Government Operations committee  Is your question referring to the scrutiny process within Parliament or to the formulation process in the executive?

Government Operations committee  I think sometimes it's like wine: it takes time. If you want good wine, you need to give it time to mature. I think three months really is a minimum standard already. If you look at the U.S. Congress, they get the budget eight months prior to the beginning of the fiscal year. G

Government Operations committee  Thank you.

Government Operations committee  In many cases, the committees are tasked with preparing recommendations that respond to the government proposals, and then there is a vote on them on the floor of the House. If you take, for example, the Swedish Parliament or the German Parliament, the finance committee—or the b

Government Operations committee  I just want to add one short observation, which is on the number of line items. Certainly, if you look at international evidence, my impression is, and you could do a study of this if you wanted to, that the number of lines you appropriate—so not the estimates, but the appropria

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

Government Operations committee  There should certainly be uniform standards with regard to the format of accounts. I hope that is the case in Canada. I would reckon it is. But it could well be that the quality of accounting varies a bit across departments, and then you would have to focus on rectifying that sit

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  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  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'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  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  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  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