“There’s never been a golden era when Parliament was effective in examining the spending proposals of government, in any systematic, comprehensive and in-depth manner,” said Paul Thomas, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba.
To usher in a new era of competency, he recommended to the House Government Operations Committee last week that Parliament create a committee of about 40 MPs and Senators who would be in charge of studying government programs and the estimates documents the government uses to request funding. So far this year, the estimates detail more than $250-billion in spending. The House Government Operations Committee has been studying ways to improve the House of Commons’ scrutiny of the estimates since February.
The joint committee would break down into subcommittees that looked at specific portfolios, for instance, Canadian Heritage. Each portfolio’s work would be tracked over several years to make sure that money was being well spent and programs were well-delivered.
“Rather than focus on the details of estimates, the committee would focus on the success of policies and programs in delivering value to Canadian taxpayers,” explained Mr. Thomas.
But his suggestion met with some resistance from the New Democrats, who objected to having Senators on the committee.
“I don’t think our party would be very excited about your proposal of having the Senate there. If we’re talking about equal members and so forth, obviously there’s going to be a disproportionate number of members for some parties and not others,” said NDP MP Linda Duncan (Edmonton-Strathcona, Alta.).
Mr. Thomas said that there were practical reasons for having Senators on the committee, which he said was an idea inspired by the Standing Joint Committee on Scrutiny of Regulations, which has 20 members rather than the usual 12.
“We pay for the Senate, we might as well get some value out of the Senate, and a body like the Senate National Finance Committee does good work, so that’s why I included them,” he said.
“It’s hard, even in a House going to 330 members, to find enough MPs interested in the dull, grinding, work of understanding government finances, that you’re going to create a mega, super committee just with MPs alone,” he added.
Once those Members of Parliament are found, Mr. Thomas said that Parliament should do its best to limit turnover in membership. This problem was raised by past committee witnesses, including University of Victoria professor David Good and Queen’s Parliamentary expert Ned Franks.
“There’s too much mobility on committees,” Mr. Thomas said, noting that with about 45 per cent of MPs new to the House after an election, Canada has one of the highest turnovers in a Western democracy.
Serving a longer term on the committee would enable Parliamentarians to really understand the form and content of government spending paperwork, the witnesses have said.
Ms. Duncan said that continuity on committees is “out of our hands” because of the four-year election cycle.
While incumbents who lose their seats in an election are one source of turnover, often, committee membership is shuffled in-session by party whips. This happened with the New Democratic members of House Government Operations Committee after the election of Tom Mulcair (Outremont, Que.) as their new leader.
Adding to the churn is the common party practice of listing nearly every party member as an associate member to a committee. When a regular member is away, or at the whip’s discretion, a new face can be substituted into a committee at any time.
Conservative committee vice-chair and MP Mike Wallace (Burlington, Ont.) said that while the idea of steady committee membership is good, at present it’s impractical.
“If the whole system changed so that there was a day that was just for committees, and you weren’t required in the House for your House duty, and you only had one committee instead of two or three or whatever the number is, that practicality of the situation would be better,” he said.
Assisting the super committee would be a team of expert researchers. They could either be analysts in the Library of Parliament, or part of a branch created in a reformed Parliamentary Budget Office.
The PBO “deserves its own statute which would set forth its own mandate. Included in its mandate would be to assist a committee or committees with a review of the estimates,” said Mr. Thomas, echoing past testimony from government experts that called for a clearer mandate and more apolitical treatment of the office.
In Australia, Mr. Thomas pointed out, committees commission research from the public service. There are also committee secretaries, who lead a number of academic staff who are there to do research, prepare questions for Parliamentarians to ask witnesses and report to the committee. He said that the system leads to more informed committee spending investigations.
He also noted that in Australia, senior public servants can get permission from their ministers to brief party caucuses on spending decisions.
“There’s a more informed debate. It’s not perfect and Australians are critical of it, but compared to what I’ve studied in Canada, they make a more meaningful effort to provide scrutiny of the spending plans of government,” he said.
The committee also heard from senior Parliamentary workers in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta.
The province tables a number of financial and planning documents, including their main estimates, at the same time the Finance Minister gives his budget speech, the committee heard.
“That’s quite amazing, people get everything all at once. I think that’s one way in which you do much better than we do,” said Liberal John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.).
In the past 20 years, following the election of former premier Ralph Klein in 1992, the province has made many changes to the way it presents and looks at its spending estimates, including changing its voting system and instituting multi-committee scrutiny in 2008.
The concurrent tabling of the main estimates and the budget—with budget information included in the mains—necessitates a lot more people knowing the content of the budget, noted Mr. McCallum.
“In Ottawa, only a handful of people in Finance know the contents of the budget, but if we had a system where the estimates came out at the same time, I think there’d be a quantum leap in the number of people in the bureaucracy who have advanced knowledge of the budget,” said Mr. McCallum.
In the current federal system, the main estimates have increasingly become disconnected from the budget. This year, none of the spending initiatives announced in the budget are present in the main estimates. They will be introduced to Parliament in supplementary estimates later in the year.
Shannon Dean, senior Parliamentary counsel and director of House services in Alberta, told the committee that she was unaware of any problems with maintaining budget secrecy.
Mr. Thomas said that fixing procedural quirks while ignoring the culture of Parliament won’t be very effective.
“A fundamental fact of Parliament is that it’s dominated by competitive, disciplined, political parties, and reforms which ignore or seek to stifle partisanship are bound to have limited success in my view,” he said.
“What is more important is a bargain that recognizes the divergent competitive parties represented in Parliament,” he added.
Conservative Kelly Block (Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Sask.) said that the committee would have “a lot to talk about” as it sits down to write its report in the coming weeks.
The committee had planned to wrap up hearing witnesses for its study last week, but the NDP’s last-minute motion to adjourn the House at 3:30 p.m. last Wednesday de-railed plans for a final hearing with officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Finance Department.
Bureaucrats and politicians were seated at the committee table May 9, and NDP MP and chair Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.) was about to drop the gavel when the lights that signal an impending vote started blinking.
The committee had planned to run through the reform suggestions it had heard from witnesses with the officials to see what was feasible.
“It was to have been a very important meeting,” said Mr. Martin.
The officials have been rescheduled for May 14, and the committee will begin drafting its report May 16.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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