Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate. My particular interest in the Standing Orders is the business of supply. For most people supply means the estimates whereby Parliament votes the individual line by line budgets to the government in order to give it the authority to spend the money that has been authorized by Parliament, because until it gets that authority, the government cannot spend anything at all.
First, I would like to draw attention to a report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs from the 36th Parliament. It states in its opening statement:
In the 35th Parliament, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs appointed a Sub-Committee on the Business of Supply “to undertake a comprehensive review of the Business of Supply, with particular attention to the reform of the Estimates and the processes and mechanisms by which the House and its committees may consider and dispose of them”.
After considerable study and deliberation the subcommittee tabled a report with the committee in April 1997. The committee subsequently tabled the report in the House, but because of the pending federal general election the committee report was not examined in detail. It was subsequently tabled again in the 36th Parliament, I believe as the 51st report.
My interest in the business of supply and the estimates goes back a long way. I sat on that particular subcommittee. It had three general concepts of change.
The first one was that we bring in what we call program evaluation which emanated from a private member's bill in my name. It asked that every government program where it delivers services to Canadians be evaluated on a cyclical basis, for example, once every 10 years. Four simple questions would be asked. They would be simple but nonetheless fundamental questions so that we could really find out if the programs were delivering value for Canadians.
The first question would be, what is the program designed to do for us anyway? When I give speeches across the country people ask, “Are you not doing that already?” No we are not. What are these programs on which the Government of Canada spends money? What value are they providing for Canadians? That question needs to be asked.
The second question would follow from there. Now that we know what it is supposed to do, how well is the program doing what it is supposed to do? The third question would be, is it doing it effectively and efficiently? The fourth would be, in this complex world in which we live, is there a better way to achieve the same results?
Program evaluation is needed to keep the programs that the Government of Canada delivers focussed for the benefit of Canadians.
The second major recommendation was that we have a committee of the House of Commons on the estimates. We are not experts. There are very few experts on the estimates in the House. Therefore we needed a committee that would look at the estimates process much more rigorously than the other standing committees do. It was given a mandate to look at six or seven fundamental parts of the estimates which generally get overlooked.
First of all is statutory spending. We do not in the House approve statutory spending at any time other than the time we set up a program. For example, i believe that unemployment insurance was set up in 1947. At that time there was a clause in the bill saying it would get the money it needs. That was the last time Parliament voted any money to the employment insurance program.
Statutory spending needs to be reviewed on a cyclical basis. That was part of the mandate.
The other one was tax expenditures. These do not even show up in the financial statements of the Government of Canada. RRSP deductions, for example, are deductions from income tax. There is no revenue for the Government of Canada. There is no expenditure by the Government of Canada, but they are a major public policy. We need to look at that.
Crown corporations have been in the news this past year. They should be examined as well.
Non-statutory spending is what we vote on but we tend to gloss over. There is non-statutory spending, statutory spending, crown corporations and tax expenditures. Loan guarantees show up as one dollar items and we do not pay any attention to a one dollar item but when the loan goes bad and comes back as a $500 million item, by that time it is too late. We want to take a look at loan guarantees and a number of other things.
Today I want to talk about the estimates process.
Here in the House of Commons we have developed our system of motions, amendments to motions and subamendments to motions. We went through that with the Speech from the Throne, the budget debates and so on, but the process is hijacked when it comes to the estimates. We do not have a motion, amend it, and a subamendment. We vote on the subamendment first. We vote on the amendment second. We vote on the main motion third.
If I as a member of Parliament put in a notice of motion to reduce the estimates by a certain amount, be it a dollar or more than a dollar, that is not an amendment to the motion that gets voted on first. That causes the President of the Treasury Board to bring in a superseding motion to reaffirm the original expenditures. When that passes, my motion is out of order. The system is hijacked, and because the process is highjacked, parliamentarians ask why they should bother. The process has become a farce.
The estimates are tabled by the President of the Treasury Board in this House and they are referred to the committees. If the committees do not look at the estimates, they are deemed to have examined them and reported back without change. Because the committees look at the estimates, the House does not debate the estimates at all. The rules do not allow it.
The subcommittee on supply recommended that we make some changes to the Standing Orders. Among these were that committees be allowed to reallocate within a department up to 5% of the spending from one program to another program. That would be something for members of Parliament to get their teeth into. If they made these changes, they would table a report in the House justifying their position. It would not be done on a political whim. They would have to table their rationale for it. If they did that, the government would either have to object or bring in a royal recommendation allowing the change. If the government objected, it would have to present to the House its rationale for things remaining as is.
We would have the two sides of the argument, the committee saying there should be reallocation, the Treasury Board maybe saying to leave it as is, both with their reasons attached. Therefore let the debate begin, let Parliament be seized with the issue and let Parliament make the decision.
We also said that since it was a novel idea, that we re-examine it after two business cycles. I did not see it as revolutionary, but that report was tabled in 1997 and here it is 2005 and we are still working to get it implemented.
This is part of the democratic process. If the government of the day, which says that it wants to fix the democratic deficit, believes in fixing the democratic deficit, I would hope that it would endorse this report and accept these recommendations.
Remember that it was an all-party committee and the recommendations were accepted unanimously in 1997. For that reason the recommendations are legitimate. They are serious. They are there to improve the effectiveness of Parliament. They are there to improve the effectiveness of democracy in this country. It does not seem much to ask because as I said, the process has been hijacked and the process today is a farce.
On that basis I have here in both official languages the 51st report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, which has already been tabled in this House. I ask for unanimous consent to table the report again in both official languages and have it referred to the procedure and House affairs committee, as it deliberates on these amendments to the Standing Orders so that it can have the rationale from the committee back in 1997 and it can understand what is going on.
Madam Speaker, I would ask that you seek unanimous for me to table in both official languages the report of the business on supply of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and that it be referred to the committee.