Auditor General Michael Ferguson flagged the reduction of committee reviews of his reports to Parliament in a submission to the House of Commons and the Senate earlier this week outlining the past year’s performance of his office and its plans for audit work over the coming year.
“Engagement with parliamentary committees has again decreased: 30 per cent of our performance audits were reviewed, compared with 48 per cent in the 2011–12 fiscal year and 62 per cent in the 2010–11 fiscal year. The total number of hearings and briefings we have participated in relative to the number of sitting days has also decreased,” the performance report to Parliament said.
A spokesman for the Auditor General’s Office told The Hill Times the drop in Parliamentary oversight of the AGO work will not affect the work done by Mr. Ferguson and his staff.
But in the past, committee reviews and evidence from government witnesses during the hearings that normally follow performance audits have often turned up new information or political actions that led to other problems subsequently discovered in government spending.
One of the notable examples involving the Conservative government was a June 2011 report from then-auditor general Sheila Fraser disclosing that the government had hidden a $50- million fund for 2010 G8 projects in Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka within an $83-million program Parliament approved for border infrastructure.
Another audit, tabled in Parliament by Auditor General Michael Ferguson in April, 2012, sparked months of controversy and Parliamentary hearings over Mr. Ferguson’s finding that the government had failed to disclose $14-billion in maintenance and operating costs for the controversial F-35 stealth fighter jet acquisition, which the government put on hold following the report and which now would cost a minimum of $45-billion if the government goes ahead with it.
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee is specifically mandated by House Standing Orders, or House rules, to review and report on the auditor general’s audits of departments and government spending, but opposition MPS say the committee has often been hamstrung since 2011.
That year, the new Conservative majority eliminated a former steering subcommittee for planning and confidential work. The move left the full committee using up much of its time with procedural and witness wrangling between opposition MPs and a Conservative government flexing majority muscles for the first time since Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) first won power in 2006.
The Conservatives on the House Public Accounts Committee, a government oversight panel chaired by an MP from the official opposition party, were the first to use in-camera meetings to overrule witness or inquiry proposals from the opposition parties behind closed doors. Parliamentary convention normally prevents MPs from disclosing what takes place in the secret in-camera sessions.
“The committee was designed to fail,” said Liberal MP Gerry Byrne (Humber-St.Barbe-Baie Verte, Nfld.). “The Conservatives positioned the work of the committee as being doomed to fail on purpose. That was the objective. They wasted time on procedural issues, esoteric fights and debates that really should have been settled collegially and within a matter of minutes, it took days to resolve.
“We had a subcommittee, a steering committee, which would [in the past] meet outside of regular committee time, every standing committee has one, and we would use that opportunity to just iron out procedure and iron out agenda items, so that we wouldn’t chew up valuable committee time. Early on in our tenure, they used the majority to just simply dissolve that subcommittee, what happened after that is we ended up using committee time to do what the steering committee would have done,” said Mr. Byrne, who has been replaced on the committee in this session of Parliament by Liberal MP Scott Simms (Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor, Nfld.).
Committee chair and NDP MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.) said other factors, such as work sharing with the Commons Environment Committee on reports from the federal environment commissioner within the Auditor General’s Office, were partly to blame, but he also said the elimination of the steering committee reduced time available for committee hearings.
When a committee begins discussion or debate on anything related to “committee business”— such as witness selection—it goes in camera and any journalists or members of the public in the room are required to leave.
“I’m not going to speak to motivation, but on the question of steering committee, I still believe and have all along that we’re more efficient with a steering committee,” Mr. Christopherson said. “The important thing was that we used to meet at a time that was outside the time of the regular committee. Now, without a steering committee, during the two days that we have, part of what we do in-camera is all the work we used to do in the steering committee.”
NDP MP Malcolm Allen (Welland, Ont.), a member of the committee who filibustered its hearings on the F-35 acquisition last year, blamed part of the slowdown on the time used up by those hearings and also the controversy sparked by the G8 spending in Mr. Clement’s riding.
But he said the government’s repeated use of time allocation motions in the last session, particularly in the month leading up to the summer recess, ate up committee time because MPs were forced repeatedly to leave committee hearings in order to take part in the House voting.
As well, the government legislative agenda was jammed, including many criminal law bills aimed at maintaining Conservative electoral support, which further added to House voting duties for committee members.
“We were going through a whole pile of time-allocation motions that the government brought forward, and we would end up voting, the bells would ring and we would have to go back out, we would go vote, we would come back and an hour later the bells would ring and we would have to go vote again,” said Mr. Allen.
Conservative MP Dan Albas (Okanagan-Coquihalla, B.C.) is the Parliamentary secretary to Mr. Clement in this session of Parliament and in that role serves as the senior MP on the Public Accounts Committee.
He is new to the Public Accounts Committee in this session along with three other Conservative MPs in the government complement of eight on the panel, and said he could only discuss the work he hopes the committee will do in the new session.
“Being new to the committee, all I know is that the committee has done some tremendously good work in the past, obviously working with the auditor general,” Mr. Alba said.
“I also do know the government takes the recommendations he [Mr. Ferguson] brings forward very seriously and examines and, in most cases, agrees with change to behaviour. I do know that my committee members are very engaged; we have a wide variety of skills on our committee. Many [members] of this new Public Accounts Committee are new, and I look at it actually being a real opportunity to bring some fresh eyes to it, and we’re looking forward to a productive session,” Mr. Albas told The Hill Times in an interview.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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