Government Operations committee  Yes, I can hear you clearly. I hope you can hear me as well.

Government Operations committee  First of all, thank you very much for allowing me to present some thoughts to the committee. I also would like to thank your administrative team for being so helpful in helping me to organize this. First I'm going to give you some comparative observations. I bring less of the Ca

Government Operations committee  I think the case is really overwhelming that Parliament should have a minimum of three months to look at the standing proposals of the executive before the start of the fiscal year. There are a number of ways in which you can do that. Different parliaments have done this in the p

Government Operations committee  I have certainly seen more highly aggregated estimates than in Canada, but I did look at the main estimates a few days ago, and at least you have program-level information, which I think is very good. I've seen estimates that include more detailed information below the program le

Government Operations committee  I don't want to become too normative. I said in my opening remarks that some of these things about the right balance of power between the executive and the legislature are really questions that are normative and reflect a certain view of how politics should be structured. But let

Government Operations committee  Well, I think you've raised an important point, and it is that we can talk about institutional features, but at the end of the day what Parliament does is part of the political system and political dynamics, and these give rise to certain behaviour, which can be highly partisan o

Government Operations committee  I just want to give you a small insight on why this practice actually prevails in Westminster parliaments. In medieval England, parliaments tried to force the king to spend his own money before taxing. It was a good idea a few centuries ago to vote the budget as late as possible

Government Operations committee  That is a very big question. I believe that we see the effects of these changes only over a number of years. If I look at the journey in South Africa, for example, you used to have a parliament that was entirely passive and that never did anything to the budget. That was the sy

Government Operations committee  Not immediately, I have to say. It's been my experience that what really makes the difference—and I've briefly worked in Parliament as well—is when you get members of Parliament who pick up the estimates and actually read them. I'm sure there are good ways of using technology to

Government Operations committee  I've seen a lot of change within the basic model of the Westminster system of government. Different parliaments have, for example, instituted new committees that they didn't have in the past. Professor Franks mentioned that this was the case in Canada as well, in the 1960s, for

Government Operations committee  I think you've raised a very important point. One of the things that could be done without much difficulty, I believe, is to have more in-year reporting by the government at a detailed level, or a more detailed level than may be available at present. Technically, there's no rea

Government Operations committee  I think if you look at some of the variables I talked about, the Westminster Parliament really is at a severe disadvantage. Amendment powers are the same as in your House of Commons. Parliament can only reduce existing items. The last time the government was defeated on estimates

Government Operations committee  We have just completed, as part of an OECD study, a review of independent fiscal institutions in OECD countries. Amongst these institutions was the Parliamentary Budget Officer of Canada. I have also followed a little bit over the past few years the work of the Parliamentary Budg

Government Operations committee  I think there are many parliaments where it is unthinkable that you would have anything happening on the floor of the House with regard to the budget without the responsible committee reporting on the budget. I'm not aware of any incidents in the German Bundestag, for example, or

Government Operations committee  Not necessarily in presenting the estimates or presenting information. The U.K. government has just committed itself to having, more routinely, public consultations when it comes to major tax changes, for example, which then will give the private sector a chance to make input and