of times the recommendations that come back from government are satisfactory, but in some cases they're not. Really, I don't see any mechanism for what we can do. I guess we could write another report, but that just gets back into a continuum.

Are there any best practices out there from an international perspective--I don't think you're going to see it from a provincial perspective--where this particular issue is handled better than we handle it?

I can give you an obvious example here. We filed a report with the previous government dealing with ministerial responsibility and a few issues. It arose basically from the sponsorship issue. We made four recommendations, and when they came back, basically all were unsatisfactory, as far as I'm concerned. I think the committee members agree with me on that.

We re-filed the same report with the new government. Three of the responses were satisfactory, but one recommendation, dealing with tenure of deputies, was basically the same answer, that really it was none of our business; it's a flexibility issue, and the government will do whatever it wants to do. I don't think that's very satisfactory, myself.

Do you have any comment on best practices that are out there from an international perspective?

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

I was just browsing through the best practices research we did. It's about four pages long, so there's not a whole lot there. I'm not seeing anything in the area of follow-up. We have something on exercising leadership, building and sustaining capacity, and achieving and demonstrating results, but I'm not seeing much in the area of follow-up.

One of the really exciting things about doing this kind of work is that one gets an idea after a while--and this came up in CCPAC too--of the importance of that issue, and how committees are concerned about it. That can then affect CCAF's work agenda. We can then go back and say this is an issue that we really should be looking at in much more depth.

So I think what you're saying is that international best practices is an issue that we need to have some information about. There's nothing in the guide, but it doesn't preclude us from getting anything in the future on that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I have just one final question. Do you have two or three things you could suggest to this committee, things that we should be doing but are not doing right now?

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

Over the course of my presentation, I tried to very subtly...although probably it would have been useful if I'd had a list of them. I mentioned the survey, which didn't go over too well; that's okay.

I'd have to go back over my notes. In my presentation I tried to drop in a few suggestions. I didn't list them, and I apologize for that. I've kind of drawn a blank now that you've asked me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay.

We're going to have a brief intervention from Mr. Poilievre and then Mr. Williams, very briefly.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Thank you.

You had said that the new parliamentary budget office would interact with this committee and government operations, and actually you were correct. I shook my head to the negative because I misheard you; I thought you had said the director of public prosecution.

So I just wanted to point out that you were right and I was wrong.

Thanks.

[Geoffrey Dubrow]

That's very kind of you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mr. Williams.

[John Williams, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

One issue you mentioned, Mr. Dubrow, was that only eight jurisdictions, I believe it was, have access to cabinet documents. We proved in the sponsorship inquiry by the public accounts committee that when the government reports to Parliament and Parliament asks for cabinet documents, Parliament receives cabinet documents. It's a fundamental concept of our Westminster democracy that government reports to Parliament, and if we do not have access to cabinet documents, then who does have access to them? I think the answer would be nobody, and that therefore is undemocratic.

this leads me to my point, Mr. Chair. I would like to compliment CCAF and Mr. Dubrow on one thing he has done. In my work in the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption, one of the things we talk about is education for parliamentarians so that they can understand what the role of oversight actually is.

If some jurisdictions in Canada have allowed the erosion of their powers and authority to the point where they do not have access to cabinet documents, that just demonstrates the need for education, along the lines of what Mr. Dubrow is doing, so that we do not give up the powers we have and should have and should absolutely retain. If we don't have access to cabinet documents, then it's all for naught, it's just a show and a façade, and we go through the motions without any real capacity to hold governments politically accountable—and I underline “politically accountable”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mr. Williams, we in this committee don't have access to cabinet documents. We did in that one specific instance in the sponsorship issue, but I've never seen cabinet documents.