Public Accounts Committee on Feb. 5th, 2007

[Paule Brunelle, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Ms. Brunelle.

Mr. Poilievre, you have six minutes.

You're on.

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

No, I'm not on. I didn't ask to be on.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

You asked to be on.

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

No.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mr. Williams. You've been promoted.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Well, Mr. Chairman—

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

He's my spokesman.

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

—I'm looking at page 41 of the performance report and I find that the Auditor General is running a deficit, Mr. Chairman. Perhaps they can tell us what's going on here, because I thought deficits were a thing of the past and that we had outlawed these things in Canada, Mr. Chairman. Now we have the Auditor General running a deficit, as shown on page 41 of the—

[Sheila Fraser]

I can assure the committee that we do not run a deficit each year. This is an accumulated deficit, just as the Government of Canada has an accumulated deficit of some $500 billion. Ours is $8 million, and it's largely related to employee future benefits, which are recorded in the statements of the office.

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

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that explanation.

The other question I wanted to ask is this. You do international audits, as well as those of the Government of Canada and of some crown corporations, and so on. Are these international audits publicly available at all, or do you just turn them over to the entity, and that's it?

[Sheila Fraser]

We have, until now, done two international audits. We are the auditors of the International Civil Aviation Organization, and we were, until just recently, auditors of UNESCO. I believe the statements are on their websites, but I am not sure of that. I believe they are posted.

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

And is your full report on the website too?

[Sheila Fraser]

I would think so, but our report is presented to the general assemblies of these two bodies. We make appearances before them—

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

So they are public reports.

[Sheila Fraser]

They are all public reports, yes.

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

This is a concern I've had for many years, Mr. Chairman. I'm just looking at the estimates, and of course this year we're doing both the estimates and the performance report together. I've always wanted this year's estimates to come with two or three years' forward projection, and the performance report to come with the actual numbers and with a couple of years' historical data. And of course, we only have one going forward and one coming back. But also, because of the format, they're very hard to compare one with the other—very hard.

Do you think Parliament should perhaps strike a committee to try to bring these two together? Parliamentarians have a great difficulty understanding these numbers, and when the plans and priorities and what you intend to spend can't be compared with the performance report on what you did spend, that adds extra confusion to the issue.

[Sheila Fraser]

I think it would be most beneficial if members of Parliament looked at how these documents could be improved.

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

And my last question, Mr. Chairman is, where are we on accrual budgeting? Is there any progress?

[Sheila Fraser]

The government operations committee has made a recommendation to government. I have not seen government's response to it.

In the hearings, though, I would say that the government seemed more willing to consider the issue, at least. We'll have to wait to see what the government response is to that committee report.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Williams.

Before we go to Mr. Christopherson, I want to follow up on one issue Mr. Williams raised, Mrs. Fraser, and that has to do with the reports. You see other departmental reports, do you?

[Sheila Fraser]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Yes? Okay.

They're very important, but something very few parliamentarians read, I would think. Probably I could count on my hand.... They pay cursory attention to them.

One of the issues I have is the length of them. Yours is 62 pages, but I've seen a lot that must be 300 or 400 pages long; they're that thick. They really become almost irrelevant for a parliamentarian. We all can read, but we don't have the time to go through a 400-page document.

Even with your own report, with 62 pages, is there any possibility of reducing it to 20 pages?

[Sheila Fraser]

Yes, Mr. Chair, there probably is. There are sections of it that are quite long just because of the financial statements, which take up several pages. We do try, at the beginning, to give a bit of a summary of what the report says.

I think the issue—if we think of Mr. Williams's suggestion of a committee—goes deeper than that. To compare it to the private sector, if you own shares in a corporation, you'll get the annual report and all the proxies and all that. I'm not sure that many people actually read those either, but they rely on their broker or someone who's done the research and analysis to give them a short buy-sell-keep summary. One thing that parliamentarians might want to think of is whether you need some sort of analysis capacity as well that will go through all these detailed reports for you and then give you some sort of more summary analysis, because I think we recognize that members of Parliament don't have the time to read these things.