Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking each of my parliamentary colleagues for the support they have shown for my motion.
I would like to respond to a couple of comments. I would like to respond to my Liberal colleague's comments which objected to the immediacy. I have a bit of difficulty with that because we have been on the starting blocks of this for about seven years now. To talk about immediacy in terms of taking too long is probably the way it should be looked at. The difficulty is that when we are talking about immediacy, we are not talking about a full implementation happening tomorrow because I understand that would be an impossibility. However the government needs to make some decisions before the various departments can fully implement beyond where they have gone already. We need to know which model the government will have the departments follow.
When I talk about immediacy, we need the government to make the remaining decisions that are necessary for the completion of this process. Then we must go on from there and begin following that lead of the government by having a financial information strategy completed.
I would also like to thank the Bloc Quebecois member for the questions she asked. She asked if the FIS would help the finance minister. I would think that the kind of information demanded by the financial information strategy and accrual based accounting in the preparation of the budget would most certainly help the finance minister and his department focus on the most necessary aspects of how the money would be spent, where it would be spent and the outputs from that. I cannot see anything but help going to the finance minister on this.
The second question she asked was whether the FIS would allow a readjustment of our sights if we missed the target. Hopefully, to begin with, it would help us more accurately target in the money that would be spent and then give annual results of what our outputs would be, what we accomplished and allow a readjustment on a more timely basis should there be some inaccuracy in prejudging the results that we expected. I would like to thank the member for that.
The departments would like the government to make a decision on the model that can be adopted to implement accrual based budgeting appropriations. Unless the government provides the leadership and moves to accrual based budgeting and appropriations, managers will not focus on accrual based financial reporting. This makes sense because the departments can hardly be expected to prepare a set of financial reports that cannot be compared with the budget materials and the appropriation statements. Departments want financial information for all purposes to be produced on an accrual basis.
Furthermore, there are concerns about the interval of when they will have to prepare the information in their estimates on a different basis from the information of their financial statements.The risk that is being run is that the departments will be producing two views of the same data. They will have to prepare two sets of books, and we know the problems with having two sets of books. Resolving this issue will demand a major effort no matter what course of action the government decides to take.
The government says that choosing a model for accrual based budgeting appropriations is a complex issue that requires extensive study before a decision can be made and that meeting the public accounts suggested April 2003 target date to produce accrual budgeting and appropriations is unlikely.
The treasury board secretariat made little progress on the issue until August 2001 when it hired a manager to complete the study and make a recommendation on how to go with this by the spring of 2002. In fact, in the April report of the auditor general, the treasury board said that it had developed a plan to review alternative approaches to implementing accrual budgeting. Therefore, it is proceeding but slowly; some would say too slowly. We would like to have that process speeded up.
I do not want to hear from the other side of the House that the government has already implemented FIS. That would be inaccurate and would be a naive statement. It is not totally inaccurate, though. The important thing is that the treasury board needs to make a decision on moving to accrual appropriations in budgeting. It needs to decide whether to get ready and have everyone start using the whole process at once or whether to begin with everyone using a more gradual phased in approach.
This may sound simple but it is really a very complicated decision that has to be made and it needs to be made sooner rather than later. The government needs to ensure that the budget and the estimates use the same language that the departmental financial reports and the public accounts use.
To conclude, as I mentioned, this is an unusual situation because at this time I do not know whether the motion will be votable or not. I ask for unanimous consent that this motion be made votable--