[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Thursday, December 7, 1995
.0936 
[English]
The Chair: We have quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order.
I'd like to thank everybody for being here and to give you my apologies for being a little late. I was pressed into service late yesterday to deliver a speech for the Minister of Natural Resources this morning, so I just got out of there.
We're here to consider requests from Treasury Board in terms of the estimates and the way they will be presented to the House and to committees next year. Mr. Williams and I have been sitting on a consultative committee that Mr. Duhamel has organized to review these changes from the point of view of members of Parliament.
Treasury Board now wishes to incorporate this in next year's agenda reporting and has asked this committee to consider whether we would like to recommend that this proceed to the procedure and House affairs committee. I believe the intention is that the procedure and House affairs committee would then report to the House next week for concerns. It also has to be considered by cabinet early in the coming week.
Mr. Duhamel.
[Translation]
Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (Member for Saint-Boniface): I would like to thank you, Madam Chair, and the members of your subcommittee for giving us this opportunity to present our ideas and hopes.
[English]
We appear before you to enter a motion for concurrence that will allow for the tabling of pilot revised main estimates, part IIIs, for six departments for the 1996-97 fiscal year on a trial basis. That's for the consideration of the appropriate standing committees.
[Translation]
Before discussing this request,
[English]
I'd like to step back a bit and bring you up to date on the process we have been involved in since our first appearance before the subcommittee on October 5 this year.
As you are aware, I am the chair of the parliamentary working group on the reform of the estimates. In fact, as you mentioned before, a number of the members of this committee have provided valuable input to our consultations, and we appreciate that. The parliamentary working group has met five times over the past month and a half to examine the information that is presented to Parliament. We have reviewed several documents generated by six pilot departments, and we have been encouraged by what we have seen.
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You will perhaps know that Mr. Hopwood and Mr. Miller of the Treasury Board Secretariat have been working very hard on this, and Mr. Hopwood is here today to describe the exact nature of the proposed revisions and evolution of information, subsequent to my brief statement.
[Translation]
I was also very pleased to see that the task force I chair had accomplished a number of things and that there was a willingness to go further.
[English]
The working group is pleased with what they have seen, and they have strongly encouraged and given their support for us to take the next step. It is with their support, confidence and encouragement that we feel we are ready to bring our pilot documents to Parliament. It is for this reason that we are before you today.
Opportunities such as this come around only so often, especially when one is dealing within the complex rules and traditions of the parliamentary system.
We realize that timing is tight, and I'm sorry about that, but at the same time we needed the full input of the working group before we could be assured we had reached the point where we were ready to proceed. In addition, you will realize that time has afforded us the opportunity to actively exchange ideas with other interested parliamentarians, academics and parliamentary staff.
If we weren't able to proceed now, it would seem that there's at least a year before another window of opportunity presents itself, and even at that, the chances of proceeding before would become slimmer and slimmer with the passage of time.
We are committed to improving the information that is provided to Parliament, and with your approval and endorsement, we will be able to meet that commitment.
[Translation]
Again, thank you for giving us this opportunity to present our ideas. I would now like to introduce Mr. Ron Thompson, who will make a few comments; he will be followed by Mr. Hopwood, who will give you the details. They will then be able to answer any questions from committee members.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
[English]
Mr. Ron Thompson (Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General): Madam Chair, Mr. John Mayne, a colleague of mine and a principal in our office, who I think is known to the subcommittee, is joining me this morning, and both John and I appreciate very much the invitation to appear before your committee.
On October 19, a short while ago, the Auditor General provided testimony to your committee and responded to questions on the government's plans for reforming the estimates. At that time we informed the committee of our support for the direction being pursued by the government in this area. We continue to support the initiative and are discussing the progress being made with the secretariat. We feel that the idea of a spring plan document and a fall performance report is indeed a positive development.
At that time, back on October 19, we also stressed that essential to the reforms is the substantive content of the documents provided to Parliament. We provided this committee with a set of draft principles for information to Parliament, which outlined the kind of information we would expect to see in such documents, such things as full stewardship reporting, clearly stated performance commitments in terms of the benefits and outcomes expected of programs, not just the outputs produced, and a reporting of actual accomplishments against those commitments. The challenge remains to ensure that adequate attention is being paid to the need for substantial improvement in the content of information being presented to Parliament.
The pilot documents being discussed today are also, in our view, a step in the right direction. Experimenting with a few pilots before requiring all departments to change their part IIIs and outlooks is a good idea from which we can all learn. We intend to watch very closely the pilot work under way, and we support the government's initiative, certainly, to evaluate these pilots. We are hoping that once finalized the pilots will show significant progress not only in the format of better reporting to Parliament but also in their content.
As we stated at the earlier hearing, we would expect good-quality documents, both plans and actuals, to be produced early in the reform process. We will continue to monitor the pilots and other reforms being made to the estimates and will be examining them in our future audit work.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I hope these remarks are somewhat useful to you and the subcommittee.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Mr. Hopwood, over to you now, I think.
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Mr. Thomas C. Hopwood (Director, Expenditure Management Sector, Program Branch, Reform of the Estimates, Treasury Board): Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I have given to your clerk a set of handouts for this part of the presentation. What I would like to do is spend about five to ten minutes just explaining the context of what our proposal is and to then entertain any questions you might have.
In terms of the first page, which describes the background, I don't want to spend too much time on it but would just repeat that the project to reform the estimates was initiated as phase two of the changes that were made to the government's expenditure management system. The project actually started almost a year ago now as the second phase of that project.
The changes to the expenditure management system caused us to want to have a look at the information that was provided to Parliament and the philosophies underlying it. Also, with prompting from our friends at the Auditor General's office in terms of improving information to Parliament, the timing seemed to be very good to have a look at all of the documents, all of the expenditure management information that government provides to Parliament.
We briefed this subcommittee on October 5 and provided an outline of our approach and our project, and at that time we emphasized that our focus is on information and not on parliamentary procedure. We're trying not to overlap or interfere in any way with the work of this committee. So we've been very careful to focus on information alone.
We have a parliamentary working group, as Mr. Duhamel has indicated, chaired by Mr. Duhamel, that is looking at the information and the options that we're putting forward. So far the response from that committee has been generally positive, and we've been encouraged that we're in fact going in the right direction.
Six departments have prepared documents for us. These departments have put in a great deal of work over the course of the last three or four months to basically change the way they think about the information that's provided to Parliament in order to move from a bottom-up to a top-down kind of orientation and to try to make the information more useful.
At this point, based on the progress we've made, we want to test these six documents out more thoroughly in Parliament, to have them formally evaluated and assessed. The purpose of our meeting today is to ask you to begin that process by initiating the motion to the House that would advise them that these revised documents will be tabled in March. So that is by way of background.
The next page provides a graphic, an attempt to describe on one page what it is we are trying to achieve overall. It illustrates the longer-term vision of the reform of the estimates project.
I won't go into all the details, but would simply explain that the part we are dealing with today is the two heavily shaded boxes to the far right, basically departmental plans and departmental performance reports. What we would like to do is table, in March, revised part IIIs that would be built around the notion of a separate departmental plan and a separate departmental performance report, so that with Parliament's support after our evaluation we could spin off the departmental performance report and retable it in the fall.
This is basically the door that we would like to open up, again, on a pilot basis and with the full participation of Parliament. I won't spend any more time on this chart. If there are any questions about the other elements in it, we can talk about those a little bit later.
The next two-column graphic describes concerns that have been expressed to us, not all of the concerns but some of the key concerns that have been expressed to us about the information that Parliament receives and how our proposed approach is intended to respond to those concerns.
Going down the right-hand side of the column, we're talking about a top-down approach as opposed to a bottom-up approach. In other words, we want the information to be more strategic, more at the level that the department's executive committee or ministers would be engaged in and not a bottom-up presentation of detail. So that's a fundamental change in philosophy, and it's the challenge the departments are now facing as they try to develop their performance documents. It's shifting that orientation from detail to high level.
Again, in terms of the separate information on plans and performance, we want to provide that separate plan and separate performance document. This will allow us to highlight performance as a topic. Right now performance is scattered through a variety of different documents. This will allow us to bring performance together in one spot.
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We want to make the documents more readable. We want to orient them towards program rationale, and another key objective is to make sure that all the documents provided to Parliament are consistent so that you can walk from one to the other without having to do elaborate crosswalks and reconciliations and mathematics to make sure that the numbers work out.
So on the information side, that's what we're trying to achieve.
In terms of the control framework, I won't talk about that except to say that the control framework dimensions are longer-term items, depending on the results of your committee and then the consideration of the vote structure.
In the next section, which talks about process, section 3, again the key point there is providing separate windows for plans and performance in the parliamentary calendar.
On what is identified on page 5 as ``Upcoming Events'', what we want to do then is to table six modified part III documents in March. The six departments involved as our pilot departments would be Transport, Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Agriculture, Fisheries and Oceans, Natural Resources Canada and Revenue Canada, and at that time we would engage in a formal evaluation of the documents. I'd like to be able to describe in detail what that evaluation is going to consist of, but we're only at the point of having decided that we want to evaluate them now that it looks like we have an initiative.
The evaluation would be done in cooperation with departmental evaluation officials and the Auditor General, and the general thrust of the evaluation would be to examine whether the information that is now provided to Parliament in these pilot documents represents better information, whether it causes the committees to want to engage in it more than the other information that's provided, whether committees feel that there's any perceptible loss in access to information, how other users, including parliamentary staff and researchers, respond to it, and that sort of thing.
So that would be the general ambit of what we'd want to assess, but we'd have to work it out in detail with the other members of the committee.
If it looks like we're on track at that point, we'd want to come back to Parliament and talk about the next steps, which would include then the possibility of having a separate performance document provided in the fall, moving into the end-year report that we talked about as being better information than we're now getting on the supplementary estimates, and if we're still encouraged then to move other departments into the new format for the upcoming fiscal year.
Madam Chair, that concludes my presentation.
The Chair: Perhaps you could clarify where things change from what's happening now, and you might want to refer back to this chart on the third page.
Mr. Hopwood: For this fiscal year, if you didn't look into the documents you probably wouldn't notice any change. The plans and performance documents that we're tabling this March will be tabled in a blue book cover. It'll still be called part III of the estimates, and it'll be tabled along with the other documents that are tabled in March.
So if you didn't open the documents you wouldn't see any change in presentation, except that on the cover there'll be a line that would indicate these documents are presented as part of a pilot project to reform the estimates.
Within the documents, when you open them up -
The Chair: So to be clear, the departmental plan replaces part III of the estimates. It'll look the same but it'll be different.
Mr. Hopwood: What you'll have is a departmental plan and a departmental performance report under the same cover, and it'll be called part III of the estimates. So what you will have is the two documents presented at one time, along with all the supplementary information that would normally be provided, tabled as they would normally be tabled in March.
So all you would perceive then when you open up the document is that instead of having the format the way it's now provided you would be presented with a new format. In some cases that will be a departmental overview, departmental plan and departmental performance report, and in the case of Indian Affairs and Northern Development what you will get is a departmental plan and a departmental performance report, both of which contain the overview.
So that's basically what you'll see. So for three of the departments, which are Transport, Indian Affairs and Northern Development, and Agriculture, you'll see that kind of presentation. For the other three pilot departments you'll see fundamentally the same presentation as you would have received in the past, except it has been simplified a little and the performance information has been pulled together again into one section.
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The uninformed reader probably would notice little or no difference. Somebody who is knowledgeable about the department and has read previous part IIIs would see a repackaging of the information but no loss in detail.
The Chair: May I just run through this? I want to ensure people understand what's happening here.
As I look at your chart, the outlook document that was presented for the first time last year doesn't appear in the proposed plan. So what happens to what the outlook documents were intended to accomplish?
Mr. David W. Miller (Assistant Secretary, Expenditure Management Sector, Program Branch, Treasury Board): One of the things we found with the outlook documents was that several departments felt if they could get their message across properly in part III, they would prefer to use that, so we wouldn't have two separate documents tabled in Parliament basically a few weeks apart. One of the constraints on that was how much impact the budget would have per se on the expenditure levels that were put forward in the main estimates that are normally tabled in the next day or so.
We're hopeful that if the plans as a result of the program review discussions and as a result of the multi-year information that was tabled in Parliament last year as part of the outlooks...if that remains fairly consistent, then we can integrate the two documents and have a part III that essentially covers the three years within the planning horizon. So we've given departments the option of saying if you can pull all that outlook information together and put it in your part IIIs, fine; if you want to leave it and table it in Parliament later, then that option is also available. Part of that will depend on how their plans are impacted by budget announcements or the information contained therein, and also their ability perhaps to strengthen a message the minister wants to make before the committees at that time.
So the two options are on the table, and there will be some part IIIs that do have multi-year information. At present we're not sure how many that will be. But that's the principal difference. The main estimates traditionally have covered only the estimates year and the outlook documents looked at strategically over the next three-year period. We're hopeful some departments will be able to integrate that for the 1996-97 fiscal year.
The Chair: The other big change is that supplementary estimates will not appear throughout the year.
Mr. Miller: The supplementary estimates will go on exactly as they are now. There is no change. In that case we'll be asking Parliament, by definition, for changes in expenditure authority, or advising it of changes in anticipated expenditures for programs that are statutory. That will go on; and what we link that to is saying that's asking Parliament for something new.
What we found, of course, is that because of the principles of the expenditure management system and the amount of reallocation that occurs within departments, between their priorities, and even between departments, you get a mixed message. The estimates, by asking for incremental authority, don't give you a good idea of the changes that have occurred since the main estimates have been tabled for those individual departmental plans. By having a report we would like to table about this time next year...it then updates all that financial and performance information with what events have occurred during the year.
But it would be separate from the approval of Parliament. It's more of an information item. It's not an approval document, and it does not require additional spending authority.
So no change to the actual process for supplementary estimates will be contemplated in any of our model here. Again, we've left that up to the subcommittee and any recommendations they have. Ours is just information. It's not approval.
The Chair: It does indicate there will be fewer supplementary estimates.
Mr. Hopwood: As the longer-term vision - and again, depending on the results of the work of your committee - the elements we're putting forward ask whether we still need to maintain the same level of input control as we now exercise over things such as capital and grants and contributions.
What we would want to do, as Mr. Miller indicated, is leave supplementary estimates exactly as they are now and introduce an in-year report that would provide better information on shifts in departments. If as a result of that and as a result of the work of this committee we can then discuss with Parliament at some time over the next two or three years whether we need to maintain the same level of input control, then that would result in fewer votes, which would result in fewer supplementary estimates. But a lot of steps would have to be taken before that would ever happen. In my estimation that's more than two years out.
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The Chair: Questions. Mr. Williams.
Mr. Williams (St. Albert): I'll just confirm that the fall report that would be tabled would be in the same format, style - a total cross-referencing concept between the departmental plans tabled in the spring and the report tabled in the fall - so that one could do a simple and easy comparison between the two documents, and that there would be as much continuity as possible on a year-over-year basis.
Mr. Miller: That is correct.
Mr. Williams: I am correct in making that assumption.
On the presentation of these pilot documents, I have a concern about the pressure that's being put on the committee to make a fast decision on these documents and on the approvals. We are being asked today to approve these with basically no prior consideration. It has to be done now in order for them to proceed and to have the documents tabled in the springtime.
I can understand the need for approval now if they want to table the documents in the springtime, but I'm thinking that there could have been more planning, more warning, more consultation, and more advance notice to this committee in order for us to give due consideration to these changes. I'd like you to note that on my behalf.
I'm not sure we want to go to the full six departments. I say that because I complimented the Department of Transport on its presentation, but I'm very critical, for example, of the Department of Indian Affairs. When you take a look at their long narratives, at every opportunity they are building bias into the presentations, covering a lot but saying nothing. The supplementary information being provided by the department is basically a list of capital projects and where they intend to spend the money.
The Department of Indian Affairs is perhaps one of the more sensitive departments as far as spending is concerned, because of the amount of money they spend and the serious questions raised in the country about the value we get for our spending in that area or the progress in that area. Yet in the mock-up of the style of presentation that I see from the Department of Indian Affairs, I haven't seen any serious commitment by the department to say that it wants to bring its spending together in a document that is clear, concise, and meaningful and presents the essence of what it is trying to achieve and how it is achieving that through statistical analysis, measurement, and demographic studies so it will have a handle on what it's trying to achieve. I don't see that in its whole presentation, but I do see it in the Department of Transport's presentation.
Therefore the Treasury Board needs to tighten up. I've written it down as the philosophy. You need to develop terms of reference in more detail than you obviously have given to the departments at this point in time, because if they're all using the same terms of reference they're coming up with an excellent presentation by the Department of Transport but a quite unsatisfactory one by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Therefore I'm not sure I would automatically say to the Department of Indian Affairs that they may continue in the way they have done so far without putting much more work into their stuff.
I certainly compliment the Department of Transport, and I would certainly like to see them as a pilot project.
The Chair: Mr. Miller wanted to respond to the concern you've raised, but we're certainly free to indicate in our report any reservations we have.
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Mr. Williams: Another question I have on part III involves the pilot projects that you anticipate. When it comes to the votes, of course the votes for the coming year will not have changed. Is the information therefore going to be presented in the old style and the new style, or is it going to be in the new style where the votes under the current structure are going to available for analysis?
Mr. Miller: The source of authority is still the parliamentary vote structure. In any documents we put forward to Parliament, that will be the primary emphasis for understanding how that fits together.
The unfortunate thing - it won't change significantly with the pilot documents - is that we do then have a little bit of a transformation in that to understand exactly what the overall priorities and directions are within that vote structure. But certainly any of the documents that we table or plan to table as pilots will always relate back to the way in which Parliament grants the authority. That has to be in there.
So in the documents, we've left out that particular portion of it just to allow members to have a look at what the details will be, but it will all have to relate back to that structure.
Mr. Williams: Okay, but my question was whether we are going to have the old and the new, or whether we are going to have the new that accommodates the information being obvious to parliamentarians so that they know what they're voting on in the springtime.
Mr. Miller: We will have the old structure.
Mr. Williams: And the new presentation.
Mr. Miller: Yes, that is correct.
Mr. Williams: Okay, so it's the old and the new side by side.
Mr. Miller: That's right. If it's necessary - and it may not be for some departments - there will be information that allows you to move from the traditional vote structure into the way in which the information is presented. You'll have those kinds of abilities to convert if that's necessary, although in some cases it won't be.
Mr. Williams: Okay.
Mr. Miller: If I could, I'd just like to comment on your second question, because this was interesting.
When we presented this to Mr. Duhamel's working group - and I believe you had to leave at that point in the meeting, unfortunately - some of the other members of that group preferred the way in which Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development had actually presented their documents over that of Transport. This is one of the dilemmas we have in dealing with diverse interests and backgrounds. So one of the other reasons why we wanted to present these strictly as pilots is that when we do our assessment, we can take into consideration all those different concepts, understandings and directions.
By having six, the idea was that they are different. They are basically the way in which the individual departments would like to portray their own messages, their own performance information and their own financial targets. Parliamentarians will then have the opportunity to decide if this is appropriate for department A or if they like the way department B has done it. It was strictly to have a wider membership getting the opportunity to look at some of those options. If it leads us to a specific way of presenting all departments for following years, that would be perfect as well. For now, though, the more people who look at the document, the more views we have on which one seems to be better from their own understanding and perspective.
So it's an interesting dilemma.
Mr. Williams: Do you have a policy or format in mind, Mr. Miller, to collect all these opinions that are going to be out there?
Mr. Miller: Yes, we do. As Mr. Hopwood mentioned, that is the key of the evaluation phase that will be going on in the spring.
Mr. Williams: On the supplementaries, you're going to present the same style as before, but if you have these departmental plans and so on using modern information technology in that type of format, why can't you provide more information on the supplementary estimates?
Mr. Miller: The supplementary estimates fundamentally have been viewed as updates to Parliament on the changes on the use of financial authorities. With that in mind, we list only those votes that require incremental authority, for instance, and we list only those statutory programs - and they are 70% of government spending - that have a significant change in the forecast expenditure levels.
Mr. Williams: I know the supplementary estimates say they want to spend x number of dollars in this particular area, but if it is a movement of money from A to B, right now we do not see that A is being reduced. We only see B being increased. We're therefore seeing only one side of the coin.
Mr. Miller: That is correct.
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Mr. Williams: Is there any possibility that you can round out the management information, for example? It's fine for us to vote an increase on B, but it would certainly be nice to know that actually this is no extra money, even though it is a supplementary estimate. I would think if we're going to consider the philosophy that, say, the House is a board of directors, they'd want to know this is not an increase in expenditures but actually a movement of money from A to B. Can that information be provided?
Mr. Miller: That is the exact purpose of what we call the in-year report. It's to understand that we are not going to change the traditional function of supplementary estimates, but we're going to provide Parliament with a separate report that looks at not only the context of increased authorities but also changing priorities, changing assumptions and offsets within the overall activity of a program or department. So you've just characterized exactly what we would like to do with that in-year report.
Mr. Williams: Okay.
I have one final question, Madam Chairman, although I may come back later on.
In your report you say:
- I have a concern that we're going to be inundated with all kinds of reports rather than having
what we need concisely presented to us in one report.
Mr. Miller: We would like to have a report - and it will only be a few pages long for each department - that includes those that do not have supplementary estimate requests as well, because of the amount of internal movement that may go on between priorities within a program. We would like to portray that.
If I can use the example of the RCMP, they have one vote to deal with their program, but there may be a substantial movement from some other federal policing activities into, say, the provincial or municipal contracts. It doesn't matter what the reason is. We now have no mechanism to communicate that information to Parliament.
So by the time you get around to actually looking at a performance document - and as they're characterized now in part III, that's almost a full year after the end of the fiscal year; they're tabled in February for the year that ended the previous March - you have the tendency to say, well, that happened almost two years ago, and we want to talk about the future. Parliament wasn't given a chance to look at the implications of those changing priorities during the fiscal year as they occurred. Therefore it's very difficult to make the performance information relevant.
What we would like to do is provide that opportunity to update the plan. It will only be a few pages, and we're working on layouts for it now. It would simply say, this is the overview or the strategic elements that were in the main estimates, these are the changes that have occurred and these are the results we would like to be measured against.
At that point, parliamentarians and other interested people could challenge or ask questions about the update that occurred, why those events changed the priorities and whatever else may go into that decision. So instead of being after the fact, it would be during the year, and it would relate to the performance information that would be put out once the financial information was available, after the end of the fiscal year.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Williams.
Mr. Arseneault.
Mr. Arseneault (Restigouche - Chaleur): Thank you, Madam Chair.
I have just a few little questions to start out with. I'm curious as to how those six departments were targeted. Why those six and not some other six? What was the rationale behind that? Those are fairly large departments and very complicated ones. Is that the reason?
Mr. Hopwood: The six departments we ended up with were all identified on a voluntary basis.
Mr. Arseneault: They volunteered?
Mr. Hopwood: Yes. For the three departments dealing with what we call the longer-term or the ideal model, in fact Transport Canada and Indian and Northern Affairs had already been taking steps to try to improve the message that was conveyed in their part III documents. We knew about that and asked them whether or not they'd be willing to participate. Similarly, Agriculture wanted to make improvements to their documents and asked to participate.
For the other three departments dealing with a more middle-of-the-road approach, a call letter went out from the deputy secretary of Treasury Board to departments indicating that we had this reform in the estimates project under way and asking departments if they would be interested in volunteering. In fact, we ended up with far more volunteers than we could accommodate. We identified three that essentially represented a cross-section of departments. We wanted to deal with large, complex entities so we could really test the robustness of the ideas.
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We explained to them at that time that this isn't just an interesting thing to do; it's going to involve a lot of work. Based on that kind of discussion, about half of the volunteers dropped off, and we ended up with the three we now have.
Mr. Arseneault: You said it was to be a lot of work, which brings me up to the next point. Will these six departments need extra resources, in terms of personnel, to implement these pilot projects?
Mr. Hopwood: Our hope is that over the longer term they will require fewer resources. We think we can provide information better and more efficiently than we we're now providing it. Our intent is for everybody to benefit from less unnecessary work and still provide better information.
Mr. Arseneault: For the pilot projects?
Mr. Hopwood: Over the short period, people have been basically devoting their evenings and weekends to putting the pilot documents together, coming to attend the parliamentary working groups and that sort of thing. They're doing it because they believe this is an important thing to do.
Mr. Arseneault: You didn't really answer my question. Will there be extra resources to implement -
Mr. Hopwood: There'll be nothing additional.
Mr. Arseneault: There's be no additional resources?
Mr. Hopwood: No.
Mr. Arseneault: You spoke about the standardization of terminology. Was it ``between departments'', or ``within departments'' that you mentioned?
Mr. Hopwood: What we want to do is allow parliamentarians to be able to walk easily from the budget to the departmental plan to the performance document and to other documents that are provided to Parliament that deal with expenditure management.
It may vary from department to department. They might have slightly different formats, but when you're reading through Transport, for example, you'd want to be able to read the plan and understand where they're going, and then read the performance document and not have to guess at what the relationship was. You should be able to see business line X in the performance document and business line X in the plan. For that business line, there should be a clear statement of performance expectations and actual performance. That's what we meant by consistency.
Mr. Arseneault: Will there be any consistency from year to year? That seems to be a problem for parliamentarians, as well. They go into committee. They study the estimates. They have these documents. Then, all of a sudden, they want to refer to last year's document because they've done the estimates last year and they try to follow, but there's no connection. There's a whole new terminology or a whole new way of presenting things.
I think even the pilot projects you're doing now will present a problem to parliamentarians to a certain extent. I'm wondering if there will be any attempt to develop some consistency from year to year within departments.
Mr. Hopwood: Two things will help that. One is that by taking a longer-term focus on both the plan and the performance document, you'll be able to see the shifts in the out-years and be able to at least track the differences.
We're also hoping that by setting up a database, people who are interested will be able to go back, not just one or two years but five or ten years, to track projects or business lines, or whatever, to find out what's happening.
I think it's inevitable that there will be reorganizations and shifts in priorities and that activities or business lines will change in structure. But, yes, we do intend to try to make that easier for members of Parliament.
Mr. Arseneault: One of the items that sort of interest parliamentarians, especially those who are in opposition, are performance documents. You refer to them quite a lot in your presentation. I guess there's going to be an attempt to get those out, but who is going to prepare the performance documents on each department? Will it be the departments themselves?
Maybe I'm a little cynical, I don't know. I sat on the opposition benches for a while. Now I'm on the government side. What I found in the estimates quite often is that there's very little chance of finding anything that would be negative toward the government in any document that's prepared by a department.
Why would the personnel of Transport Canada prepare a document that would be negative toward their minister or that would possibly create a scandal or an embarrassment to the colleague working down the aisle that he sees at coffee break every day?
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What type of performance reports can we expect? What type of real evaluation can we expect, then? Is it going to be the same type of deal we're dealing with now?
Mr. Miller: To try to answer your questions, one of the things we've had problems with in terms of performance is that it's quite easy for individual managers to identify their targets and what they would like to do for the upcoming year.
It gets more difficult when you move a group of 10 or 15 managers to what may be a branch level, and then distil that down to a few key elements that represent their performance targets. It becomes even more difficult as we move to an entire department or program level.
The indicators become extremely important. They may vary substantially between types of programs, which they should. But the other side that has been awkward is that we have not had a mechanism - I think the Indian Affairs document is a good example of this - to say it isn't appropriate for us to measure performance on the basis of one fiscal year.
We have financial results and we have things that look at why we've spent a significant amount of resources on an item, but we have to measure the change over a 10- or 15-year period. By having a separate performance document, you then have the ability to get that message out.
What we would expect is that the targets established in the departmental planning documents in the spring would be fixed. In other words, because of our consistency argument, it would be those targets you're then going to be measured against when you get to performance. But you may be able to explain what's going on in terms of a much longer period of time.
Again, departments do not have that capability. If there are substantial changes, then another purpose of that in your report may be for parliamentarians to question that. In other words, if there is a target that's in the plan and parliamentarians don't like that or don't feel that's the one that best represents a kind of program activity, they have an opportunity when they're reviewing the estimates to challenge that.
If they get to the end of the year and there have been significant changes to those original targets, again they have the opportunity to challenge exactly what has occurred. Finally, when they get to the results, if they're not satisfied with what's related there, that'll be all available for them in that one particular document.
I'm not suggesting we should be in a position to have a lot of negative information. But put out some targets. Now you're showing us what happened. Tell us what affected those targets.
Mr. Arseneault: You're saying the targets are going to be objective or subjective?
Mr. Miller: I wish I knew. Some of them will be objective, and some of them will be the other side.
Take Indian Affairs. One of their targets is retention rates or the completion of secondary education among aboriginal people. That's a pretty objective target.
You said that we are now at 50%. We're trying to get that to 65% or 70%. You can then measure what that is. You can assess how much money we're spending against trying to achieve that, or even challenge it as an objective in the first place.
Other things may be more difficult. When you get into social areas, obviously your targets may be even more subjective than the one I indicated. There'll be a variety, but I think the important thing is that they will represent the way that particular organization plans and views itself.
This is the way they want to perceive themselves as going on and justifying to Parliament why they need a particular level of resources in order to accomplish that.
Mr. Arseneault: Are you saying, when you're talking about performance documents in a 10- to 15-year evaluation, that to a certain extent we're going to have evaluations back 10 or 15 years or targets in 10 or 15 years on these new pilot projects? In 15 years' time Guy Arseneault, who's been a retired MP somewhere, is going to come back and sit in in the back here to listen and to see if you've really met your targets.
Mr. Miller: No, I think that when we look at the planning side of it.... Let's take that example of completion of secondary school. Say right now we're at one level and we'd like to move that up. These are the things we're doing in order to accomplish that.
When you get to the performance document, they would say that historically we've moved from 20% up to 50%. Our target was to move that to 55%. So either we've accomplished that or we haven't. That's with an explanation of what occurred.
.1025
It's within the context. They aren't necessarily targets that may extend over 15 years. You may occasionally have one of those, but the targets for planning would be in the shorter term, within the three years that now represent the planning horizon. But we may put the performance information within the context of a much longer historical period so people understand exactly what has occurred and what has developed in that area.
Mr. Hopwood: Perhaps I could provide some comments that might help explain where these performance documents fit within the full range of performance information. Traditionally, we have always had program evaluations at a very high level. They are done on a cyclical basis once every five to ten years, question the fundamental rationale of programs at a high level, and look at those kinds of questions.
At the other end of the spectrum we have very detailed performance kinds of service standards - performance level information - with the telephone answered within 30 seconds and the percentage of questions that were answered properly and so on.
We're trying to move the focus of performance thinking higher into that middle ground - not at the level of undertaking formal program evaluations of departments every year, but having high-level performance indicators that could be reported on an annual basis and provide a sense of whether the department was achieving the key performance targets it set for itself for that program or for that business line. What does it cost and what kinds of pressures is that program under?
We think that would do a number of things. It would sensitize parliamentarians to the real pressures - the reality of program delivery - and help them engage in a debate of policy at a higher level than individual service standards.
If that conversation led to questions like how many phone calls were answered within 30 minutes, that would be the cascade approach. You would then have access to departmental officials to get that kind of information. But we don't think that's where you should start. We think you would want to start at the higher level of...not program evaluation but the next step down. What's the program designed to do and how well is it doing?
Mr. Arseneault: But this information is all being prepared for parliamentarians, and committees that change membership on a practically yearly basis. That's why we have to be very practical about it. We speak about these pilot projects and the performance reports that are going to be included in the part III estimates, but we talk about a three-year scope.
If in three years time a new member of Parliament were elected and sat on a committee, would he have the ability to look back in that document to when a certain program was introduced, three years ago, and say, ``This is the target. This is what they wanted to do. This is how much money was projected to do it''? Could he sit down in that year - year three - and have a document and a performance evaluation that would give him all that information? Are you saying that's exactly how it would happen?
Mr. Hopwood: That individual should be able to sit down, look at a business line, such as food inspection and agriculture, and read a document that says officials think the following four performance indicators best represent what this business line is trying to achieve. That member would be able to track performance over a longer time period to see the way the program is going, what objectives have been set, and any explanation for variances between planned and actual.
Mr. Arseneault: But you wouldn't have to find other documents to find out what the targets were when this program was instituted.
Mr. Hopwood: No, there would be context as well. That's what happens when you move up to a higher level. The information becomes less numerical and more contextual.
Mr. Arseneault: Thank you, Madam Chair. I can go on if you're not ready.
The Chair: No, I have some questions, Mr. Arseneault. That won't come as a surprise to you.
The hard part will always be trying to determine whether what you spent the money on actually had anything to do with more kids going to post-secondary education or not.
Mr. Hopwood: It's the attribution question.
The Chair: Yes. You mentioned when you appeared before our committee in October that you intended to discuss these documents with Parliament. One of the things that's disturbing me is that I gather there have been no discussions with the committees that will be dealing with these new documents to see whether they like them. They're the ones who are familiar with these departments and whether this kind of information is more or less helpful to them than what they're getting now. Have you or the departments had any of those discussions at all?
.1030
Mr. Hopwood: The departments and the departmental officials are certainly involved in the process. Our windows now are until Parliament recesses on December 15, and then when Parliament returns on February 5 until March when the documents are tabled.
We're trying to work through the Liaison Committee to provide a briefing to committee chairs. We had hoped to be able to do that before Christmas, but now it looks like we'll have to do it after Christmas.
We also want to offer briefings to all the committees that will be affected, to let them know there will be a change in format to the documents, but also to solicit their support in the evaluation that will take place after the documents are tabled and get their feedback on whether or not we've actually made things better.
The Chair: I had certainly expected, when you talked about consultation with Parliament, that at least the committees attached to the departments affected by the pilot would know what is going on, and I'm hearing that's not the case.
Mr. Miller: We've had a dilemma that's interesting for us because it doesn't happen very often. We had the opportunity to appear before this committee and deal with the working group that was looking at this and came up with these documents. We went forward and obtained Treasury Board approval to do that consultation. We have not had the opportunity, for example, to go to cabinet to provide it with an update on what this project is about and the next steps. It becomes extremely awkward for us, outside of the members who are interested in this as a project, to go ahead and deal with this until we've actually had that opportunity before cabinet.
We obviously want to have as much discussion as possible, but the timing has been unfortunate this year. By the time we can get that discussion in cabinet there won't be any opportunity to meet with the committees or the chairs before the Christmas break. So we're kind of stuck, strictly because of that.
The Chair: You can see my concern, though. If you brief cabinet in February on how you're planning to change its estimates documents and it doesn't like it, you will have a problem and so will we.
Mr. Miller: Yes.
Mr. Hopwood: Letters have been sent to the chairs of all of the committees indicating we're providing information on the project itself and indicating we want to brief them on the project. We would be very happy to brief any committees that are available to talk to us before the break.
We had to wait until we knew we had a viable package before going to the next step and briefing the committees. As Mr. Williams has indicated, the windows have become very tight for us. But we have sent a letter to the chair of each of the committees describing the project and offering one-on-one discussions or committee discussions whenever they want.
The Chair: I'm just wondering if the rush isn't jeopardizing the success of your pilot project.
Mr. Hopwood: Our problem is that if we miss a year, this opportunity may not come up - the windows might not be as open a year from now. We're at the point where we think we have a solution that meets the objectives of Parliament. As Mr. Thompson has indicated, he's supportive of the directions they've called for and the Auditor General has called for in Auditor General reports.
From the point of view of departments and agencies, they feel it's moving in the right direction. There seems to be a very satisfying cohesion in terms of support for this project. I realize there was a lot to do until now, and we're trying to make sure we cover as many bases as possible. But I would hate to lose another year.
The Chair: Can you see the possibility of the departments, in cooperation with Treasury Board, doing that kind of briefing early in February when the House comes back?
.1035
Mr. Hopwood: The way we saw the meetings occurring would be that we would provide a briefing on the project, and departments could provide a briefing on their pilot documents.
Mr. Miller: One of the things that obviously disturbs us when we review the testimony from the committees is how little time they actually devote to things like part IIIs. Even if a parliamentary committee reviewed the new format of the document and said, we don't like it because it doesn't provide us with this, that would be a step up from what we're actually doing now, where they find it basically incomprehensible for their purposes.
It's going to be an interesting time for us if they do decide that is not the way they want to present the information, but I'm sure even those departments that are involved with the pilot project would appreciate any feedback of that nature.
The Chair: This is a pilot project, so what I would be interested in knowing is what preparation you're doing to maximize its success.
I do think you might want to look at different ways in which the committees might consider this. You might want to try some kind of experiment to see what happens if you just table them with the committees in the normal way. The fact that it's something new already starts giving a bit of an incentive that isn't there now, just the fact that you're part of a pilot project.
One of my experiences, and I think everybody's, is that one of the problems of spending time on the estimates is that you try to squeeze it into one-and-a-half-hour or two-hour committee meetings once or twice a week when you have other things on the committee's agenda that you'd likely be spending time on.
One of the things we discussed at an earlier meeting is whether committees would pay more attention to the estimates if in fact you set aside a block of three days where they would go off somewhere and be away from their phones and offices and look at their departmental estimates. Given that this is a pilot project, it might be a good opportunity to do that with one or two committees that are getting this new format and one or two that are not. That might also provide some helpful information for our committee's work.
Mr. Hopwood: I agree that would be very interesting to examine. I would expect that would come more out of your committee than the work we're doing, but I think that's a nice idea.
The Chair: If we were prepared to propose it, would you be prepared to implement it with the departments involved? This is a negotiating session, in case you haven't recognized it.
Mr. Hopwood: We've always taken the position, Madam Chair, that we want to support the work of your committee, and if you want to experiment with some different ways of examining the estimates....
To get back to a question that was raised earlier about performance information and why departments would provide this, it gets back to discussions I've had with departmental officials. They've asked the same question: what are my incentives to provide all of this information if it's simply going to be used against me at some sort of detailed level? There's a heavy responsibility on committees to do their job with the documents.
I think the worst thing that could happen is that if in the fall we table the documents and committees do nothing with them, that will provide a certain set of incentives to departments. If on the other hand committees take these performance documents and actually comment on the quality of the information and the direction of the department, then that'll provide a different set of incentives. So I think that if your committee could come up with ways to provide departments with better incentives to think in these terms, that would be very useful.
The Chair: The other thing I find is that committees looking at estimates - and I'd ask the other three members around the table what their experience has been this past year - tend to call the minister in first. If I were a minister, I'd refuse to go until they had been briefed by my department on that overview of the department.
I understand the attitude that senior officials bring to committees when they're looking at estimates. They don't ever get a chance to tell their story before people start saying, I don't like your story. Have you thought of ways we could use to fix that?
.1040
Mr. Miller: In my personal experience in dealing from a large department, we did in fact go before the committee with the details of the estimates and understanding where the programs were going, so that they could then put it within the context of the discussion they would have with the minister on the following day. As a department we offered that to the committees every year, but of course, for various reasons, they chose to speak to the minister following that first year.
I think you'll find that most departments certainly would prefer to put things in a context and provide what amounts to a technical briefing on the estimates and the directions before the minister does appear. I'm not sure there's any formal process in place.
The Chair: Maybe if they have a chance to do that they might be a little more forthcoming in answering questions about choices they had to make and why they made certain choices.
Tom.
Mr. Hopwood: This is just an observation. Again, in the benchmarking work we did looking at other countries, there is one example - and unfortunately I've forgotten the country - where the officials will brief on the estimates, then the committee will have a meeting and decide which areas it wants to emphasize, and in fact will prepare a set of questions that it will then submit to officials, which they can consider and bring back.
It allows the committee to think about the areas they want to focus on and it also allows officials to think about the various sides of the issue in their response, so it allows for a better dialogue.
The Chair: I have one other main concern. I am concerned about the evaluation. I think the process for the evaluation should be set up beforehand so that we know what we're evaluating and how, rather than after the fact saying it seems like this happened.
Mr. Hopwood: We're having our first meeting with departmental officials two weeks from now, on December 18, to first give a sense of how things went with the parliamentary committees and with cabinet, and then to talk about next steps. One of the key elements of the next steps would be building the evaluation framework.
The Chair: My final concern is the outlook document. We took a major step forward last year in getting Parliament involved not only in looking at the accounting, whether it's the estimates or a backward look, but in starting to take some responsibility and have some opportunity to influence the next year's budget. Frankly, that's what I think is the most important thing.
I'm concerned that if the outlook documents get incorporated into what are essentially part IIIs and get all mixed up with looking at the estimates instead of coming out a month or two later when Parliament can focus on the future, then that new initiative is going to be lost before it's ever started, really. How can we get over that?
I can understand that departments want to put their estimates in the context of what we're facing for the coming few years, but I can also see it losing the attention of parliamentarians. For the departments that aren't pilot projects, would they still produce the outlook documents later in the spring?
Mr. Miller: There may even be some pilot departments that would produce outlook documents, depending on events that unfold and the implications in the budget and other things.
One of the dilemmas we had in reviewing the outlook documents, which were strictly departmental documents - they did not involve the central agencies in any kind of review function or tick and check - was that in many cases the program would put forward a longer-term perspective by saying overall these are the general directions that a minister would want to show over the next period of time, perhaps three years, perhaps longer. In some cases it was a ten-year plan and what we had were the financial implications of the first three years.
One of the concerns we had was that when we get around to it, maybe not this year but next year, an outlook document would then say this is the third year of our ten-year plan and we're still on track. That would be the extent.
The Chair: That's instead of moving forward a year every time.
.1045
Mr. Miller: You'd have a set of numbers, but you might not have a significant description of what those numbers mean. It would be difficult in an outlook document, and it would defeat its purpose, if you then said, we're two years into that ten-year plan, and here's what we've accomplished.
So we're trying to take those concepts and move them into the part III and still provide the opportunity, even within the part III, to have the messages that were clear in the outlook document. There's no question that those messages will have to be contained in the part III if we're going to combine the two. But many departments will in fact table a separate document, as they did last year.
The Chair: So the departments really haven't got the message that what Parliament wants is to say, ``What are the problems you're facing? What are the choices? What choices do you think you're going to be making, and why?'', so they can influence those choices.
Mr. Miller: The part III would probably provide, especially if the overall context is within, say, a five- or ten-year plan.... The part III would then take that overall general plan and still repeat it to the extent that you wouldn't have to refer to last year's document, but then relate that down to particular projects or programs, in the small sense.
The Chair: My concern is taking the attention of Parliament away from the outlook and influencing the next budget. In your earlier presentation here, or somewhere else, you raised the issue of what Parliament wants - more control or more accountability.
Mr. Miller: Yes.
The Chair: I think it wants more influence over the future and more accountability for the past.
Mr. Miller: It is our belief - and it might be incorrect at this point - that having it as one document would allow a better understanding and influence on the future directions, because it would get down a level from what we now have in the outlook documents.
Let's pick on Indian Affairs again. You could say, we understand that your objective is to increase the completion rate for secondary school, but we don't agree with the ways in which you're trying to achieve that objective. There then would be an understanding of the mechanisms or the actual projects that facilitate the accomplishment of those higher-range objectives.
So the part III, because by definition it's a bit longer than the outlook documents, by intention gets down to another level that has those targets, that has the understanding of the projects of small ``p'' programs.
The Chair: Those are the main questions I had.
Did you have anything more, Mr. Williams or Mr. Arseneault?
Mr. Williams: I'm getting a bit confused about the number of documents we are being presented with. The way I have been thinking about it, or the way I've understood the evolution of these changes that we've been talking about, is that you plan to have an outlook document tabled in late spring, by April or whatever, that looks forward into the future five to ten years, or maybe even longer. It is going to have statements of philosophy, statements of principle, statements of policies, maybe global budget numbers on the far-out figures, a statement of intent, statements of objectives, put in a format that might be not in any great detail in the far outlook, but as you come closer to next year and the year after, the sketch would be more filled in. In the short term, the first two or three years, looking out, would not be very dissimilar to the format of the part IIIs, but the numbers might be more global in the way they are put together and might perhaps even be in ranges.
Through the summer, of course, there's a consultation, input by the members of Parliament, as envisaged by the concept.
The Minister of Finance takes these ideas and tables them in the fall. There is a budget in the spring, in February, followed by the tabling of the estimates and the part IIIs, which have actual forecasts for the following year, with historical information, as we see in the Department of Transportation pro forma, but tied within the context of the next two to three years down the road.
.1050
So we are seeing this year's estimates with some historical data - it may be graphs, it may be actual numbers, and so on - and the next two or three years, taken from the outlook documents. We have it in complete context. Then in the fall we would have, along with the public accounts, the reporting-style documents, which show what actually transpired in the year ended March 31, that spring, again within the context of historical information - what transpired, what the estimates said - and again, within the context of looking at maybe one or two years.
So I'm seeing three documents: outlook, estimates, and reporting. They have similar formats, continuity throughout. And some supplementary estimates will have to be...a few-page document, just to tie us over if we have some changes along the way.
Am I correct in that assessment?
Mr. Miller: One significant difference is that our plans were that the spring document, which would be a combination of the outlook document, with a lot of the things you mentioned, and a part III, would contain all the planning information, all the future directions, in that one document.
Mr. Williams: So now you're saying you're collapsing the outlook document and the part IIIs into one document, so that for the coming year it is detailed with all the hard numbers in place and they get a bit more global as you go farther forward into the future.
Mr. Miller: That's correct.
Mr. Williams: So we're going to have two documents. One document incorporates the estimates and the outlook, so the context is right there and we'll have some historical information, as for example the Department of Transportation has given us, and perhaps even the current year's actuals, or the actuals for last year, estimates for this year, as they're getting more global in the projection...followed by reporting. So basically we're down to two documents.
Am I right in saying that?
Mr. Miller: That's correct. The focus is on plans in the spring and the focus is on performance in the fall. To make that flow, the performance document will always relate back to that previous plan.
Mr. Williams: Is that going to be a policy or is that going to be an option? Are departments going to table an outlook document and an estimates document or are they going to combine the two?
Mr. Miller: In a way, that would depend on the evaluation of the project. If parliamentarians believe it's better to have all that planning information in one document, then that's how it will end up.
Mr. Williams: So you're leaving the decision to us. But is it your recommendation that they all be one document or that they all be two documents but we don't have a mix of both?
Mr. Miller: That's correct.
Mr. Hopwood: As this chart I handed out indicated, we think it would be a better approach to have a departmental plan that combines the information in the part III and the information in the outlook document with the philosophy of the outlook, which is something that's more top-down, strategic, and longer term but still provides all that other detailed information that would now be in the part III. We wanted to get the high-level message across clearly but still provide access to the detail in one document.
Mr. Williams: In the briefing book you gave us departmental mock-ups. You had category one and category two. Transport and Indian Affairs were in one and Natural Resources and National Revenue were in the other group. What was the actual difference between group one and group two?
Mr. Miller: We started out with a different objective in those. The first one was to allow departments to get their message across. That certainly is characterized in Transport and Indian Affairs.
For the second group we said we don't want a lot more of those kinds of things on the table. What we would like to do is take the existing information in the part III and organize it better, to allow for a distinction between planning and the performance and to organize it in such a way that it's easier to read. Quite honestly, that was the overall intention.
We did that deliberately, coming from two different directions. Where we ended up is with documents that are not that dissimilar. To be quite honest, we didn't expect that; but we left it up to departments. By reorganizing the information that's currently in part III, we've gone a fair way towards achieving what Tom has called our ``preferred model'', which is the Indian Affairs and Transport Canada examples. But certainly we started out trying to provide two distinct options and ended up with something that is reasonably similar.
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Mr. Williams: You leave it to the individual departments to make the presentation.
Mr. Miller: We insist, for example, that the numbers are consistent with what's been approved and that kind of thing, in other words, consistent with overall levels. There are few things like that where we would do a verification and that's understood. But other than that, it was definitely a departmental document.
Mr. Williams: Madam Chairman, I suggest that the Treasury Board act to develop some terms of reference for putting the part IIIs together so that we have some kind of continuity of style of presentation. As we see from these five presentations, there's a wide spectrum of reporting styles. I think it would be preferable to have some terms of reference developed by the Treasury Board to give them some guidance, because while we are talking about giving them approval to have six departments do these revised estimates, I am more inclined to give approval only to five because I do not like the Department of Indian Affairs.
The Chair: I'd like to ask another related question, if you don't mind, Mr. Williams.
Mr. Williams and most members of Parliament keep coming back to how the information shifts from year to year and how you're never sure that you're looking at comparable figures. That's part of what you're getting at: will there be a standard pattern so we know we're dealing with comparable information?
I did question why DFO is in here, because that department has undergone substantial changes, has assumed responsibilities out of other departments, and I think it has transferred some responsibilities out. There's no baseline for the ``new department'' at DFO. I am a bit concerned about that.
Mr. Miller: One of the concerns we have is that basically we didn't think the Department of National Defence should present its information in the same way as National Archives does. We fundamentally went out to allow significant variations and that may lead to consistency problems between Defence and National Archives, but we think that's probably acceptable to parliamentarians. There are very few individuals who are going to read all 78 of the part IIIs or whatever the planning documents evolve into.
We have always had a problem with changes in program and activity structures as they're characterized in the estimates documents and with providing crosswalks for that. Again, in the current part III structure, that's done through a series of tables that can become quite complicated.
But, unfortunately, we're in the hands of the ministers in that sense, and if a particular minister wants to change the way in which a department is organized and how it functions, it's our job to try to relay that as best we can in terms of what that means throughout a fairly consistent historical period.
I think we'll always have changes in the structure within a program as things have all been changed, but our job is to try to match those up in such a way that those changes either become invisible in some cases - in other words, if you can convert everything to the new basis - or if there's a clear crosswalk between them, if that's necessary.
The Chair: Mr. Hopwood wanted to respond further to that. Mr. Williams has another point or question. Then I think the committee should move on to what it wants to do with this.
Mr. Hopwood.
Mr. Hopwood: I'll comment on the guidelines question. As Mr. Miller indicated, we wanted to avoid giving departments a 300-page detailed list of how to do the preparation of the documents, and to a certain extent that's what's got us in the problem we're in right now.
The guidelines became more and more detailed and we got to the point, as one minister said, where he read his own document and couldn't recognize his own department. It was so prescribed in terms of how to present the information that he couldn't convey the messages he thought were most important. We wanted to give a fair amount of flexibility in style of presentation.
However, we are in the process of preparing guidelines for the development of performance reports and departmental plans, and after the evaluation of the information that we've put on the table is finished in March, we'll develop more detailed guidelines, I guess. But we don't want to go to the same level as we've had before, which is the 300-page description of exactly where every paragraph should go.
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The Chair: Mr. Williams, do you have a last question?
Mr. Williams: My final point on this issue is that the difference between Transport and Indian Affairs is that Indian Affairs is looking strictly at this year without any context. If we are going to use the cascade concept of overview of the whole department, overview of the business lines and overview of the programs, I would like to see it broken down in that concept of programs, business lines and department: where they came from, where they are, and where they're going. That is a statement of philosophy, a principle, rather than a placing of this number in this box. We don't want that, but we do want some kind of continuity of presentation.
When I look at this pro forma on Indian Affairs, it is all flowery, self-gratuitous stuff that says this is what they're doing, but it has absolutely nothing to say about where they came from, what their accomplishments are, why they're spending the money, and what they intend to get for that money being spent.
Let me just give you a quote - and I just picked it at random:
- Why does DIAND use funding arrangements?
- - to respond to First Nations desire for self-government;
- - to empower First Nations to address their own needs; and
- - to rationalize service delivery.
Mr. Hopwood: If I could offer some comments, the intent of the first cycle of pilot departments was to take the step from the old-format documents to a new style of presentation, to move from bottom-up to top-down. At the same time, we have to be concerned about parliamentary privilege and about not putting information on the table at this point in time. It's going to be tabled in March, so there were constraints on the departments in terms of how much information they could actually include in the documents.
The intent was to help the documents to grow and to evolve. The officials from that department were at the working group meetings. They've taken your comments to heart, and we're now working with the Office of the Auditor General - they are also going to provide us with comments on the departments - in order to make them better between now and when they're tabled.
So I guess I'd like to assure you the document that you have there is not the final product. It is the first attempt and it conveys, as I indicated, the philosophy that we want to get across. It's based on the concept of top-down and strategic as opposed to bottom-up and detailed, but we're certainly going to work with the departments to respond to your concerns and to the other concerns that have been expressed.
The Chair: We have a motion in front of us. The committee has had a number of discussions and expressed a number of reservations. I would like to ask either Mr. Miller or Mr. Hopwood how we deal with the problem of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. There is obviously a concern on the part of one member of the committee about how that department is proceeding as compared to others.
I guess we have to get out of here for another committee, do we?
A voice: Evidently. I'll go check.
The Chair: Is there a way of handling that? Are you disagreeing with Mr. Williams and saying the DIAND report is okay, that it's just a different way of a department presenting its information?
Mr. Hopwood: I guess I'd make two observations.
The Chair: Or are you saying that it's in development and will be improved?
Mr. Hopwood: It's in development, and all the documents are in fact going to get better over the course of the next few months.
There is another point that I would like to raise, though. Notwithstanding the substance, the DIAND documents, and the performance report in particular, were much more readable and presentable documents. They went further than the others in terms of making use of good communication approaches. They have far more graphics and visual displays than the other documents, and we want to incorporate a lot of that in here.
Mr. Williams: ``Other documents''. What other documents?
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Mr. Hopwood: In particular, I mean the option II documents. You wouldn't find as many graphs and charts and other attractive visual displays: the use of cut-ins, bold headings, good use of section headings to describe where the documents are going.
So they've done a lot of work on the communication side of things. That was something that came out of our working group meeting: that sometimes the problem isn't contents, sometimes the problem is communication. They're leading the way, and I'd hate to lose the advantage of that, not to mention what they've done for us. As I say, we're working with them now to respond to the concerns you've raised.
Mr. Arseneault: I share some of the concerns John has, but for proper evaluation it might be good to include them. If at the end there's a difference between different documents we'll have an evaluation. We'll also, I hope, have some comments from members of Parliament on those committees about that evaluation, to see which documents they actually did prefer.
I have a concern about the practical approach to all this, and the readability. One of the comments was that they are trying to make it more readable and more practical for members of Parliament. That's what this information is all about. In the end, although we may be strictly concerned with the accounting and the numbers and this and that, we have to make sure parliamentarians at least understand what they're dealing with in the documentation they do have.
If we do decide to proceed with the pilot project, I'd like to see Indian and Northern Affairs stay, just for the idea of having some diversity there at the end for evaluation purposes. If they're all the same, let's have one department do it. If it's good, it's good, and we'll implement it all; if not, we won't go ahead. That way we won't waste six departments' energy and time on a new process. We should go either with one or with six. But we shouldn't exclude one -
The Chair: The committees that understand the material.
Mr. Arseneault: - because it's different. I think it would be good to have all of them, the mix, and get a proper evaluation.
The Chair: We have a problem here. Unbeknownst to our clerk, another meeting has been scheduled to start here at 11 a.m. They've given us a five-minute grace period, but that doesn't give us time to conclude this matter and what we want to report. It's really regrettable.
I would like to find out...in principle, either we want the pilot project to go ahead or we don't. After this discussion it does seem to me there's some useful information to be had out of it for both Parliament and our committee for the report we have to make to Parliament. I'm sensing people might want to include in our report some provisos about the pilot nature of the project and further progress on it. I don't think we have time to do that with three minutes remaining.
If this is to proceed, there has to be a report to Parliament before Christmas. That would mean we would have to report to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee by Tuesday. I'm asking if there is a time between now and Tuesday that would be a convenient meeting time to take a look at this motion, make whatever amendments, add whatever we want to a report to the committee, and finalize that. I might ask, for instance, if people have meeting time available this afternoon after Question Period. I don't imagine it will take more than an hour.
Mr. Arseneault: Maybe the researcher is prepared to draw up a quick summary of what some of the points would have to be and then consult with the members of the subcommittee and see if we could proceed in that way.
The Chair: It may need a bit more discussion even on a draft, to make sure everybody's happy with it. I'm wondering if people do have 20 minutes to half an hour after Question Period.
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Mr. Williams: I've twenty minutes after Question Period today and I'm here tomorrow, Madam Chairman. I don't come back until Monday afternoon some time.
The Chair: So theoretically we could meet Monday if necessary.
Mr. Arseneault: I'm not available Monday, nor am I available tomorrow.
Mr. Williams: I'm available after Question Period today.
The Chair: Could we arrange something for 3:15 or 3:30 p.m?
Mr. Williams: Yes.
The Clerk of the Committee: I'll call your offices.
Mr. Arseneault: I'm not sure I can be here.
The Chair: If you're not sure, okay. We'll arrange to have someone sit in for you, if necessary.
Mr. Arseneault: I'd prefer to have no one sit in for me and rely on both of you to come up with a time.
The Chair: You're not available to come this afternoon?
Mr. Arseneault: I may be, but I doubt it very much. I'll have to check.
The Chair: Can you let me know as soon as you have a chance to check. You're fine between the 3 and 5 p.m. slot?
Mr. Williams: Yes.
The Chair: Gurbax, you're not available at all, and the one other member we need for quorum who's quite familiar with this is Reg Alcock. He has also been sitting on Ron Duhamel's consultative committee.
Mr. Arseneault: John Richardson has also been following the proceedings.
The Chair: Yes, that's right. Based on Mr. Arseneault's schedule, we'll set up something for the 3 to 5 p.m. slot and let you all know as quickly as possible.
Thank you very much. The committee is adjourned.