moved that Bill C-289, an act to provide for evaluations of statutory programs, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, I am glad to speak to this private member's bill. Unfortunately, it has been designated a non-votable bill and will not be referred to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts.
However, there is a tide in the affairs of men which when taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Shakespeare said this 400 years ago. There is a tide today that is causing government to re-examine its profligate ways and return to the sanity of fiscal responsibility, hence ensuring the prosperity of Canadians in future generations.
Canadian taxpayers have seen their taxes rise dramatically over the last 15 to 20 years in the name of reining in the budget deficit. Yet that deficit is no closer to being tamed than in the years before. We have had a continuous stream of finance ministers stand in the House and proclaim that the battle will be won through the increased taxes that they have introduced. These have been empty promises. We have listened to finance ministers tell us that spending is being constrained in the name of deficit reduction. Every year when we add it all up, the spending has gone up.
What is the problem? When more and more taxes only contain the unsustainable deficit, the problem is being perceived as insurmountable. Perhaps the real reason lies in the way we spend taxpayers' money and the needs we as a government have perceived as needs to be addressed.
Over the years governments past and present have created programs to address virtually every perceivable need for Canadians from health to unemployment, grain transportation, disaster relief, alleviating aboriginal problems, educating our young, combating poverty, heritage, industrial development and international marketing. The list is endless.
Some of these programs are highly visible. They serve Canadians every day. Some are out of sight of the Canadian taxpayer and yet we hope are performing some valuable service. Some are out of date and out of touch. Some are just plain obsolete. Some continue because no one has bothered to shut them down. They are forgotten, expensive and ongoing. Are they Beneficial? No.
In this day and age when we are trying to justify every dollar spent, we should take the time to evaluate on a program by program basis what we are actually doing and why.
The President of the Treasury Board has announced that 45,000 civil servants are going to lose their jobs. Is that because we have suddenly found out their work was irrelevant? I doubt it.
Somehow the Treasury Board is telling us that government can do the job required with 45,000 fewer civil servants. We do not have these answers, only questions and concerns. What does it mean for those Canadians who depend on a certain program? Will it still be there for them tomorrow?
What about the career of a civil servant which has suddenly been shattered? What does the future hold for him? Why did we find out now that we can dispense with 45,000 civil servants? It did not appear apparent to us last year or the year before that we could dispense with these civil servants, 30,000 of them, 20,000 of them or 10,000 of them. Why now?
Over the last 10 to 15 years the private sector has realized technology has changed the world, that profit margins are slimmer. Efficiency must be improved to maintain profitability. Innovation is the only way to success.
By recognizing these signs and acting on them, Canadian industry leads the world today in rising productivity growth. To them we owe a great debt of gratitude. If they had been as laggardly and as slothful as the Government of Canada, the country would have had a financial crisis long ago.
The private sector is constantly reviewing what it does, how well it does it, how it can improve efficiency and how it can innovate. Is the government exempt from these issues? The answer is no. It does not have the political will to address them.
My private members' bill is a serious attempt to redress that problem. I have focused on statutory spending in my private members' bill, spending that accounts for $112 billion this fiscal year. It is included in the estimates for information only.
Members of Parliament cannot debate it. They cannot vote on it. They cannot reduce it. They cannot eliminate it. Like old man river, it keeps rolling on every day. I want to take stock of that $112 billion of spending.
Like the private sector, I want it done rationally, completely, objectively and most of all on a cyclical basis of seven to ten years.
I am proposing in my private member's bill that all statutory spending, no matter how great or small, how meaningful or meaningless, be evaluated every decade using four fundamental principles. Is the program still relevant? Is the program effective in addressing the needs that have been identified? Is the program being delivered efficiently? Is there a better way to achieve the same results? Those are four fundamental criteria on which to evaluate every statutory program that has been authorized by the Government of Canada over the years.
Let us look at these points again. Is the program relevant? We all know we live in a changing society. Statistics Canada is continually measuring these changes in our society, the size of urban poor, child poverty, wealth, the size of our houses, the products we buy, the appliances we own, our level of education. The index of Statistics Canada is an inch thick. Who says a program designed 20 or 30 years ago is meeting the challenges of today unless we ask what is the challenge we are trying to meet today?
Therefore I want the question asked whether the program is still relevant. That will cause the senior bureaucrats and the political masters to define clearly and specifically what the need is in today's terms, not last year's terms or last decade's terms. What are they trying to accomplish today? It is simple enough. The private sector does it all the time. It boggles my mind that this is an innovative idea for the Government of Canada.
The second principle of evaluation is whether the program is effective in addressing the identified need. That again seems a fairly simple question to which we would want to know the answer. Surely if we have identified a need through the discussion on relevancy it behoves us to know we are addressing that need effectively, not just 60 per cent of the need being addressed and 40 per cent being ignored or whatever percentage we want to choose.
On the other side of the coin, why would we want to address a need with 20 per cent overlap beyond that? We would be wasting taxpayers' money because we did not examine our programs to determine if they are effective. Worst of all, what would we say if we were to find that a program is addressing issues largely irrelevant to the fundamental focus of the programs, spending money with abandon while the need identified remains unaddressed?
Surely it is our job as parliamentarians to be asking these questions to ensure on behalf of taxpayers that we have the answers.
The third principle of my bill requires that we ask how efficiently we are delivering these programs. Is our service up to par or do we have to wait months for a disability pension from CPP, for example? I found out through my work on the public accounts committee that the Canada pension plan only answers four out of every 11 telephone calls. I found out that the Department of National Defence built a warehouse in Halifax to house inventory. However, after the building was largely complete it looked at the inventory it wanted to put into the building and realized it was largely obsolete and was not being used.
Therefore, when we ask whether the program is being delivered efficiently, I hope in most cases the answer is yes. We want to know every situation when the answer is no.
The final principle of the bill asks the simple yet fundamental question is there a better way? Too often we get caught up in repetition instead of innovation. As needs change we have new tools and new technology to identify needs. As we improve our efficiency we should always ask whether there is a better way.
Preventive maintenance goes a long way to reduce renovation. A stitch in time saves nine. Program evaluation, as proposed in my private member's bill, is an ongoing process that will provide value to the Canadian taxpayer. It is not politically driven. It is open and transparent.
My bill will require each program evaluation be laid before the House and referred to a standing committee for its input, for public discussion, hearings and for recommendations. It would be a public process.
We have program reviews going on today with the Minister of Human Resources Development. These reviews are taking place behind the scenes. They are being presented, according to the Auditor General, without pooled information. In his last report he mentioned we would require more information. It would be a public process and the government would be required to respond the committee's report within 150 days.
Another major point is we must have faith in the quality of the evaluations. For that reason my bill causes evaluations on programs that spend more than $250 million annually to be reviewed by the Auditor General, and his report on the evaluation to be laid before the House also.
Program evaluation is an idea whose time has come. The Auditor General has been critical of the progress of development of program evaluation in his 1993 report. Program evaluation has been introduced in other western democracies with significant success and savings to the taxpayer. It can, will and must do the same here.
As parliamentarians who are wrestling with a serious budget deficit and an accumulated debt almost out of control, we owe it to the taxpayers to adopt program evaluation. As members of Parliament responsible for the public purse, program evaluation is without doubt the best tool that has come along to assist us in our work in decades.
The Auditor General said: "The story of program evaluation in the Government of Canada is one of high expectations and great potential that have only been partly fulfilled". That quote is from the 1993 Auditor General's report, paragraph 844.
Let us not have heads of gold and feet of clay. Let program evaluation achieve its full potential in playing its very real and substantial role in managing government programs.