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EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, November 30, 1995

.0935

[English]

The Chair: I call the subcommittee to order.

We have an interesting line-up of witnesses this morning. We call it our academic round table. I'll let them introduce themselves as they speak.

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Dr. J.R. Mallory (Individual Presentation): There is a rule about age before beauty, and it might as well apply to me.

I am and have been for some time, as you can tell by my age, an emeritus professor of political science at McGill University. My knowledge of this subject is far less up to date and exhaustive than that of my two friends here today, but among us we'll do our best to tell you what you want to know.

Historically, the voting of supply is a matter that goes to the roots of the parliamentary constitutional order. The legitimacy of government arises from the support of the legislature, since the legislature provides the funds, which are the lifeblood of government. Without funds, a government can't carry on. That is how parliaments and ultimately people came to gain control over the Crown.

Nevertheless, we know that as our political and parliamentary system has changed from the distant past to the present day, the granting of supply has assumed the character of what Walter Bagehot called the dignified part of the constitution, with a role not far removed in pure symbolism from the formality of royal assent. Is it possible to make supply have a greater symbolic meaning, to restore to members of Parliament some kind of meaningful role in holding government accountable, and even influencing financial decisions that go to the heart of policy?

In this connection, it seems useful to look back at the 1979 report of the Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability, commonly known as the Lambert report. While its terms of reference were mainly directed to the issue of internal financial management and accountability in the public service, the commission also considered means of strengthening parliamentary control of the process. Thus on page 384 of the report it said:

What they found, and this is on page 386:

Is this situation any better today? The presentation of the estimates has been improved, so we're told. They're now more intelligible from an auditing point of view, but they still don't convey much from a policy perspective or as material for legislative oversight of administration.

Progress has been incremental, but the goal of effective oversight has remained distant and is not easily attainable. The possibility of a committee having two opportunities through the year, one in the normal spring period and the second in the fall, to look at performance in relation to plans is an idea that's worth trying.

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It must be remembered that it is Treasury Board that sees itself as the primary body to reconcile policy objectives of departments with available resources as part of the whole budgetary picture. To them the process of parliamentary review, which may force policy changes in particular instances, is likely to unbalance the rational structure that they have put together.

Accordingly, governments will resist a shift in power away from rational policy-making by the cabinet supported by the bureaucracy. So what can parliamentarians do in order to become a more meaningful part of the process?

Committees, if they have a stable core membership, in time begin to exhibit what is called small group behaviour, which is the result of working and possibly travelling together, developing a common core of understanding of the subject matter, so that party lines become somewhat blurred by the common experience of committee members. This has its limits.

Members are party men with basic loyalties, and are subject to discipline from party whips. Internal committee loyalties can be stronger in the committee than behaviour expected on the floor of the House, but our constitution gives the government many weapons to protect itself from any situation comparable with the recent events in Washington.

The best weapon that members can develop is a combination of experience and knowledge of the policy areas they are dealing with. It should be realized that the present House is unusual compared with most of its predecessors, in that so many of you are still learning how the system works and what your role is.

This is a more challenging situation than normal, although as Professor Franks pointed out a long time ago, one of the reasons for the relative impotence of the Canadian House compared with other legislatures is its relatively high rate of turnover. So the challenge of learning how to be effective in the system is one that confronts every new parliament, but most particularly this one.

There's room for improving the system in relation to the estimates procedure, but with knowledge and experience even the present system would work better and members would feel less frustration and helplessness. It's important to remember what the purpose of supply procedure is in the modern context.

The present standing orders have made it almost impossible to destroy a government on a confidence issue arising out of supply. Our constitutional arrangement makes impossible the American system, which gives to legislative committees a primary place in the budgetary process.

What role is there? There could be an opportunity for creating greater accountability and much better evaluation of performance. In the autumnal review committees could attempt to match departmental plans with a measure of performance, which might lead in turn to more intensive study of the success programs. If the government listens to these reports, it will be reflected in policy changes in the future, and that depends on the impact of committee reports on the media and ultimately on public opinion, to which governments need to be sensitive.

To sum it up, supply is not a question of a standing committee having any real role in how resources are managed in a particular fiscal year. Standing committees, once they have mastered their subject area, through inquiry and evaluation of programs can express useful and persuasive arguments about modification of policy that would otherwise have no impact on either ministers or their senior officials.

That's the avenue on which I think committee study of supply must focus - on accountability and management, not on major policy objectives, which gets down to the allocation of particular resources, rather than focusing on how it's managed and whether it achieves its goal.

Thank you, Madame Chair.

The Chair: Thank you.

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Dr. C.E.S. Franks (Professor, Department of Political Science, Queen's University): I'm a professor in the department of political studies at Queen's University.

Over the years, I have been a humble student at the feet of Professor Mallory for various things about parliamentary government, so I will not repeat or cover the areas he's covered so well. I apologize for not having my remarks written, but circumstances prevented that from happening.

I'm going to go through a series of points here. They're sort of a dog's breakfast of points because they cover various areas of concern I have. I'm not willing to say that there are underlying themes that I can identify that tie everything together beautifully.

Point one is that the estimates are only a small part of a very large process that has both an internal, government side and an external, parliamentary side. This process concerns the very broad financial processes that are historically the means by which Parliament gained control over government and exercised that control.

The stages in the process, as they occur during a financial year cycle, are very similar to the stages as they evolved.

The first stage is the appropriation stage of voting money by Parliament. The estimates are part of that process.

The second stage is the actual use of money. It's the issue and disbursement of money, and the handling of funds, which is exclusively an executive function.

Then the third stage in the process, which didn't develop in parliamentary terms in any effective way until the middle part of the 19th century, is the audit process. In that, the auditor general and the public accounts committees, which were largely creations of Gladstone in the middle of the 19th century, have their roles and parts.

It's a circle of control. It begins with the basic documents of the appropriations and statues of Parliament, which give the amount of money that the government can have, and no more. This says what it can be spent for and how it can be spent.

This ends up with an audit that's based on the framework of that control. First, there's accountability, such that all the funds have to be accounted for. Second, there's the legality, such that these funds have been spent according to the laws and regulations, and no more. Third, there's an audit of, to use an old-fashioned term, propriety, which nowadays is closer to meaning value for money.

I emphasize that, because whatever happens at the early stages affects what happens later. They're all interrelated, so you can't look at one without the other. The Gladstone expression of this was the circle of control. I consider that a very good description.

Even though nowadays the government is reasonably certain of getting its entire estimates package through Parliament, this does not mean that it's a useless process, because, as I say, at every stage, there are legal controls and parliamentary controls, and the controls by the audit process, over the government. So what's said and done at the beginning stage in the estimates and the appropriations, etc., is very important.

At this point, let me just make a few side comments on the Appropriation Act and the estimates. It seems to me that their control function is their basic function, which is to say and limit what government can do. Their second function is to explain and interpret what government does for other people, but I consider that secondary.

As an aside at this point, I would like to point out that, over the years, the Government of Canada and the Parliament of Canada have very often legislated by appropriation. There have been programs upon which millions, hundreds of millions of dollars even, have been spent in which the sole legislative authority was a paragraph in the Appropriation Act.

I have always considered that a bad thing, and I still do. I don't know how many of those there are at present in the appropriations, but let me point out to you that those things exist. They have, in the past, affected huge amounts of money.

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The third point I want to discuss here is a very brief one on the confidence conventions and supply. In my view, the main budget motions are indeed confidence motions. The overall budget of the government is a basic policy document and a defeat of its views on amendments to it constitutes non-confidence, whether it's stated formally or not.

On the other hand, I believe that there's no reason why Parliament cannot reduce specific expenditures in the estimates without that being considered confidence. I would think the only grounds for it being considered confidence would be that the reduction is so major that it's a critique of the government entirely, or the motion for reduction uses the word ``confidence'', or the government has said beforehand that this is a confidence motion and will be construed as such. Otherwise, I think Parliament has and always has had and should have the right to reduce expenditures without it being construed as confidence.

I do not include increasing expenditures in this and, of course, the requirement for the royal recommendation, which is a signification of the Crown precluding Parliament from increasing expenditures anyhow.

Let me go on to something else: statutory spending. At this time, a very high proportion of the spending of the Government of Canada is statutory, which means that in any given year Parliament does not vote on the estimates and has no direct control. The direct control over that is on the underlying statutes that affect the size of statutory expenditures.

It seems to me that there's no reason why, in the estimates and expenditures cycle, Parliament and its committees should not review those statutes more consistently than at present. I will get back to that in a minute in a slightly different way.

A fifth point that I want to raise, because it has always been a concern to me, is whether Parliament should vote net or gross amounts. My view on that is that, most of the time, the amount voted by Parliament should be a gross amount, not a net amount. The only time it should be net is if the thing involved is a businesslike expenditure, a revolving fund program, in which the total amount is not so significant in terms of the parliamentary vote because it doesn't affect in any real way the consolidated fund and the public treasury.

But for most estimates, I believe very strongly that there should be a gross amount. That gets back again to Edmund Burke's creation of the consolidated revenue fund and the related economic reforms of the 18th century.

I shall leave that now and go on to the committee system. Those of you who know what I've been writing recently will realize that these comments are going to be mainly negative and pessimistic, and that, in my view, parliamentary committees can only do that which their members can do.

For committees to be effective in a legislative system, they require two things. One thing is long-term, experienced members. Another thing is a corporate viewpoint, not just a short-term one, but a long-term one that persists over the years.

In Canada, there are three limitations on parliamentary committees. I'm not going to suggest that these are in order, but let me identify them. They also don't cut cleanly, so I apologize for that.

Limitations on what committees can do are, first, government control. Generally, parliamentary committees in Canada are more strongly controlled by government than in any other legislature I've looked at, including other Commonwealth legislatures and obviously the United States.

The second limitation is that the opposition acts more as an opposition and less as a parliament in Canada than in any other system I've looked at. That, of course, is the other side of government control. I'm not going to try to say that one comes first and the other comes second. It's an interaction that has existed for so long that we assume that parliamentary committees are going to be government dominated and that, for most of the time, the opposition is going to act as an opposition.

We do not assume that a committee is going to operate as a collective voice of Parliament against government. The opportunities for them to do so and the times at which they do so are relatively few.

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Third, as far as the limitations of committees - and I'm repeating what I've said here many times - to my mind the key limitation is the fact that we have so many short-term, amateur members. I mean amateurs as politicians. In saying that, I in no way intend to criticize the quality of the members. I think the people who come to Ottawa and to the Parliament of Canada are, by and large, excellent, outstanding people.

The problem is that the job of being a parliamentarian, like any other job, requires a fair amount of training and experience and for a member to be influential she or he must have: first, the background in the job; second, the contacts and connections that enable you to function within a very complex system; and third, some assurance that she or he will be there after the next election in order to carry things on and to pay back debts or to get revenge on people. That's not a nice way of putting it, but what I mean is that's in order to -

The Chair: I understand, though.

Dr. Franks: - ensure that you can exercise some muscle and influence events over a period of time.

In Canada, the average turnover in an election is from 40% to 60%. In the last election it was 70%. That does not permit the kind of member of Parliament who can - or the kind of parliamentary committee that can - over a long period of time have a corporate view on things, have continuity, and have a time horizon long enough to ensure that you can get things done.

I won't go into details here, but the contrast between the British public accounts committee and the Canadian public accounts committee is so striking. They're totally different things. That's not to say the Canadian public accounts committee isn't effective from time to time. It simply hasn't been able to create the kinds of changes to the system or to impose the long-term considerations that the British system has.

My conclusion on the committee system is that it doesn't much matter how you alter the committee system or tinker with it: it's not going to operate much differently from what it does now, nor are committees by and large going to do much that they don't do now. They might do little things - from time to time a committee can be extremely effective - but you can't guarantee long-term, effective committees with the constraints I have described.

As for the next point, on estimates and time horizons, I have often asked myself whether a one-year time horizon on estimates is appropriate. In the Swedish system, one-third of the government departments come before the Riksdag every year and get voted on for a three-year budget with a three-year horizon.

I've often felt that something like that would direct people a little bit beyond the near future and into the long-term implications of programs so that it might be possible to exercise a better control over where the real problems are and over the changes, which are some years in the future, usually not in the next year but in some distant year.

My eighth point on this is about supply days. In my opinion they're useless. They don't do what they're supposed to do. We could go into that if you want.

The final point I want to make on the form of the estimates is, first, to repeat what I said earlier: they are crucial as a control document. They are very important in explaining to the Canadian public what government does. On the other hand, if I'm studying a government program and government expenditures, I don't get information that's wildly useful to me.

For example, you will see a statement of the overall objectives of government departments at the beginning of Part II of the estimates. I should have brought some here to show you what I mean, but I offer you the RCMP and External Affairs as classic examples. I usually use those statements as examples to my class of useless, pious hopes couched in administrative language. In other words, they are couched at a level of abstraction and of goodwill that nobody could disagree with, but they don't mean anything in terms of defining objectives or in terms of being used as a control or an evaluative mechanism of what departments do.

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This ties in with the whole problem of performance measures and how they are used and where they are used, but I do want to suggest that there is a conceptual problem in how the estimates are structured and described, which so far I don't think we've yet come to terms with in Canada.

As I say, that's a grab bag list of comments. I hope there's something in there that will be useful to some of the people around the table.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Dr. Lindquist.

Dr. Everet Lindquist (Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto): I'm an associate professor in political science at the University of Toronto. Unlike my two colleagues, most of my academic career has not been spent looking at legislatures, but I've been learning very quickly why I should be.

I'm coming at this from a very different angle, more from the angle of last point or two that Ned Franks developed, which had to do with the issue of improving information to Parliament. In my remarks I will also be drawing on a bit of my experience with the Treasury Board Secretariat as a visiting academic a couple of years ago.

Today, my remarks are based on a talk that I gave as part of a panel on public service accountability to Parliament and legislatures, and its developments and challenges, at the fall 1995 conference of the Canadian Study of Parliament Group. I was on that panel with Ms Catterall and the Auditor General. I have since come up with a title for my remarks and I think it shows some of the complex issues here: ``Improving Information to Parliament, Groups and Citizens on Government Programs: Will the New Accountability Tools Lead to More Constructive Engagement?''

The overall conference title was ``Parliaments in the Eye of the Information Storm: Citizen and Public Service Accountability''. In my remarks I was trying to play off some of the ideas that were brought to that conference by Peter Aucoin, a professor of public administration and political science at Dalhousie University. He wanted to bring to the conference many of the ideas that are coming from the so-called ``new public management'' movement, which places great emphasis on finding ways to ensure that there's more of a focus on results, more of a focus on improving performance of the public service programs and ministers, and more of a focus on enhancing accountability.

With these remarks, I tried to suggest that while I think that is a very important movement, it overlooks some of the context in which what I call the ``accountability network'' works, and it overlooks some of the very issues Professor Franks raised earlier about the quality of the information that everyone has to work with.

New public management advocates suggest that performance measures, business plans, and so on will help improve deliberations. The weight of my comments is that I'm not so sure about that. I think we have to think about what other kinds of information can assist you in your work.

I'll go through my comments briefly. I have copies of my full remarks.

I began with Peter Aucoin's view on the new public management. Let me, in addition to the three points I made earlier about what some of the objectives of that movement are, suggest some of the ways in which they think providing better public management and scrutiny of ministers and public servants can be done.

First, they believe there should be a devolution of authority, responsibility, and accountability for the management of program operations. Second, they believe there should be a clear delineation of policy responsibilities and program delivery responsibilities. Third, there should be more of a reliance on performance contracts for senior officials so that outsiders can scrutinize the work they do. Fourth, there should be increased commitment to improving accountability regimes.

These ideas are intended to supplement what I would call the many traditional methods of promoting accountability, such as Question Period, overseeing by central agencies, the work of the Auditor General of Canada, and scrutiny by the public accounts committee and many other standing committees and a host of ombudsmen-type organizations, as well as access-to-information procedures.

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What are some of the new public management kinds of information that would supplement this other work that's been done? Well I've mentioned already performance indicators; that wonderful term ``benchmarking'' - comparing how other organizations and jurisdictions do the same sort of work; use of service standards; citizen charters, as the government of the United Kingdom has done; reliance on business plans and business outlook regimes; and more transparent audit and evaluation regimes.

Again I want to emphasize that the tone of my comments is cautionary, but it is not a criticism of this overall movement. We want to think carefully about what kind of information we need to make some of these ideas work. In my remarks I suggest first of all that we have to have a broad perspective on what I call the ``accountability network'', which both my colleagues had mentioned before; that these new ideas and new accountability tools are being insinuated into a network of actors that include program managers, citizens and clients, ministers, senior departmental management teams, audit and evaluation teams, performance measurement advocates, the Treasury Board and its secretariat, standing committees, the Auditor General, and many other oversight organizations.

The point I want to make here - and I know that you know this very well - is that each of these actors have their own interests, their own authorities and tasks, many of which are not congruent. In the past, as Peter Aucoin and Paul Thomas and many others have pointed out, the interplay between these actors has very often lead to an obfuscation of the accountability regime and an inability to really use the information that exists in a positive and constructive manner. I don't want to be naive; many of my suggestions and those of my colleagues are going to be moving into that environment, and these ideas are not going to radically change those dynamics.

Let me explain why I have some concerns about a reliance on performance measures - the use of the outlook documents on their own terms with an eye towards coming up with measurable performance.

My first question is, how valuable can the new accountability tools be in the context of significant budget reductions, organizational downsizing, and restructuring of the federation? In other words, if a premium is to be placed on measuring outcomes and performance, and if doing so requires the existence of baseline data, how reasonable will it be to expect that we can measure many programs that are in effect very quickly moving targets?

My second questions is, what aspects of programs and departments will or can be measured and thus highlighted? Will these tools provide an adequate insight into the management and inner workings of government departments? Will the new accountability tools really be serving as windows that really cast light on what goes on in departments, or will they function more as peepholes that have a sort of limited look into what is going on?

My third question is, is there potential for the new accountability tools to provide misleading pictures of the performance of government departments and programs? I think this cuts both ways. You could have departments that are not being managed well or programs that are not working to expectations, but indicators might actually indicate that they are performing well. On the other hand, you can have performance indicators that are demonstrating that a department is not doing well, that it's not meeting expectations, when in fact its managers and its staff are doing an admirable job of coping with the situation. So the question here is, will these tools lead to more transparency about the inner workings of government or might they provide a veil on what is actually going on?

One response to these questions, which constitute a form of a critique, is that developing these kinds of accountability tools should be done on a trial and error basis, and that they will certainly evolve. In this view, such tools are contestable and imperfect; the search for better tools is necessarily a developmental exercise for all involved - people working inside the bureaucracy as well as people who are trying to scrutinize their activities.

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I am sympathetic to this argument. One only has to look at the Alberta experience to see a government that moved forward very quickly with a performance-based system. They didn't worry about whether every ``i'' would be dotted and every ``t'' would be crossed; they just wanted to start doing it and see how it would work, and involve legislators in the process. I'm sympathetic to the notion that we should not overplan such initiatives and that we should experiment. So on balance I would suggest that we move forward more quickly, rather than slowly, in that area.

What I worry about is whether relying too much on performance indicators will play into some of the traditional problems that we've had with the process - a focus on adherence to particular administrative policies; too much of a focus on particular errors or failures to achieve certain standards or benchmarks; and a focus on assigning blame on, or berating, ministers or officials if the results that were expected were not achieved.

The general problem here, to my mind, is the lack of a general perspective on the management problems that must be dealt with when delivering programs and reviewing where they might go.

When I think about these tools and about the context in which they would be placed, I worry that unless other steps are taken they might serve to still encourage critics to see the public service as an unresponsive and seemingly incompetent black box. They might also serve to continue to give ministers and officials incentive to avoid error or pick uncontroversial indicators of performance. They might still impede the ability of outsiders - and I would include members of Parliament - to comprehend the complexities of managing the trade-offs involved in resolving particular issues or problems.

So I boil this down to a question: how can we encourage a more balanced and intelligent discussion of department and program management and performance during a time of significant change?

There are people who believe that there is a lot of information contained in the Part III documents of the estimates, but in my experience as a researcher, and in working for the government, I found that consulting the estimates in order to get a sense of how departments and programs worked as organizations was rarely a satisfying experience. It was difficult to get beyond budget categories, vote structures, broad organization structure, and key accomplishments - usually a list of many, many key accomplishments.

My fear is that the business plan, outlook documents, and other accountability tools will not do much better in this regard, particularly for those of you who work outside departments and programs. It is interesting that most of the advocates of the new accountability tools presume that those who will use them are as familiar with the structure, competencies, and clients of the programs as those staff in central agencies and in the Auditor General's office who monitor these programs on a full-time basis. But most people don't have that depth of knowledge and experience.

What I want to suggest, then, is that in order to supplement these new tools - and it's actually a form of encouragement - we need to provide broader information on departments and programs. We need to provide good organizational descriptions and profiles. Not only would this help in the accountability cycle, but also for the conduct of broader public consultations - not just on these issues, but on a variety of other issues. There is a sort of public good that goes beyond the work of committees.

What would constitute a good description or organizational profile? It would have to address the following dimensions: key tasks and authorities at the program level; key competencies and expertise of staff; the location of corporate, program, and regional offices; the nature of their task environments, such as the kinds of clients they have to work with, the kinds of outputs they have, and the kinds of ``inputs'' that they have to transform; and finally, key trends and implications of those trends for the program.

Would it be difficult to develop such profiles, to develop them in such a way that they could help people like you come up to speed very quickly on what departments are all about? Students in my course at the University of Toronto on organizational analysis have to do this all the time. They are able to produce term papers that, in a relatively short amount of space, give people a good picture of what an organization is about and what the key issues are. They do give you a good feel for the organization.

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I brought along with me today the annual report of the Department of Finance - the equivalent to our Treasury Board Secretariat - of the Government of Australia. This document is close to 200 pages in length. It includes their estimates, but also gives you a very good feel for how this particular central agency works. These 200 pages present a lot of stuff to wade through, but on the other hand the information is quite accessible.

I think we can also take advantage of developments in graphics software and information technology here. We can find ways to really impart a lot of information very succinctly and in a very-easy-to-digest way. I am acutely aware these sorts of ideas would alarm a lot of people in operating departments and in central agencies, because everyone is having to make do with a lot less in resources. But the notion that this is a resource that could also be used by journalists, by academics, and by a whole host of other organizations that have an interest in scrutinizing the operations of government is also behind my thinking. We may therefore want to find a way to pool resources to do a better job in describing the work that government does.

I would like to leave those sets of remarks, if I may, and speak to some comments Professor Paul Thomas from the University of Manitoba sent to you. I will not go through them in detail, but there is a very interesting document that I think complements the remarks that have been made by the three of us today. It is called ``Parliament and Money: Some Points to Ponder''. I know he sent a copy of these remarks to the committee because he was unable to come.

Like my colleagues, he noted MPs have little interest in the review of the estimates, that supply days are for open debate, and that more attention indeed seems to be paid to estimates in the form of standing committees. He also notes that since the 1968 reforms many pathologies do remain in the process, but I won't go into those details since they're outlined in his document.

The interesting thing he notes here is that the format of the estimates, while imperfect and often not useful, is a contributing factor to the lack of interest in the estimates. He stresses, however, that he doesn't see it as a cause of the main weaknesses in the supply process. It's a cautionary note, really, to my ideas here. He feels that even if we were to come up with a new set or format of estimates that had a great way to impart information, this information still would have to deal with the dynamics of how committees work. At base, we have to find a different set of incentives - as well as time - for MPs to be able to look at these things in more detail.

He sees a positive opportunity in the arrival of the expenditure management system in Ottawa because it will create windows for standing committees, as well as the public accounts committee, to review the outlook documents provided by the Government of Canada. But he worries about whether or not these documents, when combined with the Part IIIs, will still be too much for everyone to look at. I'm also aware that my recommendations would actually provide more information for people to look at.

His solution is that we should be finding a way to provide this information on-line, to do this electronically, so that people can gain quicker access to it. And I might add that it can be updated so that you don't have to go through the process of coming up with a whole new set of documents each year.

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He also suggests that committees should get in the business, and I think this speaks toDr. Frank's point, that they should get involved in a more forward-looking process and, like the government, get involved in intensive program reviews.

He has here a model of the Senate Standing Committee on National Finance. He feels that they've done good work in that area and that the House of Commons ought to be considering how to do more of it too. I think this would square very nicely with the notion of having a two- or three-year time horizon.

He suggests that there should be a standing committee on program expenditure review, with 30 members and 3 subcommittees, and that they would be supported by sufficient staff. Again, this comes back to the issue of the time available to members, and also the research support. He notes, too, that this committee and its subcommittees should coordinate their activities with the public accounts committee, the finance committee, and the standing committees of the House of Commons, as well as with the Senate Standing Committee on National Finance.

I'm actually supportive of these proposals, but, again, I worry about the kind of information and knowledge that relatively inexperienced members - or I shouldn't say inexperienced, but people who are unfamiliar with the workings of large-scale bureaucratic organizations - can bring to bear on these program review-type activities. Obviously one solution is to hold a lot of hearings and draw on the expertise of a lot of outsiders. But, once again, I worry about how well a lot of those folks understand these bureaucracies too. So I think this is an argument to think carefully about the kind of information that gets provided in future.

The Chair: Okay, it's been rather lengthy and very helpful, very broad-ranging, I think.

Let me tell you what we have planned for the rest of the morning. Since we have the benefit of these three witnesses today, I have arranged for us to have lunch with them so that we can continue the discussion, because an hour isn't extremely long with the kind of expertise we have in front of us.

We have one bit of business to take care of. I propose that we continue to about 11:30 a.m., take care of the business we have to deal with, left over from our Monday meeting, and then proceed to lunch. If anybody feels that they need a break between now and then, just signal me. Okay?

Mr. Williams (St. Albert): Madame Chair, before we proceed, would it be appropriate to ask that the Parliament and money papers submitted by Professor Paul Thomas be added to the record as if they were read in?

I understand, also, that Professor Lindquist had a written text, which he quoted from but didn't use on a verbatim basis...and therefore, that it also be attached.

The Chair: I think we have texts from Dr. Lindquist and from Dr. Mallory that were not circulated to committee because they hadn't been translated. But we have a motion, then, to add the text to the record of this meeting.

Mr. Williams: I so move.

Motion agreed to

The Chair: Now are we ready to start with questions?

Mr. Williams: Thank you, Madame Chairman. I would like to extend a sincere appreciation to the witnesses this morning for being here imparting their in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand.

The subject at hand is to try to make Parliament more effective in dealing with the estimates process. As you have all pointed out, the estimates going through Parliament has become a perfunctory process, and what is the real role of Parliament and what should the role of Parliament be in approving or giving input into the estimates process?

My personal statement is that Parliament has lost control of the public purse and what government wants, government gets. I see a clear distinction between Parliament and government. I think you all recognize that and how to deal with it, specifically. You have all talked about more information. We actually have another committee dealing with more and better information, so I'm going to stay away from that area at this time.

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How does Parliament become more effective in its role of controlling the public purse? I believe that the confidence interpretation by the government is far too strict, that I think it was you, Professor Franks, who indicated that confidence should not apply for small areas of change or reduction by Parliament, although I have no problem with your definition that confidence does exist on major budget documents.

I would like to see the confidence relaxed by government. I look at two segments of the spending: the statutory spending you've all referred to, and the estimates and supply we approve on an annual basis.

Dealing with the statutory programs, these are major programs that you've all mentioned. I don't think it's capable of being analysed with any meaningful interpretation on an annual basis. For that reason, I tabled a private member's bill last year dealing with program evaluation, that major programs be evaluated on a cycle of seven to ten years based on four fundamental criteria. Is the program relevant or has the relevancy changed? Is the program meeting the relevant criteria that have been identified? Is it being delivered efficiently? Is there a better way of meeting the identified need in the general public?

That's how I would try to achieve Parliament's input into large statutory programs, on a seven- to ten-year cycle.

Dealing with the estimates, I think that Parliament has to be careful that it doesn't become co-opted into the government's programming. I don't see that as Parliament's role, and I would like to get your feedback on this.

Parliament's role is to protect the public purse and provide money to the government for supply. If Parliament gets too much involved down the road, and the outlook documents are saying they want to have this or that, change this or amend that...and it works its way through the bureaucratic process and comes back and is tabled in Parliament as the estimates at a later date, the intentions of the committee can be thwarted and changed. It may not even be the same concept at all by the time it comes back through the estimates, yet because Parliament had its input at an early stage, how can it then oppose what it approved or suggested at an earlier point? I'm concerned about Parliament being co-opted into the process of government, where I think it's government that has to present to Parliament its intentions and ask for approval.

What are your comments on my clear segregation of the two roles? Is it feasible? We'll start with Dr. Franks.

Some hon members: Oh, oh.

Dr. Franks: It's that old song, why's everybody always pick'n on me.

lt goes back to the role of the member of Parliament. I'm I right that you're a Reform member?

Mr. Williams: I'm a Reform member, I sit on the public accounts committee.

Dr. Franks: Yes, I gather that, and an accountant. So your views on some of these things might not tally with that of members of other parties.

Mr. Williams: True.

Dr. Franks: Also, when I look around this table I gather that we have two parties represented out of the three in Parliament. Is that correct?

The Chair: Yes.

Dr. Franks: Perhaps the other party's views don't tally with yours or the government party's.

The Chair: They're not planning, though, on being here long. I'm sorry, I shouldn't drag you into that debate. It's been going on in the House all day.

[Translation]

Dr. Franks: Maybe I should speak to you in French.

.1035

[English]

The role of the member was originally to represent an area, and usually an interest in the area in Parliament. The role of the member from the government was to get the consent of the governed for raising taxes, much less for expenditures, and the role of the member for the constituency was to express grievance, and that's the petition procedure plus other things. But it's out of that grievance procedure that the legislative process and the bills emerged.

The transformation of the role of the member into a party member is again a 19th century phenomenon. It's never been as thorough in Britain as it has been in Canada, although I know the text we looked at - not including Dr. Mallory's - suggested that in the 1950s and so on the systems were so similar they looked the same.

But the experience of recent decades has shown that there's a very strong residual role for a British member of Parliament as a member of the constituency, against government or whatever, regardless of party stripe. This shows in the prevalence of dissent of members from both sides against party in formal votes in the House of Commons and in numerous defeats of the governments in Britain.

We have nothing comparable in Canada, and it goes back in my mind to the problem of the relationship of the member to constituency, and again, that goes back to this question of high turnover, part of which is a product of the electorate changing its views and a high proportion, roughly 50% in normal elections, from the choice of members not to run again. And that 50% who choose not to run again is higher than the proportion who leave for any reason in the United States or England, and far higher than that in the European countries.

There are some problems in there that have never been identified about the role of the member, but in looking around this table, my guess is that - and this is not a good one because there's such a small group - probably half of you won't be here next time after the election. That's standard for looking at a group of parliamentarians, and for this number you can't generalize because it's too small but it gives you a suggestion.

Having said that, we wind up with two problems in the role of the member in Canada. One is the primary allegiance, and almost exclusive allegiance, of the members to party, generally speaking, and number two is that the member herself or himself operates on a short-term time horizon. That problem, it seems to me, is at the basis of what Parliament can do.

I said in my earlier remarks that on very few occasions in Canada has a parliamentary committee, including the public accounts committee, acted as a committee of Parliament with an interest and concern of its own against government and that this interest has crossed party lines. There are so few occasions of great significance that the ones that come to my mind really are more of a committee acting as a cohesive body within limits prescribed and supported by government. For instance, Blenkarn's finance committee is usually used as the example of an autonomous, independent committee, but everything I've seen on it, which includes the thesis by one of my graduate students, suggests that fine, it was autonomous but autonomous within limits that the government was perfectly comfortable with, so it never really operated against government.

Therein lies a problem and conundrum that I think limits severely what Parliament and what committees can do. As I say, that has nothing to do with the merits and qualifications of individual members of Parliament. It has an enormous amount to do with how our system of representation operates in Canada.

I'm tempted to go on to the time horizon thing because you mentioned seven to ten years. I'd suggested three years. The problem is that on a great many decisions, the real financial implications don't appear for many years. If you want to change things, it's often far better to make a change now with the expectation of significant change in the future than to try to make a dramatic, drastic change in one year.

.1040

I have not yet seen an interest on the part of a great many ministers - and this is even more true for members of Parliament - to work on the longer time horizon. That's one of the reasons I wonder whether an estimates procedure that creates appropriations for a three-year period might be a useful discipline into the future. It might force people to go back into the original documents - the policies of the department that Everet was talking about, the underlying statutes, and so on - and look at them as the sources or the generators of expenditures and rethink them.

I have some concern that the three-year cycle, bearing in mind Canadian politics, would remain a pious hope rather than a reality.

I hope that answers some of your questions.

Mr. Williams: Professor Mallory.

Dr. Mallory: Much of what Dr. Franks has said I couldn't disagree with at all. It's perfectly right.

The thought occurred to me that one of the problems with members as individuals and as part of a committee is that they suffer not from a lack of information, but from information overload. Part of the information overload is because you don't really quite understand its significance.

This is partly a question of time. A member of Parliament who's been here for twenty years is fairly knowledgeable about a lot of things, and he can see the significance of the information he gets in a way that a member who's only been here for a year and a half wouldn't quite understand.

Also, you must remember that those clever fellows in the Treasury Board or senior offices in departments can't resist the temptation to dazzle you with science by producing information that probably is intelligible to them but is, consciously or unconsciously, not designed to be intelligible to you. Of necessity, the relationship between Parliament and the process of administration, the real centrepiece of the parliamentary act as it has gone over the centuries, is that somehow or other you have to get to some sort of stage where the two contestants really are operating on a level playing field.

That is going to be very difficult to achieve, because we don't want to go to the extreme of the American system, the American separation of powers, which the British could have done in the eighteenth century but didn't. For better or for worse, we have a system in which the executive and the legislature are in a sense fused together, as Bagehot said. We should try to work it this way, because it has its advantages and disadvantages, just as the American one does.

The separation between Parliament and the government has always risked being totally unbalanced by government ministers and officials successfully co-opting Parliament, as you said, in accepting their agenda. In a sense they will, and there's no reason they shouldn't, because they are the elected government. The electorate said they can set the agenda for the next four or five years, and the only way we can change it is by the daily war of attrition in Parliament to clarify or redefine the agenda so that the next time around the electorate may pick the other people to set the agenda.

.1045

Meanwhile the process of being co-opted is not necessarily a bad thing, because members of Parliament are not necessarily there merely to nit-pick, to infuriate hard-working officials trying to carry out the law as Parliament has laid it down. A good deal of informal mutual interest in getting the job done as best you can with what's there is the kind of commonality of interest that can be developed between, say, a department and its committee, which is a sort of client relationship both ways.

You can't elevate this to gladiatorial terms. The great achievement of parliamentary government is not the great battle of parliamentarians against the Crown, the sort of John Hampden whom John Diefenbaker referred to. It's not that.

It's the fact that these two separate branches of government, which are part of the process by which government is made legitimate and, in ordinary terms, honest, are both engaged in a common enterprise. The system of responsible government we have makes that juncture part of the process. Walter Bagehot called it ``the buckle which joins''.

To get back to the point about co-optation, that can work both ways. A knowledgeable, persistent committee that really does find something worth concentrating on - and I suspect the idea relates to your private member's bill.... Standing committees would be more usefully employed in looking at statutory programs, which have nothing to do with the estimates, and should look at them over the long haul.

If they understood what was happening and were not distracted by the necessities of everyday politics, government would realize too that this could be a mutual exercise in solving what everybody recognizes as something that could be better. In dealing honestly with the administration of a program, a mutual interest between the officials who administer it and the members of a parliamentary committee who are trying to eviscerate it and find out what's going on inside could be a mutually beneficial process.

Co-optation is perhaps not a bad way to look at it from the point of view of a standing committee and its relationship to its client department. In a sense they can co-opt one another into a common enterprise. Then, in the immortal words of Robert Thompson, a former member of the House, they won't allow party politics to get involved in the processes of a parliamentary debate.

That is my rather extended note to Dr. Franks's observation, to which I agree.

The Chair: [Inaudible - Editor] Mr. Williams' question, and he has taken nearly half an hour with questions and answers.

Dr. Lindquist: My first response is we have to consider what the current state of affairs is. While there is this threat of co-optation, not being co-opted has also resulted in a certain dynamic and a feeling of powerlessness. Co-optation is a way of getting involved.

.1050

I've been drawing up some metaphors to date, but it's also a wedge. This is why I'm quite supportive of the new expenditure management system as it pertains to bringing in the outlook documents and so on. It's a way of getting the House of Commons involved in the process. While those documents may not provide all the information you desire, it does mean there are people who will arrive at committees and a process of dialogue and of education will occur.

Co-optation is not necessarily a bad thing too if you have an independent understanding of what is being talked about and evaluate it. That's why, again, I would argue that simply relying on performance indicators or the lean Part IIIs we have right now might be troublesome. But if you have your own feel for what the department's all about, and particular programs, then personally I would feel less at risk of being co-opted.

I also want to note, and it really does flow from your comments, Professor Mallory, that governments want to dance too. They are in extremely difficult situations. One thing I've been struck by is how difficult it is for officials to convey the kind of tensions they're under. There's probably more of an interest in having MPs and outsiders aware of what those tensions are than would seem to be the case, than would seem to be part of the conventional wisdom.

That's not in any way to downplay the fact there's always going to be a partisan stance on the part of the government of the day. But there is an interest in that dialogue, and it seems to me parliamentary committees can play a very important role in putting some of the issues on the table in a way the government can't do. They can't think the unthinkable, and this may be one way of beginning that dance.

Finally, I want to mention that high turnover is also an argument. Low turnover means that knowledge comes in the form of experience. The issue I've been trying to draw your attention to is how you create perhaps that kind of knowledge in a different way for people who are relatively new to their jobs but are quick studies.

The Chair: Dr. Franks wants to make an additional comment. I'd like to let him do that and then move on to Ms Skoke.

Dr. Franks: This is a very short one. I was mulling over in my mind my statement about committees in relationship to government. Over the years there have been examples of committees defying government. I'll give you one because it's very illustrative of how this happens.

In the 1970s when the scandals relating to the RCMP security service were emerging, one of the things that emerged was that the government had been opening mail through the postal service - the post office had been opening it or the RCMP - with no legislative permission. It was pretty clear royal prerogative didn't cover that in Canada, although they claim it does in England.

Prime Minister Trudeau's response to these disclosures was to introduce a bill into Parliament that permitted the security service to open mail. That went to the justice committee under Mark MacGuigan and the bill quite deliberately got lost there because MacGuigan said to members that this was nonsense, the government was wrong here, they'd stop. They did. Now, that sort of thing does happen from time to time.

Dr. Mallory: I have a footnote to that. MacGuigan was extremely knowledgeable because he was chairman of that committee for a number of years and was very reluctant to give it up. He acquired enormous control over it because the committee then had a chairman who knew exactly what he wanted and knew exactly what the committee should do. So the strong chairman is something that's important in the parliamentary process too.

Ms Skoke (Central Nova): Madam Chairman, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the witnesses for coming here this morning. I'm the member of Parliament for Central Nova. I want to let you know that I do appreciate the comments you've made, particularly with respect to lack of experience and lack of knowledge and immaturity on behalf of the rookie members of Parliament.

.1055

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in political science. In fact, Professor Aucoin was one of my professors. I have a law degree from Dalhousie University and I practised law for 19 years. I've been here for two years and I've realized there's a system within a system. There's a political process and a legislative process, which are often in conflict with one another.

I respect your positions regarding the role of the member of Parliament and how that is actually a changing role and how there's some conflict as to traditionally what the role was meant to be and perhaps what it is today, also the role of committees and how these committees operate with specific limits and how they are certainly government controlled.

Bearing all that in mind, I agree with what you say and I respect that. But being a member of Parliament puts me in a difficult position. Obviously, I have a responsibility not only to my constituents but also to Canadians as a whole with respect to government, its operation, its programs, the spending of money, and implementation.

I'd like you to tell me, with respect to the executive and legislative branch of governments and how all this system within the system operates, to what extent politics is involved versus the actual management and accounting process in the budgetary process that goes on here in the spending of money.

I'll give you an example from Professor Thomas's last paragraph. I don't know if you have his written submission. I don't have the written submissions of the others yet. But when I read this, it was interesting. I'll read it to you and then I'd like your comments, specifically directing it to the issue of the extent to which politics are involved in government decision-making and spending money. He says:

I'd ask you if you could comment on his comments. How can you help me as a member of Parliament to reconcile the real conflict between the political process and the legislative process and what can I do and what should I be doing?

Dr. Mallory: I had better lead off on that one. It is obvious every act of government is in a sense a political act because we have a government we have chosen through a political process. The government was chosen because it espoused particular ideas and interests as against others. That was settled on election day.

A government has an interest in surviving, in not looking embarrassed all the time, because it has to go back again within a maximum of five years to the electorate to see whether it will be re-elected if it isn't so exhausted that it gives up.

This whole process is an integrated hope. It's all woven together. So before the matter is discussed and the decision taken by ministers in cabinet, issues are refined by senior officials in departments. They are not political eunuchs. They are sensitive to the political air around them. So they try to frame policies to suit the colour of their political masters. They wouldn't be worth their jobs if they didn't.

.1100

Then policy gets exposed in Parliament because laws have to be passed, expenditures approved, and things like that. This is the first point where discussion gets articulated in public, though I don't know how far one understands what's going on through the media unless one's a junkie for the parliamentary channel.

The gladiatorial contests on the floor of the House, in which you three are engaged every day, is a piece of street theatre all right. It does carry certain essential messages in it, namely, that there are two or three views as to what ought to be done. The public will have to make up its mind.

So you're in the last act of what has been a political process all along. In a sense there's another level on which you operate too, in which Parliament is the supervisor, the evaluator, which doesn't come out in parliamentary debates but in committee activities. When you or your office gets on the telephone to a department on behalf of a constituent, this is again a slightly different level of operation.

It's all political with a small ``p''. Big politics takes place in a sense on the floor or in the media. You just have to adjust yourself to the fact you're living several lives at once, if that's any comfort to you.

Dr. Lindquist: I'd like to respond briefly to your interesting question first of all by saying a lot of ink has been spilled over what budgeting is in the literature. Of course, it's many things and I would commend to you the work of Aaron Wildavski to read in your spare time. He points out that budgets are about the present, they're about the past, they're about the future, they're about politics, they're about accounting, they're about management. You could go on. Budgets can be everything.

What I take Paul Thomas's comments to be zeroing in on though is that when you have a relatively closed budgeting process, despite the fact the government of the day that's introducing those budgets is going to have clear political interests and views, nonetheless there's a rationality you can attach to the process and the outcomes.

You just have to take a look at the expenditure management system document. There's a nice cycle. There are clear checkpoints you have to arrive at. There are going to be these outlook documents that come out. You have the estimates as well. There will be these performance indicators, quality initiatives. You name it.

Now, it's interesting that a relatively closed process, even one that's attempting to open things up, hides behind it all the difficulties of producing those documents, all the different values that are at work to even decide what a good performance indicator will be, what it will measure, whether or not it's parsimonious, whether or not it really shows what's going on or not. So I think that's the veil he sees there.

His point, at least to my mind, is that they ask what will happen when things get opened up. Things will get even more political because more people will be involved with different views. I think he's trying to address the worry a lot of you might have. What does it mean to get involved when you have so little analytic capacity compared with all these departments in government and the central agencies and so on?

I think he's saying that despite this lack of capacity - you can do some things to increase your analytic capacity - what's most important is that there is a political debate over these issues. That's going to be healthy. It's going to bring out some of the stuff that necessarily takes place inside the bureaucracy.

There are lots of healthy debates that really reflect the great range of views Canadians have that we never see, and to my mind there's something unhealthy about that dynamic. So I think he says lack of sufficient analytic capacity notwithstanding, there's an important role to play.

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Dr. Franks: I can make a distinction, which neither of my learned colleagues made here, between the political and bureaucratic in this. I believe you can, both conceptually and in practice, make that distinction and say that some kinds of decisions and activities are basically bureaucratic and follow bureaucratic norms of rationality, routine, consistency, and rules and regulations, and that some things are political, responding to pressures, conflicting values and different views, and that's fine.

I would go further and say the Canadian system is at the extreme end of not making that distinction in formal practice. In Britain the accounting officer, who is the person responsible for the financial transactions to Parliament by the public accounts committee, is the equivalent of a deputy minister. It's not the minister. The accounting officer signs the account, and says that I personally am responsible and accountable. We have no equivalent in Canada. In the formal doctrine, it's the minister who's responsible.

The Chair: Do we have an equivalent in the Comptroller General?

Dr. Franks: Absolutely not. The Comptroller General was a central agency man who established the structures and processes and regulations, but was not responsible for the transactions in the accounts, unless you are thinking about pre-1971. Is that the period you're thinking of?

The Chair: I'm thinking about that office over its history. Has it ever acted in that capacity?

Dr. Franks: We're going way back in history then, and even at that point the minister was responsible. The Comptroller signed the cheques, but the minister had the formal responsibility.

The British are quite different on that. In Britain, the next-step agencies are a recent advance on that. We're way behind. Even Britain is way behind a system like Sweden in making that distinction, because in Sweden the bulk of expenditures are by autonomous administrative agencies that operate separately from the political executive.

I make that point because to the extent that you formally separate routine administrative activities from others, you're taking them out of the political sphere, and that identifies or narrows the amount that's political.

Ms Skoke: So it really doesn't happen in Canada.

Dr. Franks: Not at all. It's quite the opposite. One of the pronounced features of the Canadian system is the intrusion of political considerations into things that in most systems are bureaucratic.

Dr. Lindquist: It's also worth noting that this idea of separating policy authorities from program management authorities is what's behind a lot of the thinking in the new public management movement. They look to Sweden and to New Zealand. These kinds of executive agencies are separate from government in some way.

Dr. Franks: If it's of any use to the committee, I have a fairly extensive report on this. It is still in draft form, but I'd be prepared to pass a copy on.

The Chair: We'd be interested in seeing it. All of us would.

Dr. Franks: It was done with a research grant from the Canadian Centre for Management Development, but they won't be publishing it in its present form, so I could do that comfortably.

The Chair: Thank you.

Dr. Franks: Going on from there, although you can say things are political in the sense that they involve value judgments and competing ways of looking at things and competing interests, there's another political dynamic that is key to the parliamentary system, and that's the dynamic between government and opposition.

I maintain that a parliament is only as good as its opposition, and a government is only as good as its parliament. So there's a terrible burden on the opposition, in that sense, to make government behave and make it good.

Mr. Williams: One more reason for us.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Dr. Franks: You're worthwhile.

I think the strength of the parliamentary system on the budgeting and estimates side is that responsibility for the budget and for management of expenditures is clearly given to the government. This is responsible government in a nutshell. You know who's responsible.

I would defy anybody around this table or even in this room to say who's responsible in the American system for the American budget. I don't know. You know the system better than I do.

.1110

Dr. Lindquist: But that's changing right now, because with two Republican-dominated houses, that sense of responsibility has improved a lot in past years.

Dr. Franks: You've seen the negotiation between -

Dr. Lindquist: Even though they're at war with the president, it's a far cry from a parliamentary -

Dr. Franks: The point is that in Canada you know who the rascals are who are governing you, and if you don't like them you can kick them out. I'm not saying anything about the present parliament, but I will suggest to you that in 1993 the electorate in Canada clearly identified a group whom they considered rascals, and tossed them out as thoroughly as has ever been done. That to my mind is the real strength of this system. The responsibility is clearly allocated and the process of accountability, first through Parliament and then to the electorate, is very clear. I believe both of those are blurred in the United States to the point at which you don't know who to get rid of if you want to change something.

Now having made that point, I strongly disagree with the presumption that a review of the estimates and of the expenditures of government can always be non-partisan, because these are key policy documents. The process is a key process of holding government accountable, and I would expect the opposition to take a lead and to criticize.

It's for that very reason that the chairman of the public accounts committee is chosen from the opposition - to have a keen interest in criticizing the government. To my mind this is even more partisan and more important on the budgeting side in the estimates, because they have far more political salience than the accounts - at least in normal terms they do. So I wouldn't want you to get rid of partisanship, or even want to get rid of it, in the estimates and budgeting processes.

The Chair: We have about 15 minutes left. I'd like to check which of our members will be able to join our witnesses over lunch.

Ms Skoke: I'm supposed to be in the natural resources committee, so....

The Chair: It will be at about 12 p.m.

Ms Skoke: I would like to pick their brains.

The Chair: Maybe you can find a substitute.

Ms Skoke: I'll try.

Mr. Williams: I have to be in the House at 12:30 p.m.

The Chair: For a long time or a short time?

Mr. Williams: It is my duty day today, I'm afraid.

The Chair: It's mine too, but I've been excused.

Mr. Williams: Is the discussion during lunch on the record?

The Chair: It can't be, but certainly our researcher and clerk are coming with us. We'll take whatever notes they feel will be helpful to our work.

Maybe you can persuade one of your colleagues.

Mr. Malhi (Bramalea - Gore - Malton): A number of witnesses have suggested that there should be one committee with the exclusive responsibility of examining the estimates. Do you have any further comments on their proposal?

Dr. Franks: I'll begin on that because I've been lambasting committees in various remarks. The strength of having an estimates committee is that it has a clear function for doing it. It's pretty obvious that, by and large, parliamentary committees have done a very weak job on the estimates.

The danger in creating a committee like that is high expectations. It seems to me that every effort at reform of parliamentary committees has exaggerated the possibilities of what can be achieved by reform, and then there's a level of disappointment afterward.

I see no problem in an estimates committee, with the one qualification that the standing committees that look at departments would not be looking at the estimates. Ideally, if you're looking at a department, the estimates should be a key part of what you're looking at because they're a major part of what you know about a department and what you need to control it. So when I look at that I don't get very excited about the proposal.

Dr. Mallory: I agree with Professor Franks. After all, our standing committees are different from the British. The British had one sort of gross estimates committee, which then had subcommittees parcelled out among policy sectors. But they don't, as we do, have the standing committees in more or less coherent, relatively intelligible policy areas.

.1115

So the standing committees really carry on the function of the British estimates subcommittees. The analogy is different because one can sometimes learn from the Brits, and sometimes they can learn from us. They revived the standing committee of our type about 10 years ago, and they're now very pleased and proud about it. I don't think it would be helpful for us to try to use the model of the large estimates committee with little groups of two or three members on each subject area, because it wouldn't be an improvement on what we have. What we have isn't great, but it's better than nothing and it's the only thing we have.

Dr. Lindquist: I agree with the previous comments. Putting everything into the hands of one committee that has to cover a broad waterfront - I don't think that is a recipe for progress. However, I could see a committee or a subcommittee that would be responsible for reviewing the quality of the estimates.

I'm thinking about this dovetailing with my proposal. If you wanted to have a different kind of information base to supplement whatever exists, and if you have these new indicators of performance, you want standing committees to be drilling down and evaluating that with a good substantive base, and good research and analytic support to do that.

However, if you agree with a comment in my prepared remarks, and with the Alberta approach, which is to allow a lot of experimentation in the documentation that's provided by operating departments, then how do you learn from what different departments have done? Do you just leave that to the government of day and the central agencies that support it? So I think there may be a role for some members to evaluate the estimates at that level of analysis, but not to confuse that with holding departments and the government to account in particular substantive domains, or doing the kind of three-year program review that both Professor Franks and Professor Thomas have recommended.

The Chair: I'm going to use the prerogative of the chair and use the last 10 minutes for one core issue.

As you know, the standing orders have been changed to specifically mandate the committee to review and make recommendations for succeeding years' budgets. I think the big challenge is how you capture their interest in integrating that process. Unlike Mr. Williams, I do regard it as an integrated process, with the estimates almost being at the end. The committee can indeed see whether government has produced estimates that it thinks are consistent with what should be the policy priorities.

I served on one committee in the last Parliament that was exceptionally non-partisan, and that was the environment committee as chaired by David MacDonald. In our reports to Parliament we by and large overcame that tendency to divide along party lines on issues. I can't remember a report that wasn't produced by consensus, and that didn't mean they were wishy-washy documents. As members of the opposition at that time we were content with that, as were the government members, because it was moving issues forward that they wanted moved forward.

I had a similar experience with legislation while in opposition, of effectively using the cooperation of government party members to achieve changes and amendments to legislation before the committee.

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So the assumption that there's a wall between the governing party and the opposition party that nobody's interested in crossing is I think contrary to the best interests of Parliament and the public. I think that's some of what all three of you have said.

Notwithstanding that it's a committee that I felt was extremely well functioning and not at all bothered by which side of the House one happened to come from, that committee never did do a good job of taking its policy interests and reviewing the estimates and spending of government in light of what it felt should be the priorities for government.

How do you overcome that barrier? Reports get tabled, shelved, covered by dust, and forgotten. It seems to me that if you start linking what you think should be happening with what is actually happening and starting to influence what is actually happening in the direction you think it should be going, that may be one hook by which to get parliamentarians more interested in the whole process of financial accountability and influence. I don't know how to start doing that.

Dr. Mallory: If I can comment on that, it's a problem that you encounter not only in your world, but also in the one I was part of for a long time. You have a main job or jobs that you want to get on with, such as moving the university along and getting another crop of students in and out, but also you get involved far more than anybody realizes in a series of little think-tanks that somebody sets up.

Administrators like these temporary think-tanks because they show a sign of activity. There's the sign of all the great virtues, such as self-examination and all the rest of it.

This is a world that is the same as yours in a sense. The parliamentary committees have a temptation occasionally to become think-tanks. They can't do it all the time. Most of what they do does in fact accumulate dust on bookshelves. Sometimes it has some influence if it penetrates the consciousness of the world around them, which it often doesn't.

It's hard enough to penetrate the consciousness of the minister. If you can't do that, then maybe you can penetrate the consciousness of the public, but that's even tougher.

The more useful job from day to day for a member of Parliament is the problem of seeing that legislation is put through and that embarrassments are covered up or exposed, as the case may be. It's the day-to-day politics of mutual embarrassment, which takes place on the floor of the House. These things go on and they occupy much of the limited time that members have.

It's not always easy to distract them from these fairly urgent situations sometimes, in which a lot of scarce time has to be devoted to making sure that there's somebody on a particular committee or that somebody's a spokesman on a particular debate, or asks a particular question. There isn't much time for reflection such that maybe we should look down the road and think about what this department or this committee should be thinking about over the next three years.

There's not too much information that will help a committee to do that. Consider most of the reports I've been looking at about Parliament. The McGrath report and others all say the same things. Lambert said it too. It's a question of attitudes. How can you get people's attitudes to change so that they do the right thing? It's what we think is the right thing, not what your whips think is the right thing.

It's not very easy for this to happen because you get mixed horizons. You may, as an MP interested in a particular policy area, have a time horizon in which you want to get some issue chewed over, clarified, and influenced, but you also have a time horizon that is affected by the next election, by when prorogation is and what affect that will have on bills in progress. There are all sorts of conflicting horizons, and you have to make choices all the time.

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Ministers have to make choices at a rate that would frighten most people, but so do lesser mortals have to make choices, both individually and collectively. Individually, you may be able to, through knowledge, experience, or weight, influence the collectivity in which you're working - say it's a parliamentary committee - but you do that not by coming in fresh from the outside, full of instant learning, but from a gradual knowledge of the politics of the situation, how you cope.

You hinted at one thing that is very much a part of the daily give and take of politics. If you're on a committee dealing with legislation, and you're in opposition and you'd like to get something changed, you're not going to get it changed by dividing the committee on party lines. You get it changed if you can exert some influence, get some co-optation, if you will, of some members on the other side of the committee.

Opposition is a devious and useful thing. You can accomplish a good deal if you know how to do it.

To shift the focus a little bit, nowadays a Senate committee, with the government majorities being the other way around, can get amendments of some consequence into a bill, but this means moving the bill back and forth between the House and Senate, and everybody gets mad that time is wasted.

In the good old days when the Senate used to do pre-study, which for purely partisan reasons they've stopped doing, a Senate committee would take a bill that was just on the Order Paper in the House - probably having gone through second reading - and they would do a pre-study of it and then think of ways it could be improved. Instead of waiting until the bill came up in the Senate, going at it with all guns blazing and then sending it back to the Commons, which will reject it and send it back again, the Senate people who were backing these amendments would quietly get in touch with the minister's office.

So when the thing reached committee stage in the Commons, it was not the opposition that would introduce these amendments - they'd then become a partisan issue that might get in the press, God forbid - but, rather, the minister would quietly introduce these amendments as his own in the committee stage. It would all be accomplished without any apparent smell of partisanship.

Partisanship is a good thing, it makes the machine work, but sometimes it's important to mask it and present an atmosphere in which it appears to be non-partisan because that's how the thing works.

The Chair: Dr. Franks.

Dr. Franks: I'm going to address only one point of your very useful and provocative comments. It seems to me that the place where what we call standing committees are most effective is not on major policy issues - such as whether or not we should have gun control, or whether or not we should drastically reform unemployment insurance - but at the next level down where the government does not have a policy with which the opposition disagrees or might want to disagree. That's where the environment committee reports, and many others over the years, were so excellent, The aboriginal affairs committee from time to time has been superb, as has the agriculture committee, and so on.

The Chair: Also the human rights committee.

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Dr. Franks: Right. This gets back to the estimates. I don't see parliamentary committees operating in a non-partisan way to say we disagree totally with the government's budget in this area, or something like that. It would be terribly damaging.

If you get down to the next level - is the expenditure in this specific program appropriate, or are the objectives postulated at this level appropriate - I think committees could be tremendously useful.

Dr. Lindquist: I'd certainly agree with those comments. I want to step back and give you a broader perspective on the issues your question raises.

First of all, there's a literature and a lot of thinking that has gone on in the academic world - what else do we do - about the relevance of the research that we do, particularly policy-oriented research, and whether or not that actually ever has an impact on anything. I won't tell you the conclusions. Actually I will.

The lesson from this literature is that it's very difficult to demonstrate the impact of particular reports. There is a rarely a match between a report that comes out and a decision that gets made. People have concluded that a much more important dynamic that is occurring is the process of the percolation of ideas, getting people who hold different views to talk.

I agree there is another little strand of thinking there that talks about the importance of not getting people together to talk about core values, where you are going to have significant clash and very little movement, but rather to talk about instruments or ways of doing things differently or things that are less contentious, where there is some middle ground and some potential for movement and for developing a better understanding of why people hold the values they do.

The point is to suggest that I think you should take a broader view of what committees would do, not only in terms of what they do now but if they were to also adopt some ideas that have been mentioned here today, because it's a very narrow gauge of success.

A second contextual point is that I'm struck by Ned Franks' point that the transactions of your day-to-day work as MPs often crowd out those relatively rare opportunities in which where you want to engage in strategic thinking. You hear exactly the same thing not only in the university world but also in operating departments and in central agencies. They're consumed by transactions. Some of them involve responding to your demands. These are organizations that have far more analytic capacity and, we would think, far more ability to sit back and think strategically. However, we're in a rapidly changing world and just keeping on top of the transactions that we have to do is very difficult.

What does this all mean?

First of all, I think you have to look at the work of committees like this and other organizations, when you do research and you hold hearings, as a way of deepening your personal knowledge, so that when transactions stop and you have an ability to think strategically or a decision-making window opens up, you have that committee that's there and a government that's receptive. Some of the groundwork has been done already and you can move quickly. It doesn't look like that research report that was done five years ago had an impact, but in fact it laid a bit of a foundation.

Second, let's go beyond personal knowledge and say that part of what is at stake is educating a broader community of individuals, not just across party lines, and not just across chambers, but also outside Parliament about some of the issues, so again when windows open you have a constituency out there that can speak on these issues in a more intelligent way.

Finally, and I think this would appeal again to the personal knowledge but also to encourage you all to develop medium to longer-term perspective...the parallel is people who become lawyers or doctors and leave their undergraduate humanities education early and then later on ask, why didn't I use my humanities experience better and read more novels and take up some more work in disciplines? When someone becomes a minister, they often regret that they didn't use their time as an opposition member to deepen personal knowledge of various portfolios that they would probably get assigned to.

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There's a book by the Institute of Public Administration of Canada called Taking Power that looks at these transitions and the fact that many members feel that they, as well as many of their assistants, are very unprepared to think about government in terms of managing it. It seems to me that again this is an indirect benefit of engaging in this kind of activity, that it will better prepare all of you, and your parties, for when that time comes and you do have to really worry not just about politics but also about management.

The Chair: I'm going to suggest that we break here and go back to our routine business, which I don't think should take very long. My understanding is that there are some people from Treasury Board who are interested in having about a half an hour discussion with our witnesses before we go to lunch. Is that the case?

You're included in that, I presume, Mr. Hopwood. Had I known, I would have got Treasury Board to pay their transportation here since your budget is much bigger than ours.

Maybe they should pay for lunch? We'll let you have our witnesses if.... Is this the kind of negotiation that goes on in the British bureaucracy in preparing estimates?

Thank you very much. We'll see you at lunch over in the parliamentary dining room in the Centre Block in about half an hour. Thank you.

We have a very small item to take care of, and that's the change in the voting procedure. I think Mr. Williams has had some further discussions with Treasury Board.

Based on my discussion with him, I propose we report back to the procedure and house affairs committee that we have no objection to this change going ahead for the next year's estimates, recognizing, however, that the committee is in the midst of a thorough review and may have other recommendations to make when we finish that. Does that fairly cover it, or was there anything else you wanted to add?

Mr. Williams: Yes, thank you, Madam Chairman.

The issue at stake is that the Treasury Board estimates would like to amalgamate the minor capital expenditures that have been segregated and apply them in with the operating expenses. I've indicated before, and I reiterate, my concern is that I do see some slippage here in reporting an accountability by Parliament.

I'm not going to stand in the way of this change. We will allow it to go forward on the recognition, not expectation but on the recognition - and note the difference - that this is an interim measure, that it does allow some efficiency and elimination of some cynicism by the people who amalgamate and put these numbers together; they put them together one way and then they have to disassemble and reassemble in another way for Parliament.

In this day and age where we want efficiencies and so on, I say I'll acquiesce to the request on the recognition that it's an interim situation, that when we discuss the new process that will come we do not start from this lower level of accountability but we recognize that this is an interim measure to facilitate some efficiencies in the short term and that Parliament is to look at the.... It gets back to my whole feeling that Parliament should have more accountability and more of a handle on the funds.

So I'm prepared to go ahead at this time and allow the Treasury Board to do it, and very definitely on the recognition that we start back at the accountability that we have today and not the accountability at a lower level that we will have through acquiescence to this measure.

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The Chair: Do you want to leave it to our staff to work out a wording on that?

I think we just want to suggest that the chair of the procedure and house affairs committee convey to the president of Treasury Board that we have no objections to this change in the vote procedure taking place now, subject to further review by the committee from the point of view of accountability.

Is that good enough, something along that line?

Mr. Williams: Yes, the researcher can draft a letter along those terms, and we look forward to his fine prose.

The Chair: I think we have to report back to the procedure and house affairs committee, and the chair of the committee will work from there.

Is there any further business? Then I now adjourn the meeting.

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