Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege for me to be here today to discuss budget 2005 in my capacity as the Minister of Public Works and Government Services.
I am also very proud to stand here as the member of Parliament for the riding of Kings—Hants. I want to take this opportunity to thank my constituents for their vote of confidence in the last election to be their member of Parliament. I feel very fortunate to represent such a beautiful and vibrant riding, one that has given birth to no less than three members of the current cabinet. The Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Fisheries and myself all come from Hants county, the great riding of Kings—Hants.
Today I want to talk about the underlying theme of the budget delivered by the Minister of Finance. The budget demonstrates clearly that the government and the Prime Minister deliver, that we have kept our promises to Canadians, which were established in the last election, and that promises made are promises kept.
The budget was an important milestone for the Department of Public Works and Government Services. It gives me an opportunity today to discuss some of the progress being made within the department and to report to the House some of the progress made within the department since a speech I gave in September in Toronto on the future vision of change for the Department of Public Works and Government Services.
In my speech I spoke of changing the way the Government of Canada did business, taking a more government-wide approach to procurement, better managing our office building portfolio and getting better value for taxpayers in doing so. I also spoke of further improvements to information technology systems of government. What really drives my work within the department and the work of our 14,000 member team nationally is to get better value for tax dollars and at the same time to deliver better services for Canadians.
On weekends, like many members here, I try to spend as much time as I can with constituents in constituency meetings in my office in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and at various functions throughout my rural and small town Nova Scotia riding. I often meet families, with a couple of children, making $20,000 or $30,000. They make car and mortgage payments or pay rent for their housing. They are having difficulty just getting by.
When one considers how tough it is for those Canadian families, we have a responsibility as a government to make good decisions, such that we can try to make their decisions a little easier. My goal as Minister of Public Works and Government Services and the goal of the department is to deliver services more effectively at better value for taxpayers, including those low and middle income Canadian families.
The budget, in terms of its impact with the department, helps strengthen the mandate of the department within the Government of Canada to transform the culture of government and to remodel the way the whole of government does business and in the process spend less taxpayer money in providing the services we are responsible to provide.
I was very heartened to hear the Minister of Finance speak specifically of the progress within the Department of Public Works and Government Services. He said during his budget speech:
--allow me to single out the people in the Department of Public Works and Government Services for their expenditure review committee work. They rose to the challenge and made an exceptional contribution to the success of this exercise. I applaud their innovation and their professionalism
His statement meant a lot to our 14,000 member team across the country. I want to commend the team for its hard work, innovation and dedication to serving the Canadian people.
Public recognition is a sign that public works has in fact turned a corner. We are playing a leadership role within the Government of Canada, in fact changing the culture of government. The ambitious transformation that we are making will ripple across the government in a measured, structured and important way over the next five to eight years.
Public works intends to deliver about $3.4 billion in savings over the next five years, about one-third of the $11 billion identified by the expenditure review committee.
First, we will take a more government wide approach to procurement. This only makes sense.
We cannot have some 100 government agencies and departments operating independently.
Making Public Works and Government Services the procurement arm of government will mean better services at reduced cost. For example, instead of one-offs, we intend to harness the massive buying power of the government. As a government, we buy about $13 billion worth of goods and services every year and get the best possible prices. We will be more capable of enforcing standing offers and using electronic tools to streamline the procurement process, while working with suppliers on a commodity by commodity basis to ensure value for money. By doing this, we intend to save on the procurement side $2.4 billion over the next five years. At the same time, we will reduce the time it takes for departments and agencies to procure the goods and services they need by about half. It all adds up to better services at reduced cost to taxpayers.
I will give a couple of examples. In buying furniture, volume discounts have resulted in recent months in a 16% savings over previous prices. We have also saved $80 million in negotiating new software contracts for defence and human resources departments alone. We also want to make it less cumbersome and expensive to do business with the Government of Canada. We intend to streamline and remove a lot of the complexity and the hassles of our system, particularly for small and medium enterprises across Canada.
As has been noted in the House, I started my first small business when I was 19 years old renting compact refrigerators to students, so I have some empathy for small business. My family and my parents lived in the house attached to the grocery store they owned for 23 years. Generationally, our family is a family of small business, so I have great empathy and understanding for the issues of small business.
We as a government will make it easier for small and medium enterprises across Canada to do business with the Government of Canada. That is why we are setting up the office for small business within our department which will help streamline, simplify and improve access to government procurement for smaller companies.
Furthermore, as of April 1, we will eliminate all fees for any business or individual who wants to use the government's electronic tendering system, MERX. We are also moving ahead with Government of Canada marketplace, an innovative e-procurement portal that we are developing currently with IBM.
I would like to take a moment to pay a special tribute to our parliamentary secretary, the hon. member for St. Catharines, for his exceptional work on procurement reform. He has developed a number of extremely innovative proposals for reforming procurement and he has held consultations across Canada with small and medium enterprises, with the IT sector, with the supplier communities and with our own people within public works. He deserves tremendous credit for his dedication, commitment and hard work on behalf of Canadians in this responsibility.
What we are doing effectively with government procurement is what many companies in the private sector did within the last 20 years. I think this makes a great deal of sense to Canadians and to the vendors we have worked with, not just as suppliers to the Government of Canada but in their role as taxpayers.
We will also achieve significant savings over the next five years in our real estate portfolio. We now spend about $3 billion annually to house public servants across Canada. Our goal is to trim this by about $1 billion over the next five years. We manage as a department about 6.7 million square metres of office space across Canada. We are making changes currently in our operations to achieve that. We recently renegotiated a building maintenance contract with a vendor for all our buildings in Canada. In that capacity we are able to save about $50 million every year for the taxpayer. That $50 million a year on a building maintenance contract is real savings for the Canadian taxpayer and real value for Canadians.
We also are moving ahead to innovate in terms of our information technology system and we are modernizing that. We are playing a leadership role with the government secure channel program. This is a world-class secure network to ensure that whether in rural Nova Scotia or in downtown Toronto, all Canadians can use their home computers to conveniently do business with the government online 24/7.
Furthermore, and I hope during the comment and question period after this, we have an opportunity to talk about some of the work we are doing on the green procurement and the greening of government work our department is doing both in the design of our buildings on a go forward basis and on a green procurement basis. We as a government have a responsibility to play a leadership role by not only working with Canadians but also demonstrating to Canadians, both individuals and private sector corporations, that we get it, that we understand the importance of global warming and sustainable economic and environmental behaviour and that we are playing a leadership role in that. I am proud to say we are.