Perhaps I can begin in terms of just the overview.
The committee was interested in knowing how all of the pieces fit together in terms of the roles of central agencies and departments in terms of the whole machinery of government around decision-making.
The blue and green flow chart that you have in front of you tries to give you some kind of framework in terms of the initial policy development stage, which is at the left-hand side of your paper. Then moving to the right, it goes into the implementation phase. Down the side of the left-hand column you'll see that we tried to identify PCO, Finance, the Treasury Board Secretariat, and line departments.
In terms of looking at the policy development stage, the role of PCO, as I had described on Tuesday in my comments, is to support the Prime Minister and cabinet. That is certainly the support we provide to the policy committees in terms of policy initiatives coming forward, helping to ensure there is a horizontal or coordinated perspective--since many issues, of course, cross over more than one department--and helping to ensure overall that the government's agenda in terms of the priorities that it has set through the Speech from the Throne are followed through.
Finance, on the other hand, will be meeting with you next week and they can certainly elaborate in greater detail on Finance's role. Certainly they of course help in setting the overall economic and fiscal context. They are the experts in terms of economic and fiscal implications and analysis. And of course, budget preparation is a key responsibility of the Department of Finance and the Minister of Finance.
I'll let Joe speak to this when I'm finished, but Treasury Board is basically responsible for looking at and ensuring the integrity of the system in terms of overall oversight on financial and management issues, on assessing resource adequacy.
Line departments, in terms of the bottom column, are ultimately responsible for developing initiatives pursuant to the government's policy agenda and ensuring that any of their priority initiatives, or initiatives that they are working on, are consistent with the government's policy initiatives. They actually are responsible, as I mentioned the other day, for developing and preparing policy proposals that would come forward for consideration to cabinet.
The three central agencies on that policy development process work very much together. We have complementary roles, if I can put it that way, and we input in terms of policy initiatives that would be coming forward to cabinet. When I go into the next chart I'll actually show you how that all comes together.
That's the policy development side of things in terms of items before they are considered by cabinet.
For the implementation phase, clearly Finance has a role in terms of the passage of the Budget Implementation Act through Parliament, and tax and other statutory measures.
Treasury Board is responsible, of course, for the approval of program authorities for departments to implement programs, to approve spending plans, ensuring that programming is consistent with the Financial Administration Act and, of course, parliamentary management of the estimates process. That's the main estimates and the supplementary estimates process. They have also set the macro policies for the Government of Canada in terms of program evaluation and audit policies.
Departments, on the other hand, are responsible once an initiative has received policy approval and program approval by Treasury Board, and then are responsible for actually implementing an initiative, providing the appropriate management oversight in terms of program implementation, reporting to Parliament in terms of their DPRs, and also conducting program evaluations and risk-based audits of their programs.
I hope that is somewhat helpful in terms of trying to explain how the pieces fit together.
Before I turn to the memorandum to cabinet process, I maybe can turn to Joe.
Do you want to add anything on the role of the board?