“The rules are stacked against change and if the Members of Parliament can’t change the estimates then they have no interest in examining the estimates,” former Conservative MP John Williams told The Hill Times last week. “It’s absolutely vital the House of Commons take an active interest in the estimates. This is the fundamental responsibility of the House of Commons.”
Mr. Williams, who served in Parliament from 1993 to 2008, will testify on Monday, April 2, at the House Government Operations and Estimates Committee, which he previously chaired, to discuss how the estimates process can be changed to allow for better accountability.
Mr. Williams, chief executive officer at the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption, said MPs face a “conundrum” when it comes to the estimates.
“If you’re going to boil down the information from the Government of Canada into a manageable amount of paper, it is such a high level overview that it doesn’t contain details therefore, you can’t see what’s going on. If you want the detail, you’re not going to get a big enough room to fill the paper. So what do you do?”
In 1996, Mr. Williams sat on a subcommittee of the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, which also studied the estimates process. The subcommittee made 52 recommendations in its report, one of which was to create a House Estimates Committee.
Although the report was adopted in the House, the 1997 election interrupted any chance of recommendations getting implemented. When the House resumed sitting after the election campaign, Mr. Williams put forward a private member’s motion to adopt the report again.
The motion passed, but since the report was from a different Parliamentary session, it was regarded as an “advisory” report rather than an instruction to government.
A few years later, he heard the government was looking to make changes.
“I ran in there and said, ‘Look here’s the mandate for the committee. ’ If you look at the mandate of the committee and Standing Order 108 and the recommendations of sub-committee I sat on, they’re identical. That part was achieved,” he said.
Parliamentary expert Ned Franks, who testified at the committee March 26, noted that while committees can vote to lower funding levels in the estimates, a sitting government could look at the change as a matter of confidence. The high stakes discourage any changes.
Committee witness Joachim Wehner, a professor at the London School of Economics, who has knowledge on how other countries handle their spending approvals, noted that Parliaments based on the Westminster system tend to be “some of the worst” among OECD countries when it comes to scrutinizing spending.
He said that in the U.K. the last time a government was defeated on the estimates was 1919, when Parliament refused to grant the Lord Chancellor funding for a second bathroom. In the same era, challenging and changing the estimates fell out of favour, he noted.
Mr. Williams also said the estimates process is an “arcane” subject which “MPs shy away from.” It’s also very complex, he said. “You can’t get to the detail. It’s a difficult file to get your mind around,” he told The Hill Times.
One of the suggestions the committee has already heard from witnesses is to change the estimates’ structure from vague votes on operating budgets to decisions based on programs or groups of programs.
“I believe this will also force government, to some degree, to engage more carefully with Parliamentary committees, and maybe it will also lead Parliamentary committees to ask more detailed questions,” said Mr. Wehner.
Auditor General Michael Ferguson, who testified at committee on March 28, said that the government should standardize its accounting practices to make spending easier to track from the estimates to the public accounts. The main estimates are based on cash accounting, while the public accounts are done in accrual.
But switching to accrual might open “more avenues for fudging the books,” said Prof. Franks, who said that he was in favour of keeping the cash accounting system because it was simpler than accrual, and easier to understand.
In cash accounting, as soon as money enters or exits the books, it is recorded. In accrual, a transaction can be recorded when a financial transaction is made, whether or not money has entered or exited the coffers.
Mr. Ferguson said that New Brunswick tables a capital budget in the December prior to the start of the fiscal year, to allow departments to get a head start on procurement. A full budget statement comes out in the spring.
The committee has contemplated recommending a change to when the federal budget is delivered in order to allow for budget initiatives to get into the main estimates. Any new budget spending is currently tabled in supplementary estimates over the course of the year. Mr. Ferguson noted that this undercuts the usefulness of the main estimates.
“Main estimates do not provide a complete picture of spending,” he said, adding that the use of supplementary estimates as a funding vehicle more than doubled between 1997-1998 and 2005-2006.
Prof. Franks suggested tying the budget to the appropriations process, rather than ways and means. He noted that the Treasury Board, who works on main estimates in the fall, would usually have the book done by January.
“I don’t see any problem in having the budget speech at about that time, when the government knows what it’s spending,” he said.
Former auditor general Sheila Fraser said last week, when asked by former Liberal MP Marlene Catterall at a public speech, that while the estimates are “a really important issue” and “one of the prime responsibilities of Members of Parliament,” Parliamentarians do not have the training or the resources to read and understand the estimates documents.
“I can remember saying in committee once that our expectations of Parliamentarians are probably unrealistic,” she said during a Famous Five Ottawa luncheon last week that celebrated her as a nation-builder. “I think really there needs to be far more support given to Members of Parliament to carry out that really important function.”
The AG’s Office has published a guide to understanding the estimates for Parliamentarians since a prior study by the Government Operations Committee recommended it in 2003.
The information given to MPs should also be simplified, Ms. Fraser said. “It is so complex that quite frankly, it’s almost impossible for a lay person who comes in and doesn’t have a lot of training to decipher it,” she said.
Conservative MP Ron Cannan (Kelowna-Lake Country, B.C.) echoed this sentiment at committee last week: “For us as Parliamentarians to oversee the public finance is something that is sometimes a very daunting task.”
Ms. Fraser told The Hill Times that she doesn’t think MPs should necessarily be experts in reading estimates and government documents, however.
“I think it’s important that MPs represent the wide diversity of people across the country with various skill sets. The issue is that even for someone who is an accountant or an economist to understand those documents is very difficult,” she said. “They need far more support to be able to do the analysis and inform them. One would hope that could be part of the solution to improving the estimates process.”
The estimates should also have information on past spending levels and spending anticipated in future years, said Mr. Wehner.
“That gives me a range of years which I can then use to query government and I can ask how a program is developing, what is driving spending changes in a particular program,” he said.
Ms. Fraser said that’s one of the roles of the Parliamentary Budget Office. She said she hopes that more resources would be given to the PBO so that the office can better support Parliamentarians and that the government “would provide him with more insight, better information, and better analysis of what departments are actually planning to do with the money.”
Mr. Wehner also suggested strengthening the role and resources of the PBO in the estimates process. He said that Canada is on the “cusp” of this new way of reviewing government finances, and a number of countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, are following suit.
Mr. Williams said the Government Operations and Estimates Committee should also take advantage of its mandate and call on a review for government program spending more widely, so that MPs continually are looking at government spending. He said each program should be evaluated at least every 10 years, based on four questions: What is this program designed to do in society? How well is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing in society? Is it doing it efficiently and effectively? And, in this rapidly changing environment, is there a better way to do the same thing?
“These are four fundamental yet simple questions that all programs should be measured against,” Mr. Williams said, noting that although the committee cannot initiate this themselves, they should regularly ask the House to ask the government to give it the information it needs to do the review.
“You keep the government focused and efficient every year. You don’t have to wait until it’s time to tighten the belt before you have to suck it in and lob off a few limbs,” he said. “I think that it is not this great big crammed vote on the last allotted supply day. What we should have is the estimates committee working all year round looking at, calling for program review of any particular program they want to take a look at.”
Ms. Fraser told The Hill Times she is “cynical” about the process changing because, as Mr. Williams did in the 1990s, MPs have been dealing with the issue for a long time.
“One Member of Parliament I remember from Nova Scotia, he said, ‘This doesn’t get me votes.’ How to get the public more aware that this is important, and how to get them engaged in it I think is going to be a challenge,” she said in an interview with The Hill Times. “I think it’s certainly something worth looking at. It’s huge amounts of money, but if you look at the departments, it’s two votes, one for capital, one for operations. We’re talking about billions of dollars. It’s just I think really hard for most people to comprehend that. I’m glad there seems to be some work going on to look at it, but I guess I’m a little cynical because it’s been going on for awhile.”
Prof. Franks was also pessimistic about the chances for change. He talked about a “very powerful feeling that exists within both the government and the departments, that it’s their money and their budget, not Parliament’s.”
Mr. Williams said he was hopeful that things can change, especially since it’s an era of government restraint and improved efficiency.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH, JESSICA BRUNO
No comments:
Post a Comment