Later that day, reporters cornered Peter Kent, the Environment Minister, about 20% cuts to climate change programs the Estimates suggested the government was planning to make.
Ah, he explained, those are not real cuts, merely the sun-setting of programs that had come to the end of their funding life. He suggested the Estimates were hardly worth the paper they were written on and the real action would be in the Budget, where he expected Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to reinstate the lost money.
The budget, when it arrived, offered few clues to suggest that was the case, but the supplementary estimates released in fall 2011 revealed that $135-million of the $222-million cut in the Main Estimates had indeed been reinstated.
Confused? Not half as much as the average member of parliament, whose most important job is make sure taxpayers are getting value for their money.
Watching a parliamentary committee scrutinize the Estimates reminded me of watching Charles the Gorilla paint at Toronto Zoo — you got the sense that he vaguely knew what he was doing, but only vaguely.
Most egregiously, this shell game is being manipulated by a government that claims MPs don’t need Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, to guide them through the departmental cuts announced in the last budget.
Mr. Flaherty argued on CTV Question Period this week that Mr. Page is over-stepping his authority by looking at money that has not yet been spent. In fact, Mr. Page’s mandate calls on him to provide independent analysis to parliamentarians on the nation’s finances, the government’s spending estimates and trends (by their very definition, forward-looking) in the Canadian economy. Mr. Page is in the process of taking a number of departments to court for refusing to supply him with details on their planned cuts.
This bureaucratic head-butting need not concern Canadians who have to get up in the morning, were it not for the fact that our MPs need Mr. Page’s help in tracking the pea, or in this case, the hundreds of billions of dollars the government plans to spend every year.
Who says so? The MPs themselves, including a number of Conservatives who sit on the parliamentary government operations committee.
It produced a report looking at the way the government asks parliament to approve the funds it needs to meet its financial obligations – known as the business of supply. The government transmits to the House of Commons its spending plans in the form of the Estimates. MPs from all parties have expressed their opinion that they often lack the support and expertise to make informed decisions on whether taxpayers’ money is being spent wisely.
The committee produced a report that made a number of suggestions on how to improve the process, not least the novel thought that MPs should be given enough time to review the Estimates. Earlier this year, the deadline to review the government’s spending plans was so tight that none of the standing committees charged with holding the government to account had time to consider the hundreds of millions of dollars of new expenditure.
In the language of parliament, those estimates were duly “deemed to have been reported” and MPs crossed their fingers that there was nothing in there to rival the purchase of four “gently used” nuclear submarines from the Brits as the kind of dumb move that could come back to haunt them. The report said committees should be obliged to spend two weeks reviewing the Estimates before they were sent back to the House.
It also recommended that in any given year, the budget should be presented no later than February 1, so that it is reflected in the Main Estimates. If that were the case last year, Mr. Kent would have known exactly how much funding for climate change programs was being renewed.
The Treasury Board president, Tony Clement, released his response to the government ops committee report last week — and it was a resounding raspberry. In particular, Mr. Clement said he does not support a fixed date for the budget, which he said would reduce the government’s flexibility to respond to financial crises.
Late Monday, the government issued a press release saying it supports recommendations for increased transparency. It may say that but it’s actions say something different. The committee spent four months looking at the Estimates process and made a number of common sense recommendations. The Tories say they will now develop their own model, while rejecting certain suggestions out of hand.
Pat Martin, the NDP MP and government operations committee chairman, said he was disappointed by the response, particularly since Conservative MPs concurred with the recommendations. “There was a widespread consensus that MPs don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs as minders of the public purse. Sometimes I think the government view MPs the way P.T. Barnum viewed circus-goers,” he said in an interview Monday.
It’s hard to disagree. The government seems to want to keep Canadians, and even its own members, in the dark when it comes to the way it spends their money.
There’s been a lot of comment in recent days about the decline of parliamentary government and how the House of Commons is now just a ceremonial body. There’s some truth to that, but Parliament is a robust, and I think, self-healing institution.
Minority government produced an unprecedented period of party discipline, but anyone who requires proof that’s now history should visit the website of Brad Trost, the Conservative MP for Saskatoon-Humbolt, where he tells his constituents that in a parliamentary system such as Canada’s, Stephen Harper “is not my boss, he is first among equals.”
More worrying by far is the diminution of the role of individual MPs as guardians of effective public spending. This is not the Conservative Party’s money – they have to seek the permission of parliament to spend it.
MPs should not need to have the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes and the mathematical genius of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind , not to mention the patience of Job, to figure out whether they are spending it wisely.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: John Ivison
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