Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of the motion put forward by my esteemed and learned colleague from St. Albert, the chairman of the public accounts committee.
I am pleased that it is a votable motion. Too few private members' motions in this place are votable. It is a rare votable private member's motion in so far as it gives effect to a unanimous report of an all party House committee. I hope and expect the matter will have no difficulty in achieving similar unanimity in the House as a whole. Motion No. 296 reads:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should fully implement the recommendations of the 51st Report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in the First Session of the 36th Parliament, entitled “The Business of Supply: Completing the Circle of Control”.
I will address the first principle that one of the central powers of parliament, perhaps its raison d'être, is to act as a check and a balance on the spending authority of the executive branch or the crown.
Over several hundred years our mother parliament, the Westminster parliament, evolved precisely to give the Commons and different interests in the country an opportunity to pass judgment on proposals of the government and to raise and spend revenues in the name of the crown. This is one of the most significant powers we possess as parliamentarians. Yet it is a power which has been very much in decline for the past several decades, in this parliament in particular.
The estimates are documents tabled by ministers of the crown which detail, at least theoretically, the spending the governor in council proposes to engage in within a given fiscal year. Anyone who is more than a passive observer of parliament will realize and agree that the estimates process has increasingly become something of a bad joke. We sometimes sit in this place at the end of the estimates period having had virtually no serious committee review of the estimates.
Often the estimates tabled here and referred to committee are considered in the course of a few minutes or hours at most. There is often no more than a cursory review of the sometimes billions of dollars of proposed spending for various departments and agencies.
The estimates then return to this place where we rubber stamp them in a hurried voting process, often on division. Sometimes in a given evening we will authorize the spending of tens of billions of dollars as though it were not real money and as though we were not exercising a real power of review.
The vast majority of members of parliament who vote on the estimates both at committee and in this place have little or no idea what they are authorizing. One of the central purposes of parliament, namely to act as a check and a balance on the spending plans of the executive, is not being exercised. This requires fundamental reform.
The motion contemplates such reform. It is not a complete panacea for the shortcomings of our current estimates process. However the establishment of an all party estimates committee would take us much closer to allowing parliamentarians who have a particular interest in scrutinizing government spending plans to do so with a meaningful level of detail. This was concurred in by all members of the committee and all parties they represented. It would be a major step in the right direction.
I note that this is a motion coming from the chairman of the public accounts committee who by convention is a member of the official opposition. I would submit that an estimates committee, insofar as it would play a role similar to that of public accounts committee, ought also to have as its chair a member of the official opposition so that we could ensure that there was active and aggressive scrutiny of the executive branch's spending plans. We know full well that members of the government in this place, not just this party but in previous governments, and members of parliament who are also members of the government feel beholden virtually all of the time to acquiesce to the spending proposals of members of the governor in council. Therefore, for the sake of parliamentary scrutiny, it would be preferable to have an opposition member chairing the committee.
The federal government spends some $180 billion in a given year. Removing from that the debt servicing costs of over $40 billion, the total program spending is roughly $140 billion. This is an enormous sum and much of it is driven by automatic program spending increases, entitlement programs, which are driven by statutory authorization. We do not even properly review these programs of tens of billions of dollars which ought to be reviewed.
There are so-called tax expenditures which carry on year to year, many of which are actually spending programs designed as part of the tax system. I would include in this category the Canada child tax benefit. This is a major multi-million dollar program which we have not reviewed since its inception and which is in effect an entitlement program operating within the tax system.
These things need to be reviewed. We need the opportunity to bring forward to the estimates committee ministers of the crown to answer in detail questions about their spending proposals. We need this now more than ever precisely because we have seen over the past three or four years a very troublesome return to the old pattern of enormous annual program spending increases.
The government has been increasing its program spending from year to year by 5% to 7% over the past three or four years. That is a level nearly twice as high as the combined rate of growth in population plus inflation. In other words, the federal government's spending envelope is growing far more quickly than our economy's capacity to pay for it, particularly given the fact that we continue to sit on a $540 billion debt, the second largest debt in the G-7. This worrisome increase in spending, which I believe is in part a result of parliament's lack of effective scrutiny of government estimates, is threatening the surpluses which Canadians have paid so dearly to achieve.
In fact, the department of economics of the Bank of Nova Scotia projects that in the next fiscal we will see budgetary deficits of as much as $5 billion. Other banks predict that we will see planning deficits by the fiscal year 2003 of several billion dollars.
All of this is to say that there is an urgent need, as virtually every business group, private sector economist and think tank have suggested, for us to return to very serious spending restraint. That restraint, I submit, would be most effectively brought about by empowering a parliamentary estimates committee to dig down deep, to discover by questioning witnesses, to have an independent capacity to do research and to call before it government officials. By doing that, it would have a tremendous ability to identify wasteful and needless government programs.
It would be my hope that, if such a committee were adopted should this motion pass, government members would sometimes vote against spending proposals brought before them by their ministers.
This could be one small but important step toward empowering individual members to represent their constituents in the best interests of the Dominion and to restore one of the central purposes of parliament to act as an effective check and balance against the spending power of the government. I therefore support the bill and encourage all members to do likewise.