A government backbencher is backing up Canada’s Parliamentary budget officer who is publicly calling for Parliament’s very critical, but archaic budget approval process to be cleaned up.  

Conservative MP Mike Wallace (Burlington, Ont.), vice-chair of the House Government Operations Committee, told The Hill Times on Monday that MPs should do a better job of scrutinizing government spending, but also they don’t have the time, expertise or resources to do an adequate job. Mr. Wallace said he has been working on ways to improve the budget approval process and will present those suggestions to the Conservative caucus in the fall. He declined to elaborate on his ideas until he talks to Tory MPs.

“I’ve been on a number of committees now and I’ve sat in on others and not just for mains, but for supplementary As, Bs, Cs, [they] would get to the House of Commons without ever being reviewed by a committee. I think that committees should be more proactive on making sure that it’s a priority agenda item,” he said, explaining that it’s difficult also to keep track of everything and compare them to previous years to make an informed decision about passing them,” Mr. Wallace said.

“Right now for you to get all the balls in order, you need to look at the budget, then you have to look at the spending estimates, then you have to look at the priorities and planning documents that the ministries put out in the fall and then you have to look a year and a half later to the public accounts. It’s a very time consuming and difficult piece to put together,” Mr. Wallace said. “I just think we should be doing a better job of it as Members of Parliament. I’m not blaming anybody for it, it’s just the way it is.”

The process to approve billions of dollars in government spending is not “a 21st century model” and needs to be overhauled to engage Parliamentarians who should be scrutinizing estimates and budgets more carefully, says Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer.

“It is their core responsibility. It goes right to the basis of our Constitution. No appropriations can be signed off without members of parliament signing them off, nor tax changes,” Kevin Page told The Hill Times. “All the moneys go into the consolidated revenue fund to be approved by MPs. How do we make this process interesting? How do we make it so that they’re incented to actually do this scrutiny?”

Mr. Page, Canada’s first Parliamentary budget officer appointed in March 2008, said while there have been efforts to improve the system in the past, changes should be implemented so that MPs do their jobs better.

“There’s no way it’s a 21st century model that we have and that we’re operating in right now. You just have to look at the level of scrutiny that’s taking place, or how fast the appropriation bills are actually getting passed. … There’s not even scrutiny taking place, they’re just basically being put forward and moved through,” he said. “We need to find a way … that they can actually make changes. Members of Parliament could propose changes with the various different types of programs and activities, departments will be responding, so that it’s a lively and rich ongoing dialogue. I think we have to look at the process so that the incentives are there.”

MPs approved more than $250.8-billion in main estimates in June. Because there was no time to set up committees to pore over the 600-page spending estimates document, the House moved a motion to have all the estimates be deemed approved and reported back. The only committee that studied the estimates was the House Government Operations and Estimates Committee, over three days and for three departments only. But this is a regular occurrence, even if an election hadn’t occurred and the House returned so quickly.

One way it could be improved, Mr. Page said, is to drill the information down to “line” items about programs, rather than having MPs vote on whole department operating budgets.

“We still use this archaic voting procedure, where we vote by inputs like capital and operations and transfers. When you think about MPs, what’s real to them are the program activities—it’s about economic development for aboriginals, it’s about financial programs, it’s about oil spill response for the Coast Guard, it’s supporting the Navy or the Army in National Defence,” Mr. Page said. “Maybe we need to restructure even the way we vote on these things, where you vote on a program more on an activity basis. It just kind of makes more sense for Members of Parliament.”

Mr. Wallace said there have been improvements over the years. For example, he said he is a very active and interested in scrutinizing the estimates, and he used to write in the margins of the estimates documents the year over year percentage changes. “Now they’re listed for us,” he said. “To the credit of the bureaucratic staff, they are looking at ways to try to make these estimates more user friendly to Members of Parliament and information more accessible. They’re not ignoring the need for this. … The program piece would be nice, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get down to that level in my view.”

Another improvement, Mr. Wallace said, could be by removing partisanship and election threats from approving the government’s spending estimates. Mr. Wallace said he took issue with the fact that opposition parties tend to attack or criticize ministers who appear before committees to speak about estimates, but never ask about the estimates. He said, however, he believed his committee did a good job in the time it had with senior officials in June.

“They try to catch the minister at whatever, or criticize the minister for whatever actions he or she may be doing and then officials stay for the next hour and the questions tend to be more about the estimates and I thought, quite frankly, this year the reviews we did were pretty good,” he said. “I was happy that the senior officials were well briefed and able to provide effective and intelligent answers to the questions being asked.”

Along these same lines, Mr. Wallace said that because estimates are deemed to be confidence issues, MPs automatically support them to avoid a possible election.

“It doesn’t matter, you support those estimates because otherwise you’d force an election. I’m not sure that that shouldn’t be something we should be looking at. Maybe there can be changes made to estimates at the political level that don’t result in an unnecessary election call,” he said.

Mr. Page said that a review needs to be done and that there is public and political interest in making changes.

“I think the timing is getting right to look at the system, to review it—maybe it’s one of these blue ribbon panel types of reviews with people from the inside and the outside working together, but looking at it from a multidimensional perspective,” he said.

Mr. Wallace said whatever happens, “The important point to me is that somebody needs to do it [scrutinize the spending]. … I think we need to review that whole process.”

bvongdou@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times

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