Mr. Chairman, the hon. member misunderstood what I said. I used the words estimates committee. I see the functioning of the estimates committee as having less to do with estimates and more to do with what are called plans and priorities.
What happens is that every department, in addition to giving their estimates, gives their plans and priorities for the next two years. In other words, I am not talking about something that is written in cement. I agree with the member in the sense that once we are into the estimate process, we are pretty much into cement. We ask people why they did what they did, as opposed to why would they do what they are planning on doing.
Possibly the name of the committee is wrong. Maybe we should call it the plans and priorities committee. However the object of the exercise has two functions: to deal with plans and priorities and with performance reports.
The plans and priorities would be an interface for members of parliament to get involved with the process that has not happened yet. In other words, the budget has not happened. It will, two years from now. The budget has not been presented, but the internal mechanism of departments is now planning on how they would spend money two years from now. It is the interface for parliamentarians to be able to catch up with a forward looking concept.
The second part of it is to make departments accountable for their plans. Right now, if we read their plans and priorities, there are great latitudes and platitudes. Some of them are good and some of them are not so good, but the reality is that they are not much good to members of parliament because they do not tell them specifically how or where they would spend the money and so forth.
The same fault exists with the performance report. This is all new. This is new in terms of parliament. It is six or seven years old, but the reality is that the performance report today, if we read it, gives all the departments an A. They never make a mistake. It makes no mention of some of the worst scenarios of which all members would be aware.
The object of the exercise of an estimates committee would be to try to link the plans and priorities with the performance report. We would agree as a committee on the plans and priorities or disagree with them. We would report to parliament. We may think the spending plans could involve the spending of money in better ways if the objectives were based on societal indicators. That is the concept and therefore when the performance report comes in we expect there to be failures.
When we are involved in this process there are risks and with risks there are failures. We are big enough to realize that. We talk about letting government departments manage. We should let them manage. If we let them manage, they will make a mistake somewhere along the line and that is fine. We understand that, but it should show up in the performance report.