moved:
That Vote 1, in the amount of $16,684,000, under GOVERNOR GENERAL, in the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2005, less the amount voted in Interim Supply, be restored.
Mr. Speaker, it gives me some pleasure tonight to rise and begin this debate.
This occasion provides an opportunity for me to highlight the government's enhancements to the estimates process, which are designed to ensure greater accountability to Parliament. It also gives me a chance to reinforce the significance of the motion which I have just made to restore funding to certain votes. Overall, this is a very important piece of legislation for all parliamentarians, many of whom have been closely involved in the main estimates process at some point along this journey.
For the benefit of those who might not be familiar with this process, the estimates support the government's annual request to Parliament for authority to spend public funds. They also provide information to Parliament about adjustments made to projected statutory spending which has been previously authorized by Parliament.
The main estimates are published in three parts. Part I situates the main estimates in the context of the government's overall expenditure plan as presented in the most recent budget. Part II is the traditional blue book that provides details on the statutory and voted items within each department and agency program. Finally, part III highlights individual department and agency spending plans which, since April 1997, have been split into two components. These two components include the departmental performance reports, commonly known around here as the DPRs, which are normally tabled in the fall and which report individual departmental results measured against performance objectives. The other is the report on plans and priorities, the RPPs, which provide detailed multi-year expenditure plans and are normally tabled in the spring.
As part of the standard main estimates process in a typical year, the President of the Treasury Board introduces four bills: interim supply in March to provide spending authority until Parliament approves full supply; full supply in June for spending detailed in the main estimates; first supplementary supply in December supported by the supplementary estimates; and second supplementary supply in March.
This year, as we know, the process unfolded a bit differently than in the past. The 2004-05 main estimates were originally tabled last February, as per normal, when the government requested permission to spend $65.1 billion under program authorities. In addition, the government forecasted $121 billion in statutory spending, for a total expenditure plan of $186.1 billion. Last March, Parliament approved approximately three-quarters of the 2004-05 main estimates.
I offered to table the estimates documents again this fall, in an amended form at that time because I, newly arrived in this position, was looking at restructuring them to reflect greater clarity. However, an objection was raised by members, and quite rightly so, that in one fiscal year we would have had two sets of estimates documents. I agreed that rather than do that--and we had the dissolution of Parliament and an election in the interim--we re-tabled exactly the same set of estimates that we tabled last March, and we tabled the reports on plans and priorities at that time. However we had had lengthy discussions with parliamentarians about ways to improve the estimates reporting to provide greater clarity and greater detail, and we decided to work on some of that in the supplementary estimates.
Today we are seeking Parliament's approval for the remainder of the government's expenditure plan that was originally set out in these main estimates. We are all very aware that Canadians want to see their tax dollars well spent. They want to know where their money is going and how it is being used. I think we all want greater openness and transparency in all of the activities in government, and citizens want to be able to hold Parliament, their government, and public sector officials to account. These estimates and the related supply bills I am putting before the House today are a testament to the government's commitment to improve transparency and accountability.
Over the last few weeks parliamentarians have spent many hours reviewing the estimates through parliamentary committees, both in the House and the Senate. Many ministers were invited to present to those committees and to respond to questions about their departmental budgets, plans and expenditures. Parliamentarians have taken these opportunities to voice their support or their concerns for the government's expenditure plan, which is what we are talking about tonight.
In various ways through this process, they have voiced their opinion on how the government should spend taxpayers' dollars. On October 27 I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate national finance committee to discuss the main estimates. I returned to the same committee on November 30 to address these issues related to supplementary estimates and to the way Treasury Board reports to parliamentary committees. I also appeared before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on November 23.
At this point I want to congratulate the committees. There has been a concern raised by many that for a variety of reasons the House has lost its way in the review of estimates. There are many theories about why this has happened, but I would argue, and I have always argued, that prior to the second world war government became enormous. It grew very rapidly and became very large, very information rich, and very difficult to deal with, given the systems that were available for review at that time. The world also began to speed up. Decisions were made much more quickly.
In response to those pressures, Parliament made a decision in 1968-69 to allow the estimates to be passed or deemed to have passed committee review even if committees had not reviewed them by a certain date.
Since that time there has been a steady erosion in the amount of time and energy that parliamentarians have put in through the annual review of estimates. I think we have all suffered from that. There is a legitimate effort in the House led by, if I may congratulate the committee on government ops and estimates, but not solely that committee. Others have been quite active to revitalize that process. It is something that we at the Treasury Board see as very important. We are constantly seeking advice from committees as to how we can better improve the information we put forward.
There is something else that is important to note in the context of the debate tonight. We are in a minority government in this House. The committees have a majority of opposition members on virtually every committee. The committees, if they had wanted to, could have done a great many things to these estimates. I have argued that one of the magical things about a minority is that everyone is responsible for the decisions that they make and people have taken it seriously.
The fact that we have two amendments coming out of committee and they are strategic and I think they will be argued, is a testimony to all members of the House who have resisted the urge to play with this and have focused on it seriously. I very much appreciate that. I look forward to more of that kind of debate as the years pass.
The appropriation of funds is part of a cycle that lasts the entire year. By the time we get to this point in the expenditure plan, we have had the chance to review the government's fiscal plan, the demands of Canadian taxpayers, and the departmental submissions that are made to Treasury Board. In one sense Parliament almost receives too much information.
Parliament receives hundreds of statutory reports from over 200 government organizations on matters as diverse as privacy, sustainable development, employment equity, alternate fuels and others. The list of reports alone that parliamentarians are expected to digest, understand and react to, exceeds 100 pages. Each and every year we receive hundreds of departmental submissions which provide the basis for the main estimates and the direct program spending that is part of the government's expenditure plan.
As I said earlier, we have been talking about this for some time and there are some themes in what parliamentarians are asking for. We have been trying to figure out what information we could provide in what form that would allow them, with the tremendous pressures that each one of us has on our time, to get the answers to the questions that one might have. There is so much information available, we have been looking for instruments that allow people to identify their particular interest and then drill down into that.
This is not a new topic. In 1994, shortly after I was first elected to the House, I was asked to participate with the Auditor General's office and the then Treasury Board on a review of the estimates process because the documents that were provided at that time filled a case that I could barely lift. It was very cumbersome, very difficult for members to use. The result of that exercise led to the creation of the DPRs and the RPPs, but in a sense it has gone the other way, where they are at a higher level and members have expressed concerns about not having enough detail.
We are one more time into a series of consultations. What we are hearing is that members would like simpler, more integrated information, along with a body of contextual information and then the ability to drill down to the detail that they require in the areas that they choose. They also want information to be integrated. They want performance reports to be linked to plans and they expect to see more balanced reporting, not just good news stories in the DPRs. We should be frank about it. We should say what worked and what did not work.
It is going to be a challenge to this place because of one of the things that I think has occurred, and members have heard me talk about this many times in the House. If the highly partisan and combative atmosphere that exists here in question period gets carried over into committees, it tends to make it very difficult to have the kind of substantive conversation that we need to have on important issues.
The fact is this is the largest organization in Canada. It has 453,000 employees. It has 441 lines of business. It is immense and there will always be issues. I do not think there is a lot of ideological ground here among the members on what the outcome should be. I think we all want good management, high quality management and good delivery of services. The more we can focus on the realities of management, I think we can find solutions that will represent the best thinking of this place.
There were a number of discussions as I went to the various committees and met with members of the House, particularly some of the newer members, about how MPs are supposed to discharge their responsibilities given the enormous amount of information and resources they have available. I know there have been some discussions here in some of the committees, among the House leaders and with the Board of Internal Economy about strengthening some of the resources that members have available to them to provide proper oversight for these estimates. I think this is all to the good.
At the end of the day, the committees having reviewed the estimates, make recommendations to the House. That comes forward, as it has done in the case of two votes tonight, with reductions. The government then has to examine what the committee has done, as it would do if it was a piece of legislation. When a piece of legislation comes back from committee with amendments, the government examines it, makes a decision as to whether or not it can accept those amendments and then we may or may not move changes at report stage. In a sense that is what we are doing here.
Before I get to the substance of the specific vote line that has changed, I would like to make one other comment about the information.
We are in the midst of a major overhaul in government led by the Treasury Board. It is an overhaul of how we hold information. Members again will have heard me talk about this many times in the House.
We have this enormous organization, the largest organization in Canada by a factor of four in terms of the number of employees and the most complex organization in Canada by a considerable factor. However, we have not had the information systems that bring together the management information across this organization in a way that allows us to either get the whole government approach or to focus on outcomes and results.
We are implementing, and this was reported in the budget, a new management results and reporting structure with the goal of developing a comprehensive picture of departmental spending and results to improve ministerial decision making and to improve the understanding of the House as to where the money members are voting for ends up in terms of outcomes for Canadians. Throughout all of this we are moving as quickly as we can to improve the transparency so that members can see quickly and easily what has gone on in any particular question.
There is a lot of talk here about horizontal issues. Simply stated, that means in an organization as large as this there may be more than one department delivering services to a particular recipient group. The Auditor General reported on this recently relative to the aboriginal community. She identified a very large number of departments providing services to one very small aboriginal community and demanding an outlandish number of accountability reporting requirements that were so onerous that the community was not able to respond. There was a concern about whether the information that was gathered was used in any useful way.
We have been working hard and the staff at Treasury Board have done a fantastic job, frankly, in some very creative ways in mapping that activity across a whole range of departments and laying it out so that we can begin to make decisions across a portfolio of activities rather than just down traditional vertical lines. To do this, we have been developing new information systems, the one I mentioned, and the expenditure management information system, which is designed to collect financial and performance data. It will play a role in integrating government-wide data and provide a common database for departments, agencies and for the secretariat.
In addition, we have the reports on plans and priorities and the departmental performance reports online and searchable by key word to make it easier for members and taxpayers to go through part III of the estimates.
I tabled a fourth report. It has been in progress for four years now. It was an innovation of my predecessor. It is the Canada performance report. What we are trying to do with that document is tie all of this activity together in a simple form as we can for such a complex organization, and report to Canadians and report to the House on what we are actually doing. What are the outcomes? We have spent all of this time and energy trying improve conditions in first nations communities. Have they improved? Are there objective standards we can set to know whether we are doing better or worse?
It is an incredibly interesting initiative and one which I strongly support. I hope the committees will work with me as we attempt to refine those indicators, and get better and better reporting.
The series of changes that we have made to supplementary documents were initiated by discussions with the public accounts committee over the years, the Auditor General, and with the Senate finance committee. There is a particular way in which we present information in the supplementary estimates.
In the supplementary estimates that I tabled in the House on November 4, we made changes in the format to increase transparency and to improve the consistent treatment of information across the estimates documents. Incremental spending items are being displayed with explicit identification of where offsets are being used to provide the parliamentary spending authority. There is a full summary reflecting the changes since the main estimates.
There is a new summary of changes devoted to appropriations which highlights all adjustments being proposed by individual departments in their supplementary estimates. In addition, we now have a summary of the supplementary estimates by standard object of expenditure which will tie them back into the public accounts.
A recent report tabled in the Senate stated:
The Committee was pleased to see that a number of changes to the format of the supplementary estimates have been introduced with the Supplementary Estimates (A), 2004-2005 to provide greater transparency and consistency...The committee commends the Treasury Board Secretariat.
Let me deal with the issue of the Governor General. I was the chair of the Standing Committee on Government Operations when we first called the Governor General. There had been concerns expressed by members here about profligate spending and an attitude that did not respect the taxpayers. There was a concern as to whether or not House committees were accountable. I wanted to establish the principle that they were, which of course they were.
While the Governor General does not appear by convention, and should not appear, her staff were there immediately. They provided detailed information and responded very openly and frankly to members of the committee. There has never been a question in their minds nor in the minds of the House about whether or not they should do this.
This time the committee called them again and moved to make this cut. I must reflect on this in two ways. We put forward the estimates of the government. We do not put them forward casually. They are not made up randomly. We go through these very carefully. The estimates, if put forward, are the estimates I believe are the amounts of money that departments require. The committee is quite free, and has the right and responsibility to differ with that, and put forward different amounts.
However, I want to caution the committee on this. If members look at the Governor General's budget, the incident the people were concerned about took place a whole budget cycle ago. This is a different budget year. The increase the Governor General's office received this year was effectively zero and travel has been curtailed. Therefore, a lot of the issues that members were concerned about were addressed in this budget.
There is an ideological debate about whether we should have a Governor General or not. That is not an issue I deal with. I personally believe we should. I personally believe she provides a valuable role. However, the issue is that the office requires a certain amount of money to do the task that it has been assigned. We are confident that the amount of money that has been put forward in these estimates is the amount of money, and that there are difficulties and consequences that arise from making such a large cut in the final quarter of the year. That is a fact.
Therefore, I have moved to have that cut restored. It is the correct and responsible thing to do. I hope the House will see the wisdom in that recommendation.