Public Accounts Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2020

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Okay.

Go ahead, Mr. Berthold.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

I checked with the people on my side.

We have no questions and we prefer that the presentation continue.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

I appreciate all of your interventions. Certainly if it is the will of the committee to simply proceed with the presentation, perhaps we'll have an opportunity to provide our questions back to our witnesses. That's how we will finish out the meeting.

[Carol Bellringer]

Madam Chair, may I ask you a question?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Yes.

[Carol Bellringer]

May I stay on for the second half? Lesley has to go to London to do a presentation, but I'm available to stay on for the second half if you have any questions for the foundation material, I can field them as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Ms. Bellringer, you are most welcome to stay for the second half of our meeting.

Ms. Burns, I think you were about to take over the presentation. Please go ahead.

[Lesley Burns]

Thank you. I think I can get through the material and also leave some time for questions. We can, of course, come back at another time.

We offer several workshops. This is a version of our orientation. We offer a more in-depth workshop on effective questioning and also issuing recommendations. One that we did as a pilot several years ago for the federal public accounts committee, and have been back several times to do, is on reading the public accounts.

I'll return to our material about planning for now. We're at slide 23, if you want to follow along.

The most effective committees plan. Prior to going into a hearing, they'll plan their work. You'll have a method for choosing what audit reports you're going to look at and in what order. You'll probably have a steering committee set up as a shortcut to making some of those decisions at the committee. Then you'll also want to decide as a committee, in advance of a hearing or investigating a report, what your shared purpose for delving into this report is.

They say that you should be able to close your eyes in a hearing and not know what political party people are speaking from. In Yukon, they've started preparing all of their questions and then divvying them up among members. You may come up with a question or your party may come up with a question, but it might not be you asking it in committee. Those are a couple of examples of ways to be working together. Setting that shared purpose is important.

Moving on to “constructive engagement” with witnesses and presenters who come to the committee, your goal in having a hearing is to get information to end with a unanimous report. The report should be unanimous because you are giving direction to the public service on what to do. The public service is used to politicians disagreeing. It's what you do, but when you come out with a cross-party statement giving direction, it gets attention. That consensus really matters.

When you have the witnesses in front of you, you want to keep in mind that time is important. It's not just your committee time that's taking you away from other valuable work, but also the time that an audited entity spends preparing for that hearing, the time of that deputy minister in that hearing. Those things all add up.

Sometimes deputy ministers will come in front of you and won't have the answers on hand. That's understandable. Sometimes the material goes back years. There is nothing wrong with asking them to make a submission in writing. It's a good practice to have a deadline for submitting that, and if you're not sure how long it's going to take them to gather that information, it's completely fair to ask them how long they think they will need to get it to you. You have support staff who can help you follow up to get that information from the department.

Carol mentioned the “one and done” idea. You don't want them coming into that meeting and then walking out and saying “Phew, it's over.” They need to know that you're going to go back as a committee to follow up.

We have prepared some pocket cards. Some of you have seen these ones before. I will make sure that the clerk has electronic versions available to send to you, and if you want the physical versions, we could get those out to you as well. They give you some quick pointers on asking effective questions and issuing recommendations, and also on cross-party collaboration, which I'm going to get into.

Before I do that, I'm going to go ahead to slide 25, which says that “Without follow-up, there is no accountability”. That's returning to the notion that if a department walks in and says they're going to do everything that the Auditor General has recommended and here's how they're going to do it, if you don't go back and check on that—and you have methods to do that through reports that you request, the committee's progress report—you may not know whether they've done it. You can call them back for another hearing if you're concerned that progress hasn't been made. The audit office always has the option of doing a follow-up audit, if that's necessary.

I like to associate this with having teenage children. You ask if they have done their homework. Often, you probably check. Is their bedroom clean? Do you open that bedroom door and check if it's clean? If you don't, you have probably developed a lot a trust in your children. That's excellent. Maybe write a parenting book.

I'm going to touch on one last thing in terms of our good practice. The number one thing we see missing from committees that aren't effective is cross-party collaboration. I've already touched on some of the reasons it's so powerful for the public accounts committee. The reason this is such a challenge for elected officials is that it's not what you're used to doing in your job.

The analogy I like to make is to hang your party colours up at the door. Public money has no party, so when you're looking at the implementation of policy, that party affiliation is not as relevant.

Slide 30 describes some partisan behaviour. There are many different ways politicians can be partisan. Some of them are subtle and some are more obvious. You have all of the foundational structure in place in your committee to be non-partisan. You have the timing of the speakers, an opposition chair and an entrenched follow-up process. It's really up to you as individuals when you walk into that room to make the decision that you want to work towards the collective goal and have in mind that you want to improve public administration.

We have some tips on slide 31 on how you might want to go about doing that. A lot of you are probably sitting there thinking that this is a really far-fetched idea, especially coming from somebody who has never been an elected official. I am going to leave delving into that topic to the four former chairs who will be speaking after us. They can speak to you from the experience they have on the importance of collaborating with other parties and the impact that can have.

I'll turn it back over to you, Chair, for any questions from the committee.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much for your presentations.

I will now go to the list. I know that typically our first round is a six-minute round, but given the short time we have left, perhaps we could ask our members to keep their questions short. Maybe stick to one question, and then we can try to get through as many as possible.

I will move to Mr. Berthold.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you both for your presentation today. It was very informative.

My colleague Mr. Longfield will find that I will have to make extreme efforts to be non-partisan on this committee. Having said that, I have always been able to distinguish between extreme partisanship and the work of a member of Parliament. I think the new members of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts will see that this is the biggest difference between this committee and the other committees.

I saw that you offer several workshops and training sessions. Would it be possible for us to have access to these sessions to go further?

Honestly, 60 minutes isn't much. I'd like, for example, for us to look at an auditor general's report and a public accounts comptroller's report with you, so that we can really focus our questions in a non-partisan way.

[Carol Bellringer]

Maybe I'll jump in before Lesley.

The one word I know very well in French is absolument. We would very much appreciate coming back for any sessions you'd like us to guide you through.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you.

Ms. Yip is next.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

It's nice to see you again, Ms. Burns. I always find the presentations well done and important. It's nice to meet you, Ms. Bellringer.

My question is this: How do you see the role of the public accounts committee in a minority government?

[Carol Bellringer]

I've certainly observed strong majority governments working with their public accounts committee, and I operated within a minority government on the audit side with the public accounts committee.

The one element that gets complicated is the composition of the members around the public accounts committee table. It stays more balanced, if you will; it makes partisanship less of an issue, because you have more representation around the committee membership table.

Again, I think the same principles apply. It's still the case that the constitution of the House shouldn't influence the behaviour of the committee. I mean, it does, but that's the tricky goal. I will say Lesley and I were sharing examples yesterday. I'm not sure if it was harder for me as the auditor, as a witness or advisor to the committee, when they would have a big argument in the House and then come into the committee and it was all gone away, or when there was something in the House that got carried on into the committee. Both were very difficult for me as a person on the outside sitting in the committee.

To the extent that it can be eliminated, all the better, but I think it works under any constitution of the House.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Mr. Blanchette-Joncas is next.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you very much for your presentation. It was very informative, as one of my colleagues has already said.

I'm going to make a comment: it refreshed my memory about the training we had last winter.

I imagine that you would be willing, if we needed it, to provide us with technical and unbiased advice.

[Lesley Burns]

Absolutely. We are available to provide other workshops or follow up on advice. You're also welcome to reach out to us directly or through the clerk if there's any information that we can provide to help you.

Part of what we do is provide support to oversight committees in terms of good practices. We think of examples of what other committees do. We're often contacted by analysts and clerks, both across the country and internationally, to find out more about a challenge that they're facing or just out of curiosity about how other committees do it. We have that information and we're happy to give it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you.

We'll now go to Mr. Green.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I think everybody's dancing around the edges of what I'd like to propose right now, whether it needs to be through a motion or perhaps consensus. It is that we book a two-hour session to have the witnesses come back.

I seem to remember that in the winter the session was much longer. What I really got value from—and one of the very few documents I kept was on this subject—was how to ask effective questions at committees. It was great not just for this committee but for all those I'm on.

I would love to have the full workshop on that subject and the full workshop on how to read the reports. Let's face it: This is such an arcane, esoteric world that all of us would greatly benefit from it, Ms. Block.

I'm wondering whether we can formalize this proposal through you as chair and have those two workshops and then come back. If my colleagues are like me, we're going to have good intentions and then are going to leave this meeting and go back to the busy world of being in a minority government. Particularly because of COVID and our need to become crystal clear about our role as a multipartisan committee—hopefully non-partisan—I hope we will go ahead and define these areas really early and make sure that we're clear about this subject.

Madam Chair, is there a way that, with the clerks, we can formalize this right now and have it as one of our next orders of business?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

I see that the clerk has been furiously writing down your suggestion, Mr. Green. I've seen a lot of nods on the screen. I'm willing to entertain moving forward with more training in whatever form the committee would like to formalize the suggestion.

Some timelines would be good for our clerk so that she knows whether you want us to move ahead with trying to schedule this activity in the very near future. That would also be helpful­

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I would go so far as to formalize it, if it needs to be a motion, to say “at our next available opportunity”, because this is really the foundation—particularly reading the documents—for any future studies and work that we do.

It just seems to me that we should build the foundation before we start bringing on other studies. After the really strange experience we had this week, I wouldn't want to see this committee go off the rails in some kind of side circus or something else that could potentially happen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

I have a motion on the table. Are we clear what the motion is?

If we are, then I know Mr. Berthold would like to speak to it.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

It's not very clear, but I will try. We have to work collaboratively.

I'd like to ask a question.

We will have a lot of work to do over the next few days. For several weeks, Parliament has not been in session and we have not had many meetings.

Therefore, I would like the motion to propose that these training meetings and workshops not be held during the times when the committee normally meets, so that we can continue to do our work. We will be receiving the Auditor General next week. She will certainly have reports waiting to be tabled this fall. We still have to do our work, and I am prepared to have meetings outside of the committee's normal meeting time.

This is what I'm suggesting to my colleagues. I think it's important that we be able to study the Auditor General's reports quickly, and we may not have a lot of time this fall. We have a role to play, and it is an important one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you, Mr. Berthold.

Go ahead, Mr. Sorbara.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

The two-hour idea is good with me, as long as we get the wording of the motion. If you could read it out, Chair, that would be great, along with Mr. Berthold's idea of not having the workshops during the times of our scheduled meetings. I'm in full agreement with those ideas.

Also, if I may just pivot, Madam Chair, to the presenter this morning, I want to put out one question on the performance audits.

Are these audits looking at the outcomes of the program or at the program itself? If you could speak to that differentiation briefly, please, that would be amazing.