Evidence of meeting #28 for Public Accounts in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was departments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Yes, but even that.... I don't think it's recording the vote amount, so that database itself won't give you the amount of the lapses.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Comptroller General, in order to ensure financial stringency, due diligence, etc., what would you do to change this? The systems adapt. You can have information at the tip of your fingers because you are giving advice to the government. You need to know what is being spent and how much money the government has.
You do not know what lapsed, so it becomes problematic, because the government could have utilized that lapsed money for that emergency. Everybody knew the economic crisis was coming, so why did you need that $3 billion in extraordinary money? There was no need for it. That's the question. That is why, with $3 billion that was unaccounted for, there were no strings attached to it, but it was given for stimulating the economy.
Now, as an accountant, as a CA--and I know you're a CA--
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
--would your code of ethics even allow you to do those things? It is very important. I know they are older financial statements; I have worked with financial statements in government. I am very perturbed that the gentlemen across talks about how it doesn't matter if it's an allocation, but the expenditure is the flow of the money, and nobody can tell me whether it's flowing or not. It will lapse. It will go back to the consolidated revenue fund and nobody will know about it.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
If I could just make a clarification, when money lapses in the 2008-09 year, you can't actually use that in a following year. So in other words--
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I know, but had you prepared in October, if the government had prepared, it would have been allocated. It has enough powers within Parliament to say, “Here is what is coming down the pipeline, I'd like to be ready for it, and therefore I won't go to the unprecedented $3 billion.” That's all.
I'm sorry, you can finish answering the question.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
The fiscal group at the Department of Finance actually does look at the overall requirements of government from the point of view of figuring out how much the government needs to borrow. They do look at the overall lapse situation and spending information. These are the folks who do the Fiscal Monitor, so they do have information on that and they do some tracking of that.
I don't know how up to date their information is. Maybe Bill could help me with that. But on the finance department from a fiscal management point of view, I wouldn't want to give the impression they're not doing this, because they certainly do it. From the point of view of the $3 billion in vote 35, that really is a matter of requiring the authority to provide some cash bridging. It's more an authority issue than it is what I would call a fiscal framework issue, if I could put it that way.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you, Ms. Ratansi and Mr. Monette.
Mr. Weston, for three minutes.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
Going back to this theme, again, because I'm not an accountant, I really need to get it in a simple way. Your mandate is to deal with what has been spent, not what is being spent, right? In other words, from what you said when you referred to other departments or other agencies being more appropriate to address this type of question, am I to understand that the reason is that your mandate is different?
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
The prime mandate of the Comptroller General is to make sure the people in the departments do things properly. In other words, because the government is so big and you've got 150 organizations consolidated in the public accounts, you want to make sure the chief financial officer and the audit executive in each one of those organizations are doing their jobs right and making sure the right safeguards are in place. So that's a huge part of the mandate.
Another part of the mandate is that at the end of the year we do the Public Accounts of Canada, which we of course bring to this committee. And that isn't accounting, but it does look backwards; it doesn't look forward.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
At what has been done.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
So just as Humphrey Bogart said to Lauren Bacall as she walked into the wrong gin joint in the wrong town, we're the wrong committee asking the wrong guy the wrong question.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Well, I hope I'm being helpful with that explanation of how the system works.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
Okay.
So looking a little forward, I understand that on Friday what we're voting on--even though I'm not an accountant--is supplementary estimates, and it's the supplementary estimates that will allow us as government to expend money in the future, right?
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
So if we don't get this vote passed on Friday, then the result will be that we can't expend money.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
If there's an election, what happens is this. Let's say the supply wasn't passed, and this Friday there's the main supply, which I think is just under $60 billion, about $59 billion. Then there's also the supplementary estimates, which are about $5 billion. So that will be voted on this Friday. If for some reason that wasn't passed by Parliament, then what would happen is that the government would use Governor General warrants.
Now, Governor General warrants have limitations as to what they can and can't be used for. So you have to go out to the departments and ask that they look through their different requirements and figure out where there are problem areas. For example, when I was at National Defence, when we looked at warrants there were some things we couldn't do because we needed to do a vote transfer.
Again, I apologize for getting technical here.
Often departments need to transfer money between votes, and the Governor General can't do that. So you need to look at the impact on each department, as to what they would and would not be able to do with the Governor General warrants.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you very much, Mr. Weston.
On behalf of the committee, I want to thank you, Mr. Monette, for coming here and helping us with what I think we all realize is a complicated issue. The inter-workings of finance within government and government agencies is not a simple science, and the whole issue of the way government money is allocated is a complicated area. So we want to thank you for your explanations. We want to thank you for being here this afternoon.
We're going to another section of the meeting, but do you have any closing or final comments, either Mr. Matthews or Mr. Monette?
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The only thing I'd want to say, and I think I've said this before, is that this committee is really important in terms of accountability, and I think my job as a public servant is to support that and to answer as best I can. I hope we've done that, and I look forward to supporting the committee in the future on any issues you may have.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you very much.
We will now adjourn for 30 seconds.
[Proceedings continue in camera]