Evidence of meeting #30 for Public Accounts in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was years.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
John Williams Conservative Edmonton—St. Albert, AB
Is it complex because we made it that way, with Treasury Board's myriad of rules? Or can it be unbound to get down to something...? It can't be that much more difficult than a corporation.
As an Individual
It is, at least by all the testimony I've had. I've talked to people who left the public service as deputy ministers and became heads of corporations. The private sector is much more two-dimensional. In government, you're always dealing with ambiguity, contradictions, and cross-currents.
One of the things I found when I did that study.... I talked to three or four serving federal deputy ministers who had been provincial deputies. They all remarked on how much more complicated Ottawa was, and most particularly, they said, the role of the central agencies. In a province, the central agencies are small. They don't have anything like the power the Treasury Board and the Department of Finance and most particularly the Privy Council have in Ottawa. That's just the way successive governments and successive prime ministers have chosen to function in government.
Conservative
As an Individual
I don't know. Up to a point, perhaps, but the demands from the public on government have increased. The public wants government to be more accountable than it used to be, and accountable in more ways than it used to be. That tends to multiply the complexities rather than simplify them. You might be able to simplify some aspects of government.
Something I did not mention in my opening remarks, but which I think is a quite important undertaking, is that the President of the Treasury Board and the Prime Minister really agreed with the observations the Auditor General and Judge Gomery made: you have too many regulations; you have too much red tape.
Mr. Baird announced last April that he wanted to reduce that by 50%. There's a question of how you qualify it, but the point is that there is an attempt being made to simplify that aspect of government, and three very expert people have been working on it. They'll be giving their report to the government in about three weeks. I attended a meeting with them in Toronto last week.
I would think that might be an interesting subject for this committee to take a look at, at some point, because it's going to be an example of an attempt to simplify government, and see what you make of it.
Conservative
John Williams Conservative Edmonton—St. Albert, AB
Is that the blue ribbon panel on grants and contributions?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
We actually met with them, too, Mr. Kroeger.
Thank you very much, Mr. Williams. Thank you, Mr. Kroeger.
Mr. Christopherson for eight minutes, please.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much for your presentation. It was fascinating. There are so many different directions in which to go.
Let me just pick up on the $6.81. I appreciated where you were coming from and I could understand the impracticality of it, almost the national embarrassment. It just makes us look small time, petty, and for the most part we don't expect to be, and we aren't, treated that way when we travel anywhere. So I understand that part of it.
But the flip side of this issue is this. If the Auditor General chose to go in and do a review and one of the strongest criticisms was that over and over and over again the responsible person, up to and including the deputy minister, allowed clear guidelines to just be ignored, we'd be up in arms. What is it about a clearly defined allowance, spelled out in black and white, that a deputy minister doesn't seem to understand or can't impose on the people he or she supervises?
Where do we get that balance? Do you build it in by providing the deputy with the flexibility? Is it just the lack of a mandate to say, within $20 to $50, in certain cases, the deputy can waive it so that we don't have what appears to be petty? How do we deal with that?
As an Individual
That last formula is the way I would suggest we try to deal with it.
On the one hand, it makes no sense to say this figure is set in cement and you can never depart from it under any circumstances. On the other hand, you obviously don't want a system in which it's, “Oh well, that's just a rule.” What you want is reasonable latitude for people to take account of circumstances, to exercise judgment, and if they break a rule, ask them why. If they have a fairly good reason, I'll go along with that. Accept that a lot of different circumstances can arise in a government where deputies and assistant deputies, or whomever, need to make judgment calls. In terms of how government looks to the public, instead of being rigidly bureaucratic, the ability to do sensible things in situations is really quite important for the reputation not of a particular government but of government as an institution.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Your point is well taken. It's just that we are left with that other side.
Again, when you mentioned the dilemma that hypothetically could happen within a ministry, where somebody is saying, “Wait a minute, we don't want to get hauled in front of the public accounts committee with the deputy and all the mess that entails”, that's music to our ears.
In the example given, I understand that you wouldn't be totally up to speed on the details. That's totally understandable. But in that scenario, we would love that somebody in that process said, “Wait a minute, what if we get hauled in front of the public accounts committee and have to account for our decisions here?” That's actually music to our ears.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Well, that's good, because this is the one non-partisan—as much as we can—non-political arena where there's accountability with people who have the authority to demand it.
Do you have a jurisdiction in mind that you think has struck a good balance between holding to the point on things and making sure that things are clear, that deputies know what their mandate is and where the lines are, versus that discretion that you were looking for in the overall system? Do you know of an entity, either provincial or international, that gets close to striking that balance and that stands out in your mind?
As an Individual
No, I'm afraid I've been out of government too long to have that kind of specific knowledge. I'm sure there are some places, although there can't be all that many, because everybody is risk averse. Everybody now thinks they have to do it by the book. That's an overreaction to what is basically a healthy phenomenon.
In other words, the existence of the Auditor General is absolutely fundamental to the good functioning of government. The existence of this committee is fundamental to the good functioning of government. The only trick is to somehow not overdo it, where everybody is so gun-shy that unless the book absolutely says I could say yes, I'm going to say no, which is the kind of thing that happens.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Part of your message today, then, is that you think in some areas the pendulum has swung too far.
As an Individual
Yes, and incidentally, that's what Mr. Baird and the Prime Minister concluded when they put the blue ribbon panel into being and said they wanted to cut all this stuff by 50%. They accepted that it's gone too far.
It's very complicated to find a way of scaling this stuff back.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
That was going to be my next question. What process do you adopt to begin that?
As an Individual
I hope, again, that the committee will actually call the blue ribbon panel, when you find an opportunity to do so. There are a couple of ways you can do it. First of all, who do you put on the panel? Well, people on the panel are the former secretary of the federal Treasury Board, a former NDP cabinet minister in Ontario, who's now running the United Way of Greater Toronto—
As an Individual
--yes, Frances--who has functioned as a big non-governmental organization trying to deal with the government, and thirdly, somebody from the private sector, coming back to Mr. Williams' question, Marc Tellier, who's running the Yellow Pages corporation, so he looks at it from the private sector perspective. Then what you do is you provide Treasury Board officials, which has been done, to work with them to give them the really detailed support on why these things are there, and, finally, they can invite people to come in.
Last Thursday, there were 30 of us who went to Toronto and spent six or seven hours in dialogue with them on how they were getting along and where they were pointed. Those are all things that you can do, but it is complicated and intricate, and it is impossible to expect a minister to know about this. This is about the wiring diagrams of government. You can't expect ministers or members of Parliament to do it, but it's a good thing to find out a way of having it done.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Interesting.
Apparently with Gomery you had some very serious concerns about going the accounting officer route, and then when it appeared in Bill C-2, something gave you a higher comfort level. Can you express what that was, what led you to go from no to yes?
As an Individual
If I may, Mr. Chairman, I'd actually like to deal with a little bit more than just the accounting officer.
As an Individual
The problem that I and many people, many former officials, had with Justice Gomery's second report was that it said that public servants should have, and have, a separate constitutional personality from the government the voters send them. Now, the basic principle in government, as it functions, is elected people are boss. At the end of the day, what elected people want to do and be accountable for, they have a right to do, as long as it's not illegal. That's really quite basic.
Justice Gomery had a different take on it. He particularly said, and this is the British accounting officer theory, any time your minister wants to do something that you don't think is a good idea, you get a written instruction to demonstrate that you didn't go along with that.
Ministers are people whom you deal with every day, every week. You can't go around asking for written instruction every time there's a disagreement between the two of you. You have to have a working partnership.
The other thing is that from the point of view of most officials and most former officials, the principle that the minister is in charge and that ministerial responsibility applies is very important. What was ingenious about the Federal Accountability Act, which, when I looked at it, solved all of the problems I had had with the British system, was that it said, first of all, officials function within a system of ministerial responsibility--elected people are in charge, you don't have government by the unelected--and number two, if you have a disagreement, there's a particular way of dealing with it.
You see, there were two conflicting pieces of legislation. All the departmental acts read that the minister has the management and direction of the department, but the Financial Administration Act says the deputy minister has certain responsibilities vis-à-vis the Treasury Board. How do you square that? Well, this squares it. It says that you function within a system of ministerial responsibility, but if the minister wants to do something that you think is improper, you, as the deputy, take it to the Secretary of the Treasury Board, you talk about it, and you say, “What do you think?” If the Secretary of the Treasury Board shares your view that this shouldn't happen, you report that back to the minister. If the minister says, “I want to do it anyway”—it's the minister's right—the next step is for the minister to deal with the ministers of the Treasury Board.
Now, the attractive feature of that is, instead of having officials vetoing what ministers do, it gets settled between elected people, the ministers of the Treasury Board and the minister of the department. Of course, ultimately, a matter could be referred to the Prime Minister, but it preserves that principle that I've always thought, and that most officials and former officials think, is really important: elected people are in charge.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you, Mr. Christopherson, and thank you, Mr. Kroeger.
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, you have eight minutes.