Government Operations committee  Thank you Mr. Chairman. I don't propose to go through my opening remarks, per se, but instead will summarize them and hopefully within the next five minutes. At one time, when I was working at the Department of Finance back in the early 1980s, the estimates were a fundamental i

Government Operations committee  I wasn't going to read through all that.

Government Operations committee  I think that if the PBO were made an agent of Parliament, then the rules with respect to the passing on of information should be the same as the other agents of Parliament, such as the OAG. If the rules and regulations with regard to the Office of the Auditor General are sufficie

Government Operations committee  It is true, all the information is online. Departments submit their detailed information as to what they are proposing to spend to Treasury Board for review and approval as the first stage of the estimates process. That usually starts in the spring of each year for the next fisca

Government Operations committee  I strongly agree that the estimates need an anchor, and that anchor should be the budget. The budget sets out the overall economic and fiscal policy of the government, and the estimates support that fiscal policy that the government has set out. Some new spending proposals have t

Government Operations committee  First of all, I'm from the Department of Finance. The estimates are controlled by the Treasury Board.

Government Operations committee  We talked continuously on this whole process. When the estimates and the budget were on the same accounting basis, you could put them together very quickly. You had a linkage between the two. Today that's not the case. Ever since we moved to a full accounting for the budget and t

Government Operations committee  I think you would still have to have supps.

Government Operations committee  Well, I think you need a minimum of two. Three is maximum, which is normally the case now. One of the issues with the budget is that it could include various measures, or set-aside money, for certain types of proposals that the Treasury Board committee is still looking at but ha

Government Operations committee  I'm saying that the budget is on full accrual. The financial statements are on full accrual. Those are the bookends for each fiscal year. The budget starts it off, and the public accounts ends it and says how well the government has done. The estimates are a piece in between. So

Government Operations committee  The deemed rule? I think you could do away with it, if you tabled the estimates a lot earlier.

Government Operations committee  No, I don't. I think Part III, when it was tabled prior to the reports on plans and priorities, contained a lot more detail on programs than is the case today. When you take a look at the public accounts, they are separated out. There is program information available there: the

Government Operations committee  As I indicated earlier, up until about 2006 there was a logic, an order, whereby the budget was first, then the estimates. part IIIs used to be tabled with the estimates, and there used to actually be a lock-up for the estimates at that point in time, so that officials were avail

Government Operations committee  It all depends on what happens during the course of the year, on how much of the spending that was included in the budget was actually included in the main estimates when they were tabled. If there's a sizable amount that was not included, then you're going to have at least one e

Government Operations committee  That is an issue, an important one, in the sense that the estimates should only include those types of things that the government wants Parliament to approve, and to which appropriate—how should I say it?—oversight has been given, by the government and the Treasury Board. As I