Mr. Speaker, I was pointing out that today, as we are debating the estimates, when we think the most important issue facing parliament is the spending of the public purse, the approving of taxation and the spending of $145 billion of taxpayer money, we would take that very seriously in our debates in the House of Commons.
The unfortunate news is that we treat the whole process as a completely perfunctory process where we have the estimates tabled by the President of the Treasury Board and automatically refer them to committee.
Unfortunately we know that the committees do not take their work seriously as far as the estimates, the reason being they know they make no difference. Never in the last 25 years have we in this House been able to change one single penny of the estimates.
For that reason, the committees say why should they bother knocking their heads trying to introduce changes to the estimates, spending the money more intelligently, spending the money on issues that are more important to Canadians. The problem is this government is not prepared to listen and previous governments have not been prepared to listen.
When the President of the Treasury Board tables his estimates around March 1, he takes the arrogant approach and says he basically has the approval of the House even though here we are on June 9 voting on these amounts.
One of the big affronts is that we are dealing only with is $42 billion of expenditures.
The other $103 billion was approved by statute some time in the past. When I say some time in the past, that could have been 50 years ago. It was the last time that we in this House had the opportunity to pass judgement on a program that required expenditure of taxpayer funds.
When the legislation is passed, that is called statutory authority and the government never has to come back to this House again to seek its approval to spend the money on these programs as the costs balloon up and up.
It is a huge affront to this place and to the Canadian people that later on today we will be voting on only $42 billion of a total expenditure of $145 billion.
The other affront is the way the rules of this House have been organized to ensure the government gets its way. When we look at the normal process in the business of the House, a bill is introduced which can be amended and the amendment can be amended again. We first vote on the subamendment and if that passes, it amends the main amendment. If we vote on that and it passes, then we have amended the piece of legislation. We will vote on the legislation and if that passes, the amendments have caused a change.
We start at the bottom and work our way up. Not so with the estimates because as soon as we table a motion that we want to reduce the estimates, in essence if we wish to amend the estimates, we do not vote on the amendment, we do not vote on any subamendment. The first thing the rules say is that when we put forth an amendment, that causes the President of the Treasury Board to move concurrence in his main amount.
I am looking at the 1998-99 estimates, parts one and two, page 1-44. Their total expenditure under Vote No. 1 is $867,573,000. If we want to reduce the amount of money the Department of Health is going to spend by even $10, that will cause the President of the Treasury Board to put forth a motion to concur in the total expenditure of $867,573,000 and the House has to vote to say we are going to give the department that full amount of money. If that vote were to fail, the department would get no money and therefore our motion to reduce would be irrelevant.
That is why it is impossible to defeat a motion on the main estimates, because it is preceded by a concurrence motion. That is why the rules have been turned upside down.
I use health as an example because in the public accounts committee some months ago we dealt with the Department of Health and its supply of services to natives and aboriginals.
We found, for example, and this is no fault on the aboriginals but certainly every fault on the Department of Health, that they were approving payment of bills submitted to them by dentists and so on in amounts 40 times greater than the provincial amount approved for these procedures. A multiple of 40 is the mark-up that some dentists have been putting on some treatment, sending the bill to the federal government for payment and it was being paid without even a question.
The provincial governments have been trying to husband their health resources and scrutinizing the bills and saying they feel this is about the amount they are prepared to pay for this procedure. For the federal government there is no limit to what it is prepared to pay, even 40 times the regular amount. If we wanted to take $55,000 out of health in the estimates today because we should be paying only the appropriate amounts rather than these exorbitant amounts, it would cause the President of the Treasury Board to move a motion to concur in the entire amount. Once we have voted for the entire amount, how can we turn around and say that we want to change our minds and vote for something less? It makes an ass of the system.
I am sorry to use something that may be close to unparliamentary language, but I am talking about the system, not a member, although that sometimes is open for debate.
Let me use another example, which is the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Again I think about our committee, the public accounts committee, where the auditor general pointed out to us a problem that he found regarding a water treatment system on one reserve in the province of Ontario. The water treatment plant, according to the consultant, could be fixed for $26,000. But by the time the job was done, and it was not done properly, the bill was over $2.3 million. There is no control. If we wanted to remove that amount from the estimates we could not do it. That is a serious problem that we have with the main estimates as they are presented and with the process.
The finance department will spend approximately $45 billion a year on interest on our national debt. Because that is deemed to be statutory spending, as I referred to earlier, we cannot vote on one single penny of that $45 billion. Surely it is the House that is supreme and it is the House that has control of the public purse. We thought we had control of the public purse, but obviously the House does not have control of the public purse.
Therefore, my question is: Where do we go from here? The good news is that there is an answer. The answer lies, in my opinion, in the report that was tabled in the last parliament, called “The Business of Supply: Completing the Circle of Control”. It was an all-party committee chaired by the deputy whip of the government. It dealt with a lot of the problems I have raised here today. This report, which one eminent person called the best report on parliamentary procedure in 50 years, deserves a great deal of consideration by the House.
I believe that 52 recommendations were made. I will just mention one or two of them to give hon. members an idea of how “The Business of Supply: Completing the Circle of Control” report dealt with these issues.
It recommended that a committee be set up to monitor and review the estimates and the supply process. That is just a simple recommendation to say this asinine procedure of putting the cart before the horse should stop and we should get it back to the right way. That way the House will be able to express its opinion on how to change the estimates.
It said that the standing orders should be amended to create a standing committee on the estimates with a mandate to monitor and review the estimates, the supply process and related matters and that the work of the standing committees on the estimates be referred to them. That way we would be able to ensure that the committees that deal with the estimates would be dealing with them in an appropriate fashion and bringing back to the House appropriate recommendations based on all parties' opinions as to what they thought of the estimates.
It goes on to say that a standing committee on the estimates should be specifically empowered to report to the House on the estimates and on the supply process at least on an annual basis. We want to ensure, again, bringing back to the House the authority and the primacy that the House is the granter of supply to the government.
The committee went on to recommend that the standing committee on the estimates be authorized to undertake periodic reviews of the mechanism used by crown corporations to report to parliament and the adequacy of the means by which they receive appropriations from parliament. That is an excellent recommendation.
It goes on to talk about how in this day and age, when we know that people want to spend all of the budget rather than achieve their objectives within budget, the parliamentary committees should be allowed to move up to 5% from one allocation to another. That makes common sense today when we hear so much about wastage and balloon budget spending toward the end of the fiscal year.
I could go on and on about the problems related to the business of supply and how the subcommittee on the business of supply dealt with the issue on a constructive, all-party basis that had the unanimous support of all parties in the last parliament.
It is high time this government and this parliament realized that Canadian taxpayers deserve much better and that this report needs to be adopted. The recommendations contained in the report need to be adequately considered, rather than being put on the shelf. I seriously hope this government will ensure today that we look at this report and adopt the recommendations contained therein.