Madam Speaker, the business of supply is not a matter that many members of parliament take very seriously or feel passionately about. I was fortunate to share that interest with the member for St. Albert. In fact I am committed enough to this topic that I actually requested to chair the subcommittee on the business of supply.
I enjoyed very much working with the member for St. Albert. We share a common commitment to the fundamental principle that the founding role of parliaments around the world is the right to determine how the government may collect money and how it may spend money. We shared a common opinion that by and large our Canadian parliament has not been doing that job well.
The member for Dewdney--Alouette referred to the fact that standing committees have not been reviewing the estimates. I should point out to him that in fact under this government every standing committee has reviewed the estimates, unlike standing committees in a previous parliament headed by a government of a party with which he has now chosen to align himself.
Our work started from a debate and a controversy which rose in the House. One of the first jobs I had to do was to educate the member for St. Albert that the answer was not simply to change the business of confidence, which was his opinion going in, but that there was a much more important job to be done by the subcommittee to demonstrate to parliament what tools it had and how it could use those tools to not tinker with estimates when they are tabled but to have a profound influence on the estimates of the following year.
A number of those tools, as the member for St. Albert knows, have been provided by the government since we took office in 1993. There is the idea of departmental performance reports. There are the plans and priorities reports that project into the future which the government initiated. Changes have been made to the standing orders which give the standing committees virtually full scope to investigate any matters within the purview of the departments that they are responsible for. These have given parliament the tools to do the job that needs to be done, not only to hold the government accountable which is primarily the role of the public accounts committee, but to influence the most important document that parliament approves which is the budget. That is what determines the government policy for the coming year. If it does not have the money, it cannot do the actions.
We also came to appreciate that parliamentarians need some incentives. A number of the recommendations in our report go to the very heart of how to lay out for parliamentarians how they can use those tools. Of the 52 recommendations in the report, nearly half are not recommendations to the government at all, but are recommendations to parliament and to the standing committees.
There is work for all of us to be done, to make sure that we are using the tools at our disposal in carrying out our responsibilities a little more fully.
The government has also taken measures as has parliament to implement some of these recommendations. I would point out for instance that the report on the modernization of the procedures of the House of Commons has given parliament a significantly greater scope in reviewing the estimates. It has allowed the House of Commons itself to take two full departmental estimates and have a special debate on each of them in committee of the whole. That is an important tool which we have not used yet, but I look forward to the first time that it happens.
The government has shown the attention it has paid to our recommendations regarding crown corporations by giving one minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, responsibility for virtually all crown corporations. It is an extremely important step forward.
One of our main recommendations was the establishment of an estimates committee. It has not happened and the hon. member for St. Albert knows why. In the last two parliaments with five parties in parliament, House leaders have had to agree that it was necessary to collapse and combine a number of committees to allow the business of parliament to proceed. Establishing a new committee while that is going on has not been practicable.
I fully endorse the recommendations of our report that such a committee could play a vital role in supporting and strengthening the work of standing committees on the estimates. It could continue on behalf of parliament to review the estimates process and constantly upgrade and improve it. It could look at horizontal issues which cross a number of departments and standing committees and for that reason do not normally get examined by the standing committees.
One of our recommendations had to do with public visibility in the estimates process as a way of providing incentives to members of parliament. As the hon. member will know, in recent months we have doubled the amount of television space available for committees. It is an important step forward. I urge, as does I am sure the hon. member, all standing committees and members of parliament to take advantage of it to make sure their work on estimates is done in the public eye and on camera.
I reassert our recommendation to the finance committee that it invite committee chairs whose committees have done a thorough review and report on estimates to appear before the finance committee as part of its fall prebudget consultations.
In the time that remains, and it is not much, I will refer to a number of areas in which progress has been made. We called for the resuming of reporting on tax expenditures. That has been done. We called for the minister to respond to standing committee reports and recommendations in the budget. To some extent that is being done although not systematically and not always.
The Treasury Board has prepared a package for MPs on the estimates process. I think the member for St. Albert would agree that it has dramatically increased the accessibility and readability of estimates information for standing committees and members of parliament, as well as of related documents such as the statutory provisions underlying some provisions in the estimates.
Work continues to go on. One area in which I hope there will be further progress fairly soon is the relationship between members of parliament and public officials and how we deal with each other at committee. Our report recommended guidelines for public officials. We need guidelines for committee members to enable them to build trust with public officials so we can be partners in the budget making process as opposed to opponents.
I do not have much time left. I will go over a number of issues in which progress has been made on implementation. I count close to 10 on which significant progress has been made toward implementing the recommendations in the report. The member for St. Albert and all who worked on the committee report should be extremely proud of the influence we have had to date. Is there more to be done? Yes, there is. Can all the recommendations be fully implemented now as the member's resolution calls for? No, that is not realistic. This is an evolutionary process. We try something and move forward from that.
Substantial progress has been made. I again thank the hon. member for St. Albert and all those who worked with us on the report for the opportunity of working together and having an impact on how the government deals with the estimates.
I wish we had a little more impact on how parliament and members of parliament deal with the estimates. Notwithstanding the statement by the member for Dewdney--Alouette, since our government took office every standing committee has reviewed its estimates. Have they done a thorough and complete job? Probably not, but they have been done and they had not been getting done before.
The opposition has a role to play. It has a number of days every year that are commonly called opposition days. They are actually supply days but it is rare to see the opposition using supply days to discuss and examine the business of supply. I encourage all members on both sides of the House to use the tools we have and do our job as parliamentarians.