Mr. Speaker, I take this opportunity to commend my colleague, the hon. member for St. Albert, for taking the initiative of tabling Bill C-289. Incidentally, the hon. member sits on the public accounts committee that I chair and I share and certainly understand his interest in ensuring that an act is passed to provide for the evaluation of statutory programs.
The need for statutory program evaluation has clearly been established both in the public and the private sectors, especially at a time when costs are tightly controlled and we have to make the most of our scarce resources. The only thing standing in the way of this bill being passed and applied to major programs is an obtuse government unable to keep up with the times.
The public accounts committee has already devoted several meetings to program evaluation. The Auditor General of Canada, for his part, devoted chapters 8, 9 and 10 of his 1993 report to program evaluation, and made the following comment again in 1993, and I quote: "Our audit found that the story of program evaluation in the Government of Canada is one of high expectations and great potential that have been only partly fulfilled. Cabinet has been paying sustained attention to program evaluation data over the last ten years".
But this interest was given little more than lip service, really. The sixth report of the public accounts committee, tabled on November 21, reiterated the relevance of program evaluation. The auditor general indicated that most of the programs that were evaluated were not high expenditure programs.
In 1991-92, the evaluation of programs with budgets over $1 billion, that is to say 16 programs totalling $124.5 billion, showed that only two of these had undergone a comprehensive evaluation; the rest were only partially covered, if at all. In 1991-1992, twenty-four per cent of government's program expenditures were evaluated. That same year, 480 of the completed evaluations covered programs with expenditures of $250 million or less, as compared to 18 in the over $250 million category.
There is therefore a need to eliminate this kind of laissez-faire in government with respect to evaluating mostly low expenditure programs. That is why I agree with paragraph 8(2) of Bill C-289, which states that the Auditor General of Canada may review any program evaluation and submit a report on it to the House of Commons in the case of a program evaluation covering a statutory program with expenditures of $250 million or more each year.
I also support this bill because it is directly based on the main recommendations of the sixth report of the public accounts committee, which I signed last November.
This legislation would establish an objective decision making process regarding the continuation or the elimination of government programs, and it would help reduce the arbitrary and political nature of the decisions made. Having better documented and more objective decisions would give more weight to the role of managers and members of Parliament. An improved program evaluation process would result in a more efficient control of costs, given that the current deficit exceeds $37 billion for that the accumulated debt is close to $550 billion.
As the hon. member St. Albert pointed out, program evaluation is a modern day management tool. In this era of electronic highway and state of the art technology, why would the government keep ignoring the value of cost benefit analysis and objective criteria on which to base its decisions, and instead follow trends, rely on a gut feeling, or base these decisions on political or partisan considerations?
Program evaluation is definitely a protection against dramatic cost increases which become unmanageable over time. I should add that this explosion of costs which eventually become uncontrollable accurately reflects the Liberal Party saga of the last 25 years.
Bill C-289 is a rare attempt by this Parliament to get us out of the vicious circle of expenditures, debts and subsidies to friends of the party, in which the Liberals put this country two decades ago.
The purpose of this bill is to provide for the regular evaluation of government programs by a program evaluation process set by Treasury Board on a prescribed cycle. The President of the Treasury Board would determine the cycle for evaluating statutory programs. We could not agree more.
New programs would also be covered by this process within six months after the coming into force of an act authorizing a statutory program, the President of the Treasury Board shall, by order, prescribe the fiscal year as an initial evaluation year for the statutory program and prescribe the evaluation cycle for the statutory program. This whole process would tend to reduce the
risk of arbitrary decisions, and we therefore support section 3 of the bill.
In concluding, I have two suggestions for the hon. member for St. Albert: first, in subsection 7(4), the hon. member suggests 150 days for completing the evaluation of a statutory program after the end of the evaluation year. I think 90 days would be more reasonable. This means that tabling in the House would come after 120 days, instead of 180 as the hon. member initially suggested.
Second, considering the strategic role played by the auditor general in program evaluation, I would suggest to the hon. member that the program evaluation report and the auditor general's report connected with the former be referred to the Public Accounts Committee instead of a committee designated by the House as provided under section 9.
I endorse Bill C-289, and I urge the House to support this bill, so that the government will stop this debt spiral caused by unnecessary spending and programs that have outlived their usefulness.