Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I thank you for inviting me to give you a historical perspective of the role of the secretary to the Treasury Board. I would also like to thank the four members of the Committee for taking the time earlier this afternoon to meet with me as well as my colleague, a member of the blue ribbon panel looking into the grants and contributions programs of Canada.
I understand from your remarks that the committee wants to focus primarily on the role of the Treasury Board Secretariat in the context of the accounting officer provisions of the Federal Accountability Act. While I'm not in a position to say much about this matter in the current environment, I'll be pleased to discuss how we viewed accountability issues when I was Secretary of the Treasury Board in 1989-1994.
In preparing to meet with you, I reread some of the presentations I made to public service managers in the early 1990s. They reminded me that there were two dramatic differences in the environment then as compared with today. The first was that there was a widely shared assumption that the vast majority of people in government could be trusted to perform their duties with integrity. Second, senior administrators were preoccupied with cost control and productivity improvement.
With regard to the first point, in my comments on the federal public service reform in the nineties, in a study for the Office of the Auditor General, I wrote:
[...] we can rejoice in the fact that the management program is not founded, as is the case in many countries, on the need to eliminate corruption and incompetence on the part of civil servants. If the management program reaches the politic profile, it is almost always focused on economic matters. In Canada, what kicked off a reform is simply based on the fact that Canadians would like to pay less for the federal services they feel they have the right to expect.
I doubt that someone would write such things today.
I still believe that the vast majority of people in government act with integrity, but the public perception is not what it was 15 years ago.
The second difference is equally important. We were desperately trying to reduce unnecessary administrative costs in an environment where real operating budgets were being reduced each year. There had been eleven expenditure reduction exercises in the previous decade. The public service in 1992 was almost identical in size to what it had been five years earlier. Given the population increase and the net addition of new programs, we estimated the public service was doing about 10% more work than five years earlier with the same number of people, which can be equated to a 2% productivity increase each year, and we were proud of that.
To maintain these productivity increases the Treasury Board Secretariat in those days believed it crucial to do what it could to reduce unproductive rules and streamline administered processes. As part of the public service 2000 initiative the Treasury Board ended person-year controls, introduced single operating budgets, allowed year-end carry-forwards, and made optional a number of common services. The secretariat had a shared management agenda process with each deputy minister and a departmental management assessment process that affected the deputies' performance rating from the clerk and the Prime Minister.
The resource environment is different today. According to the public accounts, personnel costs in the federal government in 2005-2006 are worth $30 billion, up 8% from the year earlier and 55% from 1994-1995. It would appear that the focus has shifted away from administrative productivity.
One might expect that the substantially increased cost of operating the government would have resulted in better service. As those committee members who were at lunch with my colleague on the blue ribbon panel know from our consultations, and frankly from what you had told us about your experiences in your constituencies with respect to the administration of grants and contributions, all of the people we have consulted say that in the last few years they have become more and more frustrated in their attempts to interact with a federal government that they see is more interested in providing forms to fill out than in providing good service.
Similar conclusions can be found in the May 2005 report of the Standing Committee on Development of Human Resources and also in the May 2006 report of the Auditor General on the management of voted grants and contributions.
How can a decline in administrative efficiency be good for Canada when we are falling behind in international comparisons of productivity? How can an increase in form-filling help our government deal creatively with the thorny policy issues on its plate today?
In the early 1990s we liked to think that the federal government was managing to do more with less. For a period in the mid-1990s Canadians accepted that the government was going to have to do less with a lot less, but in the view of many of those involved in grants and contributions, the federal government is now doing less with more. Surely we can do better.
I recognize that the number of revelations in the last five years have reduced public confidence in federal institutions and that government and Parliament must institute special measures to restore that essential trust. But I hope that sooner, rather than later, the focus will return to productivity, to reducing the paper burden and red tape so that confident, trusted, and accountable public servants can deliver better results for the taxpayer's dollar.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.