Thank you.
As you see in slide 4, the public accounts committee is the committee responsible for overseeing that parliamentary decisions have been implemented in the way Parliament intended them to be. An effective PAC can have a huge impact on how the public sector is run, and they do this by ensuring that recommendations issued by the Auditor General are implemented.
You might be thinking that your constituents don't care about your work on the public accounts committee, and sadly for me, a lot of them might not have heard of it. However, if you take a minute to sit back and maybe even jot down what your constituents' biggest concerns are, I think you'll agree with me that all these concerns have something to do with spending implications and that your constituents do care about how their tax dollars are spent.
Your role on PACP is different from that on other committees. You won't be discussing the creation of policy, and you shouldn't be discussing policies at all.
As an example, there's no point in talking about whether a hospital should be built once it's already built. Instead, your focus might be on the process of how it was built. Is there actually a hospital there? Is it a liquor store? Was the process followed the way Parliament intended it to be? Your actions on this committee will improve how the public service is administered and how programs are administered, and that will have a lasting impact on the programs that follow. It's like creating the road. We may all be driving down the same road, so if you get those bumps out now, those bumps will be gone for the future. This can only happen if the deficiencies that are identified in the audit reports are corrected.
In the United Kingdom, the public accounts committee is a very sought after committee. Unfortunately, I don't always hear the same in Canada and across our provinces. You will be hearing later from four of your former chairs. They will discuss the impact that this committee had on them and the importance that they feel it can have, not only for Canada but also for themselves as politicians. In the U.K., the committee is often a stepping stone for promotion.
There are a few benefits to the committee. You'll learn a lot about how government functions. This will likely improve your overall understanding of many different departments in government because you'll be engaging in a number of different topics. One week you might be talking about immigration, and the next week, about drinking water. Your scope is very broad, but you're not expected to become an expert in all these topics on your own. You'll have support, because you're part of a system.
Slide 5 shows the system of accountability that you're part of. It shows the relationship between the audit office, government departments and Parliament. Working together, they can uphold an effective public administration.
It's the Auditor General's role to conduct audits of government departments. These audits are going to be evidence-based. They're independent and they're thorough. Audit reports will provide you with impartial and in-depth information. They study the audited organization in great detail, often spending thousands of person hours investigating the topic. That's time I'm willing to bet you don't have and your staff doesn't have, but these insights are all available for your use.
It is a symbiotic relationship. The public accounts committee depends on high-quality audit reports and the Auditor General requires the public accounts committee to be effective and to ensure that audit recommendations are taken seriously. It's not a mistake that Parliament is at the top of this diagram, because ultimately government agencies and ministries are not accountable to the audit office. They're accountable to Parliament and to PAC, because you are representing Parliament. You are the ones who are elected by the citizens of Canada.
Too often we hear a very well-intended elected official who's frustrated by reading in an audit report that deficiencies have been pointed out year after year, sometimes for as many as 13 years, and they haven't been fixed. That frustrated elected official will turn to the Auditor General and say, “Why haven't you done this? Why haven't you fixed this? You keep pointing out the problem.” The reason is that it's not the Auditor General's job. It's your job as an elected official. Most auditors general are too polite to say that. Again, the public service is accountable to you, not to the Auditor General. The Auditor General is there to provide you with the information you need.
When the system works, the result is more accountable government. As part of the system, the public accounts committee has various steps that need to be followed in order to hold the government to account. If you go to slide 6, I just want to give a reminder, before we move on to this, that public money has no party. You often hear when you're on the public accounts committee that you should be hanging up your party colours when you walk in the door—or, in this case, I guess, when you log on.
The federal committee is very fortunate, because you have an effective process in place. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about good practices. In these, in all of the foundations, you check those boxes. Often when we go into committees, there are practices that aren't being followed. We're working with those committees to figure out a way to build those practices within the environment they're operating in. It makes it more difficult for them to be effective and to function. But that's not what we're here to do today. As I said, you have all those practices in place.
If you go to slide 8, you'll see a list of activities. I won't go through all of these in detail, but this is a process that, based on our good practices, a public accounts committee ought to be following. I'll go into detail on a few of these in a few minutes, but I just want to highlight, again, that the federal committee is a model across the country. You are really looked up to and, if I do say, envied. You have highly qualified support staff who can lead you through all of this. In fact, one of your analysts literally wrote the book to guide support staff on the support they can be giving to the country. You also have a unique practice that was started when Mr. Sorenson was chairing the committee—namely, a legacy report that will help guide you as new committee members to where the committee left off before so that you can have a continuation and not a complete break from where the committee was previously.
Slide 9 is our good practices guide. I'm highlighting this just to let you know that we're not pulling these ideas out of thin air. This is based on numerous conversations with members of public accounts committees, in Canada but also globally, on the academic research on what makes committees, and in particular public accounts committees, effective.
You'll see that we have broken this down into three sections.
Slide 10 looks at foundational practices. Those are often things that tend to be based on legislation. Those are in place federally.
Slide 11 outlines the actions. The committee is following very good actions to be where you want to be.
Slide 12 talks about outputs. This really comes down to what you as individuals want to accomplish with the committee. If you want the committee to be ineffective, there are many ways you can do that, but you'll want to keep in mind that you are a cog in that system of accountability. If you're not doing your part, the rest of it fails. I can't remember offhand what the budget of the Auditor General's office is, but if you're not doing your role, you might as well not even be paying that, because all that hard work is far less effective. They really need you to be working with the department for any deficiencies that are pointed out.
You might be wondering what exactly you will be doing. I'm going to hand it over to Carol in a minute to talk about performance audits and some of the audits to give you a little more insight into that.
Prior to doing that, I want to point out that one of the activities you'll be spending a lot of your time doing and delving into the audit reports will be in hearing.
This is a public opportunity to get more information on what an audited organization is doing. You'll invite two main groups of people. One of those groups is representatives from departments. Typically that's a deputy minister, because that is the accounting officer who has the responsibility for administering the department. I think Mr. Murphy will probably discuss that in more detail. It is not the minister, despite people saying, “The buck stops with the minister. Why isn't it the minister?” It's not the minister because the minister is responsible for setting the policy direction. You'll not be focusing on policy; it's the administration of policy.
The other group that you'll be calling is a group from the Auditor General's office. With them you will be looking to find more insight into the audit findings. Your questions to the Auditor General would focus a little more on the scope of the audit so you can have a better understanding of the issues they have found.
I'm going to pass it over to Carol now and she can discuss a little more specifically exactly what the reports from the Auditor General's office will give you, what they will include and how you might want to be looking at them.
