[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, March 19, 1996
.1105 
[English]
The Chairman: I'd like to welcome everybody here today.
We're going to have some testimony, but just before we go into that, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, I've been informed of a very sad piece of news. One of our members, Monique Guay, of the Bloc Party, lost her husband on Friday, I believe, to a heart attack. On behalf of the committee - and I'm sure I express the opinion of all the committee members - I'd like to express our condolences. Perhaps you would pass that on. I'm sure members will be taking an opportunity to express that in their own way as well.
Our agenda today is fairly straightforward. We have some testimony from Treasury Board witnesses, who are going to talk to us about the estimates and a different approach they are trying out. I believe Mr. Miller will be leading the testimony and Tom Hopwood, I believe, is here as well. I see the parliamentary secretary is with us as well.
Mr. Miller, are you going to be...?
Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (Former Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board): With your permission, Mr. Chair, I would like to begin. May I?
The Chairman: Yes.
Mr. Duhamel: I will make a few brief introductory comments, and then we'll turn it over to Mr. Miller and Mr. Hopwood, who will provide the details.
First of all, there is a slight correction to be made. I'm the former parliamentary secretary. I've kept on the responsibility for this project until, I hope, we see it through to fruition.
[Translation]
Members of the committee, I would like to outline briefly what I intend to do in this presentation. But first I wish to say that I appreciate very sincerely being able to come and discuss this project with you.
We wish to improve information given to parliamentarians and to all the users of this type of documentation. We wish to make sure that we have the best possible process and the best documentation available in order to respond to your needs. Over the past year, we held consultations with various groups and we received a vast assortment of comments. We have completed the first phase.
At this point, having launched six pilot projects, we are proceeding to an assessment of the progress made to this day. However, in order to make a fruitful assessment, we need your participation. Those are the main points that I will develop in English.
[English]
Once again, I want to thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to be here today to talk about the changes we are introducing as part of our improved reporting to Parliament project. As I indicated previously, our main purpose is to ask your assistance at this critical stage of our project.
As you perhaps know, I chair this parliamentary working group comprised of members of the House and the Senate that has reviewed and commented on a broad range of ideas on ways to improve reporting to Parliament. Over the last year we have built a strong consensus on ways to improve the reports to Parliament. The part III you have received represents, if you wish, the first step toward achieving this particular objective.
The report of the working group contained a number of recommendations to officials, one of which was - and I want to quote this - that revised part IIIs:
- be subject to an evaluation of whether they represent better information for Members and
Committees and that Members and the relevant Committees be included as part of the
evaluation process.
- So that's the critical objective today.
We fully admit that there's still some distance to go with the individual documents, but we believe the direction we are heading in is the right one. I would ask you, therefore, as you examine the new documents, to focus as much on where we are going as on how far we have moved so far,
[Translation]
on the direction we are taking.
[English]
I would now like to pass the floor to Mr. Miller and Mr. Hopwood, who will provide you with more details. Merci. Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Miller.
Mr. David W. Miller (Assistant Secretary, Expenditure Management Sector, Program Branch, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat): Thank you.
The improved reporting to Parliament project was actually started about a year ago, with the objectives of providing better information to Parliament and reducing the effort required to do so. This year, as part of the project, six departments have tabled revised part IIIs. One of these six is Natural Resources Canada.
.1110
As Mr. Duhamel mentioned, what we'd like is this committee's assistance in evaluating the changes we have made this year to the part III, in particular the split that was made between planning and performance information. We'd like to get your views on the idea of shifting the timing of providing this information to Parliament.
A key piece of the project is to place increased emphasis on reporting of performance and results. To show how this is done, on a pilot basis, as I mentioned, these part IIIs consolidate performance information in one section, which in the case of Natural Resources Canada is toward the back of their part III.
If parliamentarians and others respond positively to this, we will seek House concurrence to adjust the timing of providing this information.
I believe you each have a short deck that we will go through briefly, starting with the first page. This indicates the objectives of the project and the things we are trying to improve in three distinct areas. The first one is the documentation content and timing.
I think it's fair to say that most stakeholders were dissatisfied with the current part IIIs and the other expenditure management documents that have been provided to Parliament. They felt that they were hard to read, difficult to reconcile, excessively detailed, not related to results, and did not provide a clear overall picture of priorities, plans and performance.
The second area we're hopeful to improve is the control of Parliament. By this we mean the way in which Parliament categorizes spending for review and for their approval. The control framework has not been updated in several decades, and there are several issues we would like to address through this project, including how individual organizations report, the design of the business plan framework, which they would then be held accountable for by parliamentarians, and the input orientation, or the way in which the vote structure is currently identified for review and approval.
The third area we would like to improve is the use of technology. The current version of the information to Parliament in parts I, II and III of the estimates has been in place for about 15 years. Quite honestly, the advancements made in technology in the last few years will allow us better use of those tools in order to provide information directly to Parliament.
I would like to focus today on the first of these three areas, in particular on the steps we are taking to make a clear distinction between planning and performance information, and also to talk about adjusting the timing of presentation of this information to Parliament.
On the following page, it's important to note, as Mr. Duhamel said, that although we are working closely with the subcommittee on the business of supply, which has been chaired by Ms Catterall, she is addressing the supply process itself. We're looking at the information, in other words, the actual details that feed the process. We are not commenting on the actual changes that may occur within Parliament.
Our project will not only influence the main estimates and the supplementary estimates but it also will have implications for the other documents associated with expenditure management, perhaps including the budget and the way it, or certain information, is presented, certainly the public accounts and perhaps some of the 400 other reports that are provided to Parliament on the performance of government in certain areas. It is also linked in to the president of the Treasury Board's report on the review, tabled for the first time last fall.
I'd like to add at this point that we are trying to take a very transparent and step-by-step approach to these changes. We are consulting extensively with parliamentarians, directly and through the working group that's chaired by Mr. Duhamel. Other stakeholders have been heavily involved as well, including officials of the Office of the Auditor General, academics and government officials themselves.
Of course, an important part of that is the feedback we will obtain from the parliamentary committees as they go through their review process.
The next slide indicates some of these initial steps that are under way within this process. Last December we received House approval to table the revised part IIIs for the six departments. We have worked with officials of Natural Resources and the other departments to bring forward and design a document that responds to as many of the concerns as we could identify for the previous part IIIs. As I mentioned before, a key element is a clear separation between information on plans and performance. We believe that is necessary to get a clear picture of either.
.1115
Another element is to improve the timing of information provided to Parliament. One of the dilemmas we have - and it occurred this year - is that the tabling of the main estimates occurred the day after the budget was tabled in the House. This did not provide any opportunity for departments to build the broad messages of the budget into their documents and reflect them the following day. So one of the ideas we have is that we would delay the tabling of this information by two to three weeks after the budget to allow those broad overall messages to be incorporated.
The estimates themselves, which are the parts I and II of the current documents, would still be tabled under the current House rules, but it would provide some time to build those other messages into the longer-range documents.
Unfortunately, for this year departments are still going to have to provide another document, an outlook document, which takes that longer perspective into account. It will be tabled with the committee chairs over the coming weeks.
Last December we made a commitment to evaluate the new approach and to report back to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. If the reaction remains positive, we will continue to work with parliamentarians to introduce other improvements in your reports of information, as Mr. Hopwood will mention in a second, the control framework, and the use of technology.
Tom.
Mr. Thomas Hopwood (Director, Reform of the Estimates, Expenditure Management Sector, Program Branch, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat): Thank you very much, David.
With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to describe in particular the questions we would like to ask your committee to answer for us and to give you a sense of exactly how the evaluation is going to impact on your committee.
The evaluation framework we've put together for the new documents - we're talking about six part III documents like this - addresses six major areas. Three of them are fairly technical and deal with issues of disclosure and compliance with our objectives, but there are three questions listed on page 5 of the deck that would relate specifically to the six standing committees we're working with.
The three questions deal with three areas. First, do the revised part IIIs better meet your information needs? Second, are they effective communication instruments? When we dealt with parliamentarians in our working group we found that often their concern didn't have so much to do with content as it did with communication. What they're really interested in is getting a clearer higher-level message, an overview of where the department was going, clear statements of plans and performance, as opposed to 350 pages of more detailed accounting-oriented information. So one of the key objectives in our project was to try to make the documents more readable and more usable for members of Parliament. So we would like to get your feedback on that aspect of it.
The third key area we wanted to get your views on is whether you have had the opportunity to actually influence the shape and design of the documents themselves. I guess it comes as a surprise to some parliamentarians that the documents are actually designed for you, that the information is designed to meet your objectives. It's that relationship between the committees and the departments that we wanted to have a look at.
Those are the three basic evaluation questions we're going to be asking you to answer for us. We're still a little bit up in the air in terms of exactly how we want to go about doing that. We have options. We could distribute a questionnaire to members, we could engage in individual interviews, or we could come back and meet with the committee at a separate meeting like this one sometime after you've completed your review of the estimates documents themselves. The timing would be that we would ask you to engage in your review of the estimates information as early as possible to give us the opportunity to come back to then ask you how you found the documents and whether they served your purposes better than in previous years.
Our timing is very tight. We basically have two weeks between April 15 and the end of April to ask committees to engage in the review of the documents and then to get their feedback. Our timing is constrained by the fact that in May we want to go forward to the House with a motion to ask for permission to take the performance information contained in the documents and to table it separately in the October time period. So we're operating within a very tight window.
.1120
On the next page, I've already talked about some of these issues, including the impact on the six committees we're dealing with. We're encouraging committees to engage in an early review of the estimates information. That would allow us to come back later to get your impressions.
A key element is the point Mr. Miller raised about changing the timing of the documents themselves, or when they're tabled. We'd like to table the performance information in the fall, which is basically six months earlier than you now get it. We'd like to separate the timing of the planning information by a few weeks from the budget to give departments the opportunity to build the budget information into their plans.
So it would be a shift in timing from what we now have, where the budget and the estimates and all the planning and all the reconciliations and all the performance information has to come down virtually on the same day. We think that would better serve the needs of Parliament. It would also help people in departments and in central agencies who have to prepare the documents.
We've allowed a great deal of discretion in the design of the documents. If you take a look at the six pilots, you'll find that they're quite different in some cases in terms of how they present the information.
A last point I'd like to make in terms of impact on committees is that if we do go ahead and table separate performance reports in the fall, it'll be very important that committees not only actually engage the officials on the performance information and ask questions about and challenge some of the performance information provided but also provide feedback on the design of the performance information and how well it serves your needs.
In terms of timing, as Mr. Miller indicated, we received House concurrence in December to table the six revised part IIIs. Those were tabled a few weeks ago. We're now evaluating the approach. We intend to go forward in May. If the evaluation is positive and if members agree that we're on the right track, we want to go forward in May with a motion to the House asking permission to table separate performance reports in the fall.
Later on in the fall we'll introduce another document, called an ``end-year update''. I don't intend to spend too much time talking about that today, but I'll just indicate that we want to provide a better picture of shifts that have taken place during the course of the year to departmental spending plans and priorities. Later in the fall, if it appears still that we're on the right track, we want to expand the pilot beyond the six departments now involved and to include others that are ready to provide the information in the new format.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my presentation. Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. We'll move to questions.
Mr. Deshaies.
[Translation]
Mr. Deshaies (Abitibi): I am a rookie parliamentarian and I have little experience in assessing budgetary reporting. I count on colleagues more experienced than I am to ask better questions.
You have asked for suggestions in order to change the timing for the tabling of plans and performance reports. There are two things that I don't quite grasp: the plans to be tabled contain the activities the departments are considering to undertake and the performance reports measure the results obtained from the departments through past programs. Am I mistaken?
[English]
Mr. Miller: Under the current structure, all of the information that relates to the planning - in other words, the planned expenditures for the next three years - as well as information on the performance over the previous three to five years is included in the same document. It becomes very difficult to then assess, separately, what has happened in the past from what the plans are in the future. Quite naturally, departments have the reaction that, well, events have occurred, and they would like to focus not on the past but on what they plan to do in the future.
By having a separate document in the fall that would relate to actual performance, we feel we'll have a much better focus on the results and a much better way to track some programs through what may be fifteen or twenty years rather than just the past fiscal year.
.1125
So now the documents represent at least five years of information, in some cases much more, and it is extremely difficult for all but the most knowledgeable readers to understand how those directions are interpreted.
[Translation]
Mr. Duhamel: I would like to add that the idea is to better manage the mass of information that we receive for the simple reason that it is very complicated. Even though I have the experience of two Parliaments, and even though I used to work for a provincial government, I find it very difficult to understand the basic information that I could use in my role as parliamentarian. So there is that aspect. Therefore, there is on the one hand a need for better managing the information we receive, and on the other hand that information needs to be presented in a more precise and clearer fashion, in such a way that it is better suited to our needs as parliamentarians.
Mr. Deshaies: As you were talking, I went through a description of the various programs the department is intending to set up or has set up. I find it a little bit mixed up. Since I am unable to interpret the Main Estimates - and I suppose that I could learn how to - I would like someone to tell me what appropriations went to those programs. You said yourself that you were aiming at a better presentation of data so that we could have a better understanding.
In the new presentation, will parliamentarians be able to find a performance report related to the money invested? For example, as a parliamentarian, will I be able to determine by reading the Main Estimates if a $20 or $30 million program has had a positive outcome after a year or two, and will I be able to know how the performance study has been conducted?
[English]
Mr. Hopwood: I'll attempt to respond to that question. It's a very important question.
Other governments around the world are moving in the same direction, towards better reporting of results, and trying to get a handle on the right level against which results should be reported.
We found with our pilot departments - the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, for example - that their view of program success was sometimes over a fifteen-year period. Their performance frame was therefore much longer term than that of other departments where you may be able to say we invested $30 million this year and this was the return on our investment of that $30 million.
The approach we're taking towards results reporting is to start in a top-down strategic way. We're starting with the overall departmental objectives and mission. We're going into the business lines, asking what are their key objectives. When we establish that, we will ask what are the three or four best indicators of whether or not that business line is achieving its objectives.
In some cases they tend to be quite high-level statements, where you would get a variety of inputs into the overall success. We wanted to do it that way rather than building them bottom-up, which is the way a lot of the previous performance reports were built. You would get information on how many phone calls were answered in a certain period of time, but you could never aggregate all that information into a total overall view.
The question you're asking goes to the heart of what we're struggling with right now, which is how do we build these documents in a top-down way to better serve your information needs?
The Chairman: Mr. Chatters.
Mr. Chatters (Athabasca): I don't have anything to ask particularly at this time, having come in late and missed part of the presentation.
Certainly we have been studying the new format, and it's much improved, much easier to get information out of. We do appreciate that effort.
The Chairman: Mr. Thalheimer, did you have a question?
Mr. Thalheimer (Timmins - Chapleau): No.
The Chairman: Anybody? Marlene.
Mrs. Cowling (Dauphin - Swan River): I have a very brief question.
We're looking at something different and new. Is this a completely new model or is there something specific you're looking at as a model for this?
.1130
Mr. Miller: What's interesting for us is the previous time and how the current set of part IIIs was developed. It was in a cookie-cutter approach. That's the best way I can describe it. All departments and agencies were required to report the same type of thing and the same information.
After looking at those, it became obvious that, to take two other examples, National Defence should not report their expenditure plans the same way as National Archives.
What we have done in this particular group of pilots is allow each department or agency to come forward with the way they feel most comfortable with the information. Although there are some general principles relating to trying to indicate results information and trying to describe the planning information in a way that people will understand the direction of programs, there is nothing more than a general framework.
As Mr. Hopwood mentioned, each of these six pilots is significantly different in the way they bring it forward, but I think that's more importantly the difference in the organizations as well as general reporting requirements.
The Chairman: Mr. Duhamel.
Mr. Duhamel: While there is no model we're utilizing, we should say - and I believe this is correct, and if it isn't I'm not going to be offended if I am corrected - we have consulted widely, and this is basically what's happening in some of the countries where they have some of the best systems in place. We've also consulted authorities in the whole area. What we're attempting to do is reflect the most up-to-date thinking in these particular areas. So that is the only kind of model we're utilizing, but there is no specifically defined one.
Mrs. Cowling: Thank you.
The Chairman: I have a couple of very brief questions. First of all, is this information going to be on-line?
Mr. Hopwood: We're working with the Hill information technology staff to put these documents on the PubNet system, and we're hoping that by this time next year most of them will be on that system. Also, individual departments are making the documents available through Internet, and again, we're working with the Hill information staff to set up a home page just for expenditure management information, where we would have these documents and other expenditure management documents on-line.
The Chairman: I look forward to that happening.
I have one other question. I think it deals a little bit with what we were saying here today. On this specific reporting that a department does and various other charts that they give and the breakdowns.... Having spent a lot of time going over statistics in my previous life, I always like that category that normally ends up at the bottom, called ``other'', or ``not elsewhere classified'', or whatever it might be. Who determines the roll-ups for these things? Is it the departments themselves?
I'm getting the feeling that there are no set criteria, that a department can throw into the ``other'' category whatever it is that they don't want to have discussed in detail.
Mr. Hopwood: There is a process within Treasury Board for approving what's called the operational planning framework, and departments deal with the Treasury Board Secretariat to define a framework, which is now moving towards a business-line orientation, that best describes the outputs of the department. Every once in a while you end up with another category of things, often administration, that fall into some other category that you can't easily allocate to your raw outputs. That's an ongoing process.
We are now, as I say, shifting from an activity-type structure to a business-line structure, which is more output-oriented, and we're working with departments to make sure as much as we can that the resources are allocated towards clearly identified outputs.
Mr. Miller: Certainly if there are questions about an ``other'' category, depending on the table, we do have rules for disclosure that are followed, from the presentation and the information and the estimates, through to the public accounts on actual results. If you do have a specific item or concern, I'm sure officials from the department could provide those details. Actually, we try to avoid fairly large ``other'' categories because it leads to obvious questions that you've raised.
I'd be interested if there are specific elements you are concerned about. I'm sure we or the departmental officials can provide further details of those kinds of things.
The Chairman: I'm sure when you return for our actual examination of the estimates, or the officials do, we'll bring those up.
Let me thank you, Mr. Miller, Mr. Hopwood and Mr. Duhamel, for providing the testimony today.
If I could ask the committee members to stay behind for just a minute, we have a little bit of business to do.
So thank you very much. I appreciate it.
.1135
Mr. Duhamel: Let me say thank you to you, the committee. We need your help very, very much. We want to remind you about the time line, April 15 to 30. We're sorry about that, but we didn't manufacture that, I assure you.
Please don't hesitate to call me or Mr. Miller or Mr. Hopwood. They've been excellent. I want to thank these pilot departments as well, because obviously additional work has gone into this and it's most appreciated.
[Translation]
Thank you very much to all of you.
[English]
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Committee members, what I'd like to do is to table the report from the subcommittee on agenda and procedure. We had a meeting last week, and we outlined very briefly the future business of the committee.
In the report you will see that the agenda calls for a continuation, first of all, of our mining regulation study on which we issued a preliminary report just before Christmas. That would be a first order of business. Second, there will be a bill referred to this committee in respect of the nuclear regulatory regime, an update of that. Third, we will be discussing the estimates. Also on our agenda, as time permits, we have a private member's bill, Bill C-229, to deal with. We also have a suggestion that was put forward regarding undertaking a study on natural resources and rural economic development. That is basically what the report of the committee has suggested.
In summary, we're going to continue. We have witnesses scheduled for this Thursday on our review of regulations, and I suspect that the bill will be tabled in the House in the near term and that we will be having that referred to us as it goes through debate in the House.
That was a unanimously accepted report of the committee, and I'm asking, first of all, for any questions or discussions, and if not, a motion to accept.
Mr. Reed (Halton - Peel): Chairman, I want to ask you about the natural resources and rural economic development aspect. How far into the future are we looking on this subject?
The Chairman: I would like it to be in the near future, but there are three things we need to do first, and that's what our timing's going to be on. We need to finish the study, we need to deal with the legislation that's going to be before the committee, and we need to deal with the estimates. When that's completed, I think we can turn our attention to that.
Before and during the process of dealing with the first three, I have asked for a proposal, an outline, for that type of study to come before the committee so we can have a discussion about it and be ready to go. But those other three things need to take place first.
Mr. Reed: Thank you.
Mr. Chatters: We are dealing with mining regulations at the same time that the House, and unfortunately a different committee, is dealing with the Yukon quartz mining bill. There was some concern expressed that there were those who would have an interest in mining and would want to be involved in both, and it would make it difficult to do that. So I would pass that concern along to you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Chatters.
Are there other questions? If not, can I have a motion to accept?
Mr. Deshaies: I so move.
Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings]
The Chairman: We stand adjourned until Thursday at 11 a.m. Thank you.