Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page told the House Government Operations Committee last week that moving the budget to the fall would be addressing only a symptom of the real problem.
The idea behind the move would be to have the spending in the budget reflected in the government main spending estimates, which come out every year by March 1. Right now, the budget and the main estimates are prepared at the same time, but separately, by the Finance Department and Treasury Board Secretariat. Any new initiatives in the March 29 budget will not come down the government spending estimates pipe until the next round of estimates in early summer. There are usually three rounds of supplementary, or additional, government spending estimates every year, tabled in May or June, November, and February.
This also makes spending changes hard for Parliamentarians to track.
Supplementary estimates, the final round of funding requests for 2011-2012, were tabled in the House of Commons on Feb. 28 by Treasury Board President Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.).
In the estimates, the government is asking Parliament for permission to spend an additional $1.2-billion across 54 departments and agencies. Some of the biggest requests in the supplementary estimates include $355.5-million to Foreign Affairs and CIDA, almost all for international aid. The office of Infrastructure Canada has requested $282.1-million. Human Resources and Skills Development is asking for spending authority for $218.6-million, with $162.2-million due to the routine write-off of uncollectible student loans.
The government has requested authorities to spend a total of $260.6-billion in 2011-2012.
In 2012-2013, the financial year that begins April 1, the main estimates include $251.9-billion of spending over 130 organizations.
Committees in both the House of Commons and the Senate are delving into the nitty-gritty of these spending requests in the coming weeks by calling departmental and Treasury Board officials, as well as ministers for more details.
Then, the estimates called to a vote to give government permission to spend the money.
Most MPs say they are overwhelmed by the volume of spending listed in the estimates without clear detail on its purpose. The books can be hundreds of pages long, with as much as half a billion dollars in votes per page.
“You’re kind of left hanging, or thrown into the deep end of the pool. They drop these books on your desk, and you’ve either got to tell them that you don’t know what they’re talking about, which is unlikely, or that you do, which is a little dangerous,” former Liberal MP Joe Jordan told the committee.
Mr. Jordan noted that it was only when he became Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board, six years after he became an MP, that he finally really understood the estimates.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (Whitby-Oshawa, Ont.) announced last week that the budget for 2012-2013 would be tabled March 29. The budget is traditionally tabled before the start of the fiscal year, in February or March. Under the reform scenario, it would be tabled the previous autumn.
“I’ve been an advocate that maybe we should be presenting our budget in the fall, and having mains reflect the majority of the changes come April 1,” said Conservative MP Mike Wallace (Burlington, Ont.).
Both Liberal and NDP members of House Government Operations have also raised the possibility of moving the budget timing.
“I think agreement that this would be a good thing in terms of better-aligning the estimates in the budget, and that strikes me as important, but it’s been like this for 100 years or more and that’s never happened, and I’m sure we’re not the first to come up with this argument,” said Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.).
David Good is a professor of public administration at the University of Victoria and a former assistant deputy minister, with experience in the Treasury Board. He said that while moving the budget announcement to the fall would help reconcile its contents with the next spring’s main estimates, it poses problems for the government.
“The reality with budgets is the federal government brings down a budget when it needs to. It needs the flexibility when economic situations change,” he explained.
“Getting a process in place where it’s constantly regularized is a difficult one to try and do. I’m not sure if doing a budget in the fall and waiting all the way to the main estimates, and then you incorporate what’s in the main estimates, would necessarily be the best way to do it,” he said.
He added that he didn’t think the change would lead to any better scrutiny of spending.
Mr. Page suggested that if Parliamentarians were intent on going that route, they may want to look at making budget preparation and release more concurrent and complimentary. But he said that he thinks any reforms to the estimates process should focus more on structural change and less on procedural tweaks.
Altogether, Parliamentarians spent only about 90 hours looking at the estimates in 2010-2011, noted Mr. Page. He said the key was to give Parliamentarians a reason to really dig into the documents.
Parliament has already looked at reforming the estimates a number of times.
By Mr. Page’s count Parliamentarians have made more than 100 recommendations since 1997, most of them procedural.
As Conservative MP Bernard Trottier (Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ont.) noted, the estimates look much the same now as they did in 1860.
Mr. Page said that the playing field between Parliamentarians and government needs to be leveled. Compared to the six-step approval process that Parliamentarians perceive as the budget, estimates, and public accounts, behind the scenes bureaucrats and Cabinet ministers are involved in more than a dozen decision-making steps.
“That information exists right now, they just need to make it available to you,” Mr. Page said.
David Macdonald, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said that large financial institutions and smaller jurisdictions like the City of Ottawa regularly publish more detailed financial information than the federal government.
Aside from the main spending documents, the government also publishes annual departmental reports on plans and priorities as well as departmental performance reports, quarterly reports, and future-oriented financial statements. All of these documents are meant to shed more light on the details of departmental spending.
Regularly, the information in all this paper work doesn’t add up or isn’t comparable, noted Mr. Macdonald, as well as Mr. Jordan.
“You have to take a bit from here and a bit from there and speculate what may or may not be in there,” said Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Macdonald suggested that in order to provide more context, reports on plans and priorities contain past and future years of spending and other resources.
Mr. Good said that MPs have more spending reports before them than ever before, but the problem is its usability.
“People don’t want information unless they can actually use it,” said Mr. Good.
As for the estimates documents themselves, experts suggested re-grouping the information into more intelligible chunks. Right now, spending is lumped into votes, which are broad categories of funding like grants and contributions, or operations.
Mr. Macdonald noted in the case of a large department like National Defence, this led to MPs basically voting on billions in spending.
“Parliamentarians were provided essentially no data on a vote on $20-billion in the main estimates—eight per cent of the total output in Canada—with essentially no detail of how that money would break down in the department, he said.
Mr. Page stated that in his experience, the estimates aren’t even referred to for information within departments. He suggested that instead of vague votes, spending is broken down into 10 or 15 program activities. He said this would provide better fodder for MPs and would give them a place to start when asking for more information.
Parliamentarians also need to be given more practical abilities to change the estimates, said Mr. Good.
“Parliamentarians have very little impact on the estimates,” he said.
He noted the House standing orders, or House rules, consider the estimates to be deemed approved by committee after a certain period of time has gone by, even if the responsible committee hasn’t studied them.
A Speaker’s ruling from 1979 also ruled committees that produced a substantive opinion on the estimates as out of bounds.
While technically, Parliamentarians can vote to lower the estimates to show their dissatisfaction with them, this is rarely done. Part of the reason is that depending on the importance of the vote, it could be viewed as a matter of confidence.
Mr. Good suggested making small changes to the estimates not a matter of confidence.
“They would then have some incentive to actually focus in on them, because then they could actually impact on the spending of departments,” he said.
Whatever recommendations the committee decides to pursue, Mr. Page said the bureaucracy is capable of delivering it.
“I don’t think there is anything stopping us. I think if you folks around this table said, ‘This is the way we want our information ... that’s what we pay public servants to do.’ You will get that, we can change this system. I think you need to tell us that and we can deliver the goods,” he said.
A number of departments and agencies have cut back on their asks compared to last year, even before the government’s planned savings from the strategic and operating review are factored in. They include the Privy Council Office, the Finance Department, Fisheries and Oceans, Defence, and the Treasury Board.
The Senate and the Library of Parliament have also cut back on their planned spending in the main estimates. Both Parliamentary bodies have been looking at ways to cut back on their own spending in light of the rest of government’s strategic and operating review. The House of Commons is also considering spending cuts, but its 2012-2013 estimates rose by $4.2-million to $445.9-million over last year.
In the main estimates for the first time is Shared Services Canada, a new department that will centralize and streamline government IT. It’s allocated almost $1.5-billion in the estimates.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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