I would like to address the hon. member for Winnipeg South because he understands this university very well. He probably knows many of the people who teach there. I would like to refer to this particular study entitled, “Searching for Good Governance”. I am going to quote a couple of paragraphs from this particular study. Bill Stanbury in 1994 concluded that the present system of cabinet government was seriously flawed with respect to one of its most widely cited virtues, accountability.
We have just talked about exactly that. Accountability is the issue. It is not vexatious or frivolous motions that come to us. Those are byproducts of a much bigger problem which is accountability.
Mr. Stanbury went on to say “Little useful information is disclosed that would permit the voters to properly assess the performance of the government. The ability of parliament and voters to hold accountable the cabinet and the rest of the executive is highly limited”.
That is what we are talking about today and it is very significant. The issue is the accountability of parliament and the accountability of the Prime Minister and ministers of the crown. He argued that between elections a majority government was ultimately constrained only by self-restraint, a form of self-regulation.
Members know that self-regulation that is talked about here is nothing more and nothing less than the self-regulation of the Prime Minister himself. It is the Prime Minister's office that decides what will or will not happen. Mr. Stanbury went on to say “The government often controls the means of monitoring its performance. It controls much of the quantity, quality and type of information available. It is unlikely to admit non-performance and will do its best to conceal bad performance”.
In his book Checks Unbalanced: The Quiet Side of Public Spending , Herman Leonard wrote: “Civilized people go to great lengths to avoid having to confront unpleasant news and uncomfortable feeling. But when we practice avoidance and obfuscation in public affairs, the consequences reach us all. A civilized penchant to look away. The willingness of some to hide and of others to tolerate the hiding of the public's business is on its face antithetical to our society. Society's fundamental governing precept, governing by the informed consent of the governed”.
That is a major insight but very important for us to realize. That is at the heart of what we are debating here today, that we make parliament relevant so that every Canadian can say it is a place where their representatives can tell the people what it is that they want done in a democratic form. They will take their view from the majority position but they want their voice heard there.
This is the point that he is making. He is saying that if information is not given or if it is somehow obfuscated or it is adulterated in some way, electors no longer make an informed decision about who can represent them. That is what that is all about.
He goes on to the accountability of expenditures. This is probably even more significant than anything else I have said so far. The authors of the study concluded:
Most of the “bottom line” focus of accountability in the media is the general budget presentation of the deficit by the Minister of Finance.
We do not have a budget right now but we do have the rest of this which does apply. It is a well established practice that the media takes the bottom line from the budget presentation by the minister. It provides an incentive to manipulate the presentation of the general accounts to give the impression of better performance in this regard.
The study further stated:
For example, spending might be shifted “off-budget” to an independent agency such as a Crown corporation, or into a loan guarantee as opposed to a direct subsidy, to reduce the “deficit” registered in the general accounts. Alternatively, accounts might even be made to look worse in order to make more dramatic an expected improvement. It is well-known that new governments tend to attribute as much responsibility for deficits as possible to the previous political managers.
How many times have we seen that in the House? We have seen it over and over again.
It goes on to state that preliminary work done by Postner emphasized the need for a consolidated budget, a budget that would provide a unified presentation of all government activities, including general government activities, trust fund activities such as public sector pension plans and enterprise type activities such as crown corporations.
By doing so it would help to illuminate the complete financial picture of the government and diminish the potential to shift activities off budget to conceal politically embarrassing information.
There is the heart of the issue. We are unable to assess accurately whether the information we are getting in the budget document is an accurate description of where the government has spent its money and how much it has spent. We do not know and we cannot know because the accounting system is such that it does not accrue the total expenditures. They are expenditures that take place off budget. They are still a liability to the government. It has spent the money but it does not appear in the budget that as presented to the media and the public. It is not an accurate reflection of the real financial position of the government.
This is at the heart of the frustration which we are experiencing. We can argue about free votes. We can talk about the role of committees and amendments. If we do not deal with the fundamental issue of representation of our constituents, of our consciences in this place, we are denying the fundamental principle of democracy. That is what we need to address.
I would like to say one more thing with regard to the whole business of reforming parliament. We must first of all recognize that we are Canadians, that we are here as a democracy, a democracy that has stood the test of time, a democracy that is in a crisis situation right now and a democracy where many people are saying it is no longer relevant and they really do not care. That is a serious indictment. We must care because the iron law of politics applies to us and to every Canadian. Those who choose not to get involved are bound to be governed by those who do.
The time has come for each of us to work together and to work through the principles of true democracy. This is where people are elected on the merits, platform and philosophies they present. They are elected on the basic principles and policies that they stand for, that they will implement when given the reins of power and that we can depend on those people to do what they said they would do.