Mr. Speaker, I am certainly pleased to participate in this debate on parliamentary reform. It has been something that has been near and dear to my heart for a number of years.
When I first came to parliament, the 35th parliament from 1993 to 1997, I worked on a subcommittee chaired by what is now the government whip. We produced a report that is called ”Business of Supply: Completing the Circle of Control”, which was called by the clerk of the House of Commons at that time one of the best reports in 50 years on reforming the House of Commons. It was unanimously adopted by all parties.
It was tabled in the House of Commons. We did not get a response before the election was called in 1997, so we retabled it in the 36th parliament. Even though it had all-party agreement, the government said that there was nothing in it that it wanted to adopt. That is why we are frustrated when it comes to parliamentary reform. I will give some examples of what we are talking about.
The procedure to handle the estimates is a process by which the House approves the estimates and grants the government's supply money to pay the bills of the government. Last night we approved billions of dollars in 30 seconds flat. It is a crying shame. There was no debate, just a pro forma, first reading, second reading, committee of the whole, shall this clause carry on division, shall this clause and this clause, shall it be reported back to the Chair, all in favour, yeas and nays and it was a done deal. We approved $16 billion that fast, without any examination. That cannot be.
If we are to have a parliament that will hold the government to account, we need a real process to handle the approval of supply.
Mr. Speaker, you are one of the more learned members on the issue of supply. For the edification of all Canadians, there is a simple process. If a motion is being debated, it can be amended. When an amendment is moved, we vote on it. If the amendment carries, the motion is amended. A vote is then taken on the main motion. When it comes to the estimates, the process is reversed.
If I put a motion on the order paper to reduce an expenditure by $100, $1,000, $1 million or to eliminate the expenditure entirely, that causes the President of the Treasury Board to reaffirm what she wants to spend. Her motion comes up before mine. After she reaffirms what she wants to spend, how can she say it is impossible to vote against my motion when she has just reaffirmed what she wants to spend? It would be ludicrous to say one thing and then say the opposite. The system is fixed to ensure the government gets its way. This cannot be. That is why we are totally frustrated with the process of the estimates.
In 1996 we talked about such things as evaluation. I complimented the President of the Treasury Board when she introduced a new policy on evaluation a month ago. It is along those lines that we have been talking about.
The government will spend $170 billion this coming year but most parliamentarians do not know what it will be spent on. It spends this money through programs. Since 1996, I have been asking that programs be evaluated by asking simple fundamental questions, such as what is the program for and what public policy is this program designed to address. If there is a need for it, fine, but we should be told what it is.
Once we have figured out what the program is trying to do, the second question would be quite simple: How well is it doing it? We could then measure the success of the program. The next questions could be: Are we doing it efficiently, and can we achieve the same results in a better and more efficient way?
Let me take for example the program that the Minister of Finance introduced just before the election. I am talking about the heating fuel rebate which was paid out to prisoners, people in graveyards and so on. He said that the government would help low income people with their heating fuel bills. That is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. However, he did not tell us the methodology he would use to send out the $125 cheques.
As it turned out, people who live in apartments and do not pay heating fuel bills received cheques. People in prison got cheques even though they do not pay heating fuel bills. People who recently died received cheques. They are in a graveyard and cannot cash it. The money will go to the estate even though the estate does not pay a heating fuel bill. It goes on and on. My son who lives with me received his cheque and he does not pay a heating fuel bill either.
What was the public policy? The public policy was to help low income people with their fuel bills. That is okay. How well did the program achieve that objective? As we can see, there was gross waste in the program by virtue of the fact that far too many people received a cheque even though they did not pay a heating fuel bill.
In 2001, five years after the business of supply report was brought down, the government said there was nothing in the report that was worth adopting. It finally slipped in the idea that maybe program evaluation was not such a bad thing after all, that it might be able to do a little pilot project to see if it could get the thing moving forward. Why did it take five years? That is the point.
On reallocation of funds we have heard about March madness: the money has to be spent before the end of the fiscal year because if it is not spent it will not be there for the next year. Empires will get smaller. There will not be a big raise. There will be staff reductions and maybe even transfers to different departments.
Yesterday at the public accounts meeting we were dealing with the billion dollar boondoggle in HRDC. It is still hanging around. The auditor general had a chart that was the perfect chart for March madness. It showed that $5 million to $8 million a month was the average expenditure, and then in the month of March it went right up to $50 million. In April it went down to some $5 million to $7 million. That went on for a whole year. It came to March of the following year and it went up again to $50 million and back down to some $5 million to $7 million. It multiples by 10 in the month of March. Is that March madness?
We are saying that we should have the capacity to move money from one budget to another. What does the government say? It says it cannot have that, that it would never do and that it would upset the protocol of budgets and so on. I cannot understand why the government cannot see the sense in money being transferred from one budget to another in this modern day and age of computers, budgets, accountants, financial statements and all these things.
We deal with another situation in public accounts. This is how ludicrous it was. The Department of National Defence has a budget to repair houses and it has a budget for new houses. It needed some new houses but there was no money for new houses. It still had some money in the repair budget. It would demolish wrecks of houses but keep one little corner of the basement so that it could build a new house on that corner of the basement and call it a repair. It was a brand new house.
When we talk about statutory expenditures, it is $100 billion a year that does not even get debated in the House. Let the taxpayers know that $100 billion never gets debated but it is spent, and that has to change.
The auditor general talked about the child tax credit. It is an actual expenditure but it gets netted off on taxes and does not show on the books. Loan guarantees do not show up until they are bad. Once they are bad, what can be done? There should be a process by which we can evaluate loan guarantees. I would love to go on for an hour but I know my time has ended.