Mr. Speaker, the three points listed by my hon. colleague are important and deserve a closer look.
There are unfortunately cases in which government funds were not used properly. It is obvious that, in some departments-as the auditor general himself discovers each year-government funds could, in certain cases, be used in much better ways.
What is important in a business with total expenditures of $157 billion is that we must be able to implement controls at two levels.
First, at the macroeconomic level, where members can control the policies themselves and ensure that the money allocated by Parliament to implement certain policies is used to attain the real objectives of these policies. Most of the time, Parliament exercises control primarily by allocating the money needed to implement certain policies and, as I pointed out in my speech, this process is now undergoing extensive reforms.
Treasury Board also has a responsibility to ensure that departments follow the proper procedures in specific cases so that money is spent in accordance with regulations and with the provisions of the Financial Administration Act.
We must remain vigilant in these areas because each year every department develops new ways of doing things and some of their new procedures are not suitable and therefore result in inappropriate expenditures.
This role of reviewing examples in every government department, which is shared by the auditor general and the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, must have the full support of Treasury Board, and it does. Whenever new procedures or ways of doing things to reduce the misappropriation of funds are brought to our attention, we implement them.
The second point mentioned by the hon. member is that certain departments still have not made in-depth changes and there is a possibility that, while some subsidy programs may have been considerably reduced or even abolished, the person-years required to deliver these programs have not been subject to the same kind of cuts.
This is why we have a system whereby every department must, each year, submit to Treasury Board a plan for delivering their plan of action. This means that, each year, Treasury Board's five deputy ministers review how the various departments intend to bring changes to their structure, to the way they use their person years, to their programs and to the implementation of these programs, so as to better reach their objectives.
Today, in my speech, I indicated that we also intend to conduct a performance analysis and that we have already conducted a number of pilot projects in this regard. The idea is to review the budget, not the way we currently do it when we allocate funds, but by obliging departments to submit a report on their use of funds and on the extent to which their objectives are met, with, where possible, some quantitative measurement of departmental performance. My colleague was very clear in making that point and we are trying to improve service delivery and evaluation measures.
The third point mentioned concerns the impacts of tax expenditures which are not measured sometimes. Obviously, evaluation issues are always very difficult. They are difficult because there are a lot of results that cannot be examined or that cannot be quantified.
For example, the impact of certain expenditures on the health and general welfare of Canadians is impossible to measure sometimes. We can measure the impact of certain specific actions, but it is sometimes difficult to measure the impact of preventive measures, for example, because we have altered a situation and it then becomes extremely difficult to measure exactly what the results would have been without these preventive measures.
There are methodological problems. Each year we try to have quantitative measures that are more accurate, but it is obvious that we still have work to do in some areas. I can assure my colleague that the Treasury Board understands perfectly well that there are
still a lot of improvements to be made and is working towards making these improvements.