OGGO Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

Á

1110

The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.))

Ms. Sharon Sutherland (Professor, School of Policy Studies, As Individual)

Á

1115

Á

1120

Á

1125

The Chair

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière (President, Anderson Soublière Inc.)

Á

1130

Á

1135

Á

1140

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance)

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Á

1145

Mr. Paul Forseth

Á

1150

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ)

Á

1155

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Â

1200

The Chair

Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.)

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

Â

1205

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

The Chair

Â

1210

Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.)

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Paul Szabo

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Paul Szabo

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Â

1215

The Chair

Ms. Liza Frulla (Verdun—Saint-Henri—Saint-Paul—Pointe Saint-Charles, Lib.)

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Ms. Liza Frulla

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Ms. Liza Frulla

Â

1220

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Gilles-A. Perron (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, BQ)

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

Â

1225

The Chair

Mr. Steve Mahoney (Mississauga West, Lib.)

Â

1230

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

Â

1235

The Chair

Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.)

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Â

1240

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

The Chair

Â

1245

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

Â

1250

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth

The Chair

Mr. Roy Cullen

Â

1255

Prof. Sharon Sutherland

Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

·

1300

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Liza Frulla

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Mr. Tony Valeri (Stoney Creek, Lib.)

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

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NUMBER 004

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

---

EVIDENCE

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Á  (1110)  

[English]

    The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.)): Let us come to order on what will be the first of two round tables, today and Thursday.

    I'd just like to serve notice to members that I'd like to reserve a few minutes on Thursday for a very brief business meeting, as it will be our last meeting before we return in February. I will speak to the vice-chairs and others prior to that, just to clear anything we might want to do at that meeting.

    Today we have before us two witnesses. Madame Bourgon was unable to attend today, so we will pick up with Jocelyne later on.

    We have Professor Sharon Sutherland from the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University and Jean-Pierre Soublière, president of Anderson Soublière and, more important to this committee, a member of the advisory committee on Government On-Line.

    For the purposes of this morning, what we might do is ask Professor Sutherland to begin and make her opening remarks. Then we'll ask Mr. Soublière to do the same, and then we'll move to questions and discussion.

     With that, Professor Sutherland, why don't you begin.

    Ms. Sharon Sutherland (Professor, School of Policy Studies, As Individual): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for having arranged for me to be invited today to talk about horizontality in government.

[Translation]

It's a great honour to be here and I am very grateful.

[English]

    Horizontal issues present both problems and opportunities. I was asked just to speak to horizontal issues in general. It is easy to let the accountability problems in horizontal approaches to governing dominate everything else. Horizontal issues, however, do allow backbench MPs to make good things happen for Canadians, whether they're better services or better coordination.

    When I read the minutes of your meeting on June 11 this year to prepare for this appearance, I was happy to see MP Carolyn Bennett saying that horizontal issues present opportunities. Her example was a House committee that called 13 ministers to speak on disability issues as their departments handled them, and the ministers did not know of each other's activities.

    Her example shows that taking an interest in what is happening across departments and across sectors presents an opportunity for politicians to exercise positive control on how things can be shaped. One can create pressures for changes and one can create pressures to coordinate the use of public resources.

    This is different from negative control, which comes after the fact. Now, I happen to be most interested in negative control, probably. It's interested in getting answers, in allocating blame, in creating a deterrent effect, and also in making recommendations for future changes. So it has a little bit of a positive aspect.

    It's very difficult to know how to place one's remarks on this huge subject, because so much has been said and so very little systematic research has been done. Therefore I'm going to say a little bit about problems and opportunities, making reference to some basic documents.

[Translation]

    I understand French fairly well, and if you want to ask me your questions in French, I will do my best to answer them in either French or English.

[English]

    There are many problems with taking initiatives involving multiple partners. First, I do believe that the Auditor General is absolutely right on the difficulties, really the lack of sustainability of fulfilling or meeting programming needs that affect the public by pulling together mixed teams of players. Accountability can be very difficult to realize, and even more difficult to demonstrate, in efforts that involve many governments, many government agencies, private actors, and individual citizens.

    So far, Canadians have not been good on documenting horizontal initiatives. There is, apparently, no one data bank that lists all of the horizontal initiatives now under way. And so there are not many lessons learned. Horizontality is more something that has grown up to fulfill what people perceive to be a need and it's become something of a fashion as well.

    The human dimension of trying to do something for very little money in a casual or voluntary way is that it costs a huge personal effort after working hours. And this is illustrated in CCMD's two reports on horizontal projects, which I have listed in this little paper. One sees that the transaction costs of working with multiple authorities are often absorbed by heroic officials working extra hours without resources or support. And for what are they doing this extra work? For what, other than the moment?

    One notices that the current approach to horizontality makes no provisions to hear the organizational messages that come up from below. Institutional change does not often follow. Far too often accountability is interpreted as being just the personal accountability or answerability of officials. Will they admit when they did something wrong as well as when they succeeded? The CCMD report issued in 2001 is on these lines. It provides guidelines for documenting who did what.

Á  (1115)  

    The report of the previous year, however, touches on 14 cases of horizontal activity. What you notice in these cases of horizontal activity is that they can be by casual groups of people. Or horizontal activity also takes place in well-funded little bureaus placed very near the Prime Minister, in the Privy Council Office, or in that grouping of organizations. But dedicated ministerial guidance is often absent. Going without ministers means going without profile. My point, I guess, is that horizontal agreements and horizontal efforts in Canada do not seem to lead new organizational structures to evolve.

    To return to Carolyn Bennett's issue, is there now a single window on disability programming, let alone a single organization to provide the programming? If not, why not? What happened after those 13 ministers were introduced to each other?

    Our appetite, rather than building up from the bottom and using the evolutionary pressures to change what we were doing, is very little. In fact, our appetite seems to be the opposite. We seem to go for more and more horizontality, both as a government working in flexible ways and as driven by society.

    At a recent meeting, Professor Mark Sproule-Jones of McMaster reported that, in the environmental area, we have moved from vertical government to horizontal government to no government. Environmental lobby groups, he told us, were making deals with private industry. These deals would normally be construed as regulatory activity, but there were no government actors present. That is really government on automatic.

    I'd like to move to some of the opportunities. A committee like this one could harness at least some of what is learned, and use it to drive organizational change. This is done in the United Kingdom—at least part of the time. There's a report of January 2000 called Wiring It Up, which you probably know well. It's considerably more systematic than anything done in Canada I've seen so far. It provides a template for a joint management structure headed by a team of ministers. That team of ministers works together with a board below it. Below this you have the public servants who actually deliver things. So everything is understood, and the ministers see what the pressures are for change in provision.

    So government can establish new patterns of organization. It can evolve and become more relevant. If this committee has other fish to fry, it could also work for a liaison committee across all of the parliamentary committees. Such a committee exists in Britain, where all the committee chairs gather together and share the information they have. This year its first report dealt with the appearance before it of the Prime Minister. The committee said the Prime Minister needs to provide information to Parliament as the head of government, and to do so outside the dramatic theatre of the chamber of the House of Commons. Now, that theatre has its own uses, but it's not really wonderful for information. So the Prime Minister did give testimony on July 16.

    One of the very interesting things, which you probably know, is that the committee is in a position to insist accountability needs be met and structural clarity be offered. And the committee can also recommend reforms to procedures and ask for more emphasis on really clear financial information.

Á  (1120)  

    It's good for all of us to recall Professor Norman Ward's formulation about the powers of parliamentary surveillance. Parliamentary surveillance is designed as Parliament desires, with as much of it as Parliament desires, and in the forms that Parliament desires. The House is master of all its processes. It means you don't have to take anything off the shelf, but you can push for information in forums and formats that you desire.

    I'm coming to my last subject. To protect the opportunity that this committee represents, I believe it's important for everyone to understand that information is highly aggregated. In other words, the information is not detailed and doesn't have much texture to it. Highly aggregated information contains its own points of view.

    There will be very many actors who will be willing to capture the political power of the elected members in this committee. There are many people who would like to affect the direction that this committee might steer toward for accountability.

    I would put the Auditor General's value for money reporting, and only the value for money reporting, into the category of highly aggregated information that contains a ready-made point of view. To show that I'm not picking on the Auditor General in particular, I would also include what I think is the Treasury Board's very obscure work on modern comptrollers in this category of highly aggregated information. It is information where there's basically no way to open a door and see how the conclusions were derived.

    Instead of accepting such reports made up of conclusions and their own moral element, the committee can push for reliable financial and resource information that is fine grained. It can force the creation of such information. It can do so in a time when financial audit is ignored in favour of essays whose meaning and true value is fundamentally obscure. In much of what we see done as audits and reports on accomplishments, performance reports, and outcomes, the information is fundamentally obscure.

    I'd like to make reference to another British report, by the Hansard Society, The Challenge for Parliament--Making Government Accountable, which was published last year. The report says that the future of Parliament and the future of committees can only be realized if parliamentarians insist on placing themselves at the top of the accountability system. MPs, parliamentarians in general, are at the top of a system of accountability.

    The pattern now is for agencies to use Parliament to try to get publicity for their own causes. Parliamentarians must make outside regulators and officers of Parliament work for them and work for you. Make them report in sufficient detail so that the detail is useful for supporting government, some is useful for reforming government, and some of it is useful to those of you who oppose the government. To cite the Hansard Society's report, “Making Government accountable is a task undertaken by Parliament on behalf of the electorate with the aim of improving the quality of government.”

    Parliament must respond to and highlight the most pressing political issues in a manner that the public understands. If academics and scholars can't understand what modern comptrollership is, the public can't understand it either.

    You, as members of Parliament, are the ones chosen by the Canadian electorate to examine evidence and use evidence. It is you who should be synthesizing the work of others, forming and confirming values, and pursuing your values. When you are too long absent from this work, others fill the space with high-level assessments. These judgments should be reserved for you. You, and the Government--with a capital G--speak for the citizens.

    Thank you.

Á  (1125)  

    The Chair: Thank you, Professor Sutherland.

    I have one question for clarification. When you talked about the Prime Minister appearing before a committee, was he appearing before the liaison committee?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Yes.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Okay. Mr. Soublière.

[Translation]

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière (President, Anderson Soublière Inc.): It's an honour for me to appear before your committee, and I thank you for your invitation.

[English]

    Although I am a member of the advisory committee on GOL, I'm not here as a representative of the advisory committee. I'm here as an individual who is involved, so to speak.

    I was fortunate in most of my career to manage a large Canadian corporation, and was responsible for its Canadian and international operations. I really got to work with governments across the world, and have come to the point where I appreciate what we have here. I'm a big supporter, mais en même temps, je suis un dérangeur. So we have to work hard to keep what we have going here.

    I've worked with our governments across the country, and with the federal government in my previous business, and now I just offer lots of opinions. On the round table on GOL, my presentation will be somewhat different, but I'd like to talk about GOL very quickly and the project you have in front of you in the power-point presentation.

    There's often confusion as to what GOL is and why it is important. Let me quickly provide my definition. GOL is not a website with services to Canadians only. It includes that, but it is much more than that. It also includes, to be able to do this properly, the restructuring behind the horizontality required to properly serve citizens. So that second part is the big complex part. The third part--and we're not there yet--is the whole e-government thing, or e-democracy.

    To me, then, GOL includes those main components; it's not just a website. That's the easy part, even though it's not so easy. It includes the restructuring as well as the e-democracy. What I'm here to talk about is primarily this restructuring, or this horizontality to be able to restructure government.

    Canadian citizens feel it's very important. There was a round table on e-business that I belonged to, and I was the GOL captain. This GOL thing is very important. I wish it could have a different name; “e-government”, I think, is a little bit more comprehensive. It's very important for six basic reasons. I actually did some research on that, and I am not an academic, as you will soon discover.

    One of them is that if our government is modernized--I'll use that word--with the new technologies, it will label our country and it will help attract investments and immigrants to our country.

    A second important factor is the pull factor. The provincial governments, the municipalities, and the federal government are all doing it at different paces, but if our governments are available for citizens to relate to, it'll act as a pull. In other words, we have the productivity issue with small and medium-sized business in the country at times not totally buying into new investments of new technologies. Well, if a company is relating to a government on-line, it is efficient to a point, and its competitors will soon have to do that to remain competitive. So governments, by having the services on-line, will be a pull for the small and medium-sized businesses to invest in the new technologies.

    The third one is efficiency of the economy. If corporations and

Á  (1130)  

[Translation]

Canadian citizens can do business with government more efficiently, that will make the economy more efficient, in theory. That is a third very important reason.

    A fourth reason, which is perhaps a little less important but which also has a lot of value,

[English]

is the industrial development agenda. Governments investing in the new technologies and working in a correct way with the private sector will have a major industrial development impact.

    I can tell you from my previous employment that we didn't look at grants and contributions. We didn't care about that. What we wanted was a chance to do work with governments across the country and different provinces, and the feds do it in different ways. And the way they do it has negative or positive impacts upon our economy. Governments in Canada are such a large part of the economy that how you behave impacts the economy. Not just how many dollars you give or take away from us, but how you behave impacts how our economy works across the land. We can go into that in detail.

    A fifth reason is in fact the recruitment and retention agenda. By having a modern government, using the modern technologies, the recruitment of public servants as you know is a big issue. The retention of these public servants will be greatly facilitated. So it's a fifth important reason why we encourage governments to become e-government, so to speak.

    And a sixth is really the efficiency of government itself. That adapting of new technologies within the government is very important. As you know more than I, greater and greater services are being demanded, tax cuts also in parallel to that, but yet the complexity is there. And this cannot be accomplished without a modernization program--a continuous process of improvement, really. This is why GOL or e-government is very important and why we have been advocating and trying to push the governments across the country.

[Translation]

    I'm not just talking about the federal government, but also about the various provinces and municipalities in Canada.

[English]

    Now, it is my opinion that with the current approach of governance of information management and information technology, especially in the federal government, it is almost impossible to do what I have been advocating--in other words this restructuring currently. It's almost impossible. There is a series of reasons for that and some of them are very logical.

    There is ministerial responsibility and there is budget allocation. There is a difficulty of sharing dollars between departments and programs. There is of course the issue of whether there are enough resources or dollars to invest in the modernization, because it requires an investment that essentially comes down. So there is a series of reasons why horizontality is difficult, and it's not just because people are not willing. In fact, there are many public servants who work very hard at it. Frankly, the portals of Canada Portal, which have been seen as great successes across the world, in my opinion, were done because of superhuman effort. The governance and the sustainability of these in the future is going to be difficult again because of the governance structures we have.

    As a disturber and a prodder, I actually.... Those of you who reside in Ottawa would know that I was the chair of the Ottawa Hospital for nine days until I was fired by Mike Harris last year. That was one of my pro bono activities, which was seen as a success because it got me to do other stuff. But I was involved in health research for a while.

    And actually, why don't we switch. You have my little project. Really what I'm talking about here is trying to get our Canadian federal government's information on scientific technology and medical information together and available for the research and development community across the country. This is really the foundation of what I'm talking about here. Actually we can switch directly to page 3.

    What we have--and I'll give you the logic of some of this before very quickly. As you know, there's the Canada Portal. There's a group of people working on a scientific and technology portal. And what I'm suggesting we move to is as follows. You see the notation there for CIHR, SSHRC, and NSERC. Well, CIHR have launched a project where they are wanting to do more than just a portal, but really a portal that has lots of front-end and back-end processing to allow the medical researchers across the country to essentially apply for medical research grants.

    The portal itself will allow some of the provinces to participate--some of the provinces have already signed in--as well as private foundations in medical research. For example, and that's the only one I know, there are 450 independent funds for cancer research in the country. So for a university professor or a researcher in a medical institute to find these funds is very difficult and very challenging.

Á  (1135)  

Not only that, but traditionally they all required a different type of biography and it was very complex. The approval process was different and so on and so forth.

So CIHR, through ResearchNet, is trying to provide a standard for that as well as additional processing. Provinces and some private funds are coming in.

    It has been my opinion that SSHRC and NSERC, which also provide funds to our research community across the country, should use the same technology, the same process, instead of redesigning it again, which is what traditionally happens between departments.

    So that's one project. I understand that one of the two has signed on to do it and so on and so forth. That's one project. In other words, try to put together in Canada the research funds available for research scientists across the country.

    The bottom one is the federal science e-library. This is not a criticism, but it's a fact and it's the way it's evolved. There is a whole series of independently managed technology libraries in the Canadian federal government. How many? Well, there are four or five big ones and another 94 smaller ones. Several of them are just one room with some books and nobody goes there, or one person will go there an hour and a half a week. There really is a bunch of them, but every one of them is totally independently managed.

    The issue that's coming up to us in this modern age is the purchasing of electronic subscriptions, which are more and more expensive. What we have right now in this government, because of the lack of horizontality, is difficulty. It's not that people don't want to do it, but it's difficult. A public servant will have to get in his or her car and go from one department to the next to have access to some electronic data or to some subscriptions that a department will have purchased. Licences are purchased independently, not necessarily even by departments, although some departments are bringing them together.

    In other words, all the technology information we have within the Canadian federal government through electronic subscriptions is totally.... Scattered would be an exaggeration, but it's not together. So the proposal we put together--I worked with people at CSE, the NRC people....

    By the way, I'm doing this pro bono because I think it's really important and it's kind of neat and fun, coming to some of the comments you were giving. I have another Don Quixote project I could tell you about--I call this one of my Don Quixote projects that I'm working on--which is another interesting one.

    If we can get the libraries together, it is my opinion.... There is an association of librarians, by the way, but they can't govern themselves. They try to optimize themselves, but they all report to different people. If we can get this together, we will save....

    The federal government gave $20 million, I think, to the universities across this country two or three years ago, and 64 of them got together to purchase electronic subscriptions. Apparently they saved between 10% and 40% by grouping their subscription purchases. This government doesn't do that. It is our opinion that if the subscription could be centralized through this electronic library, cost savings would be obtained. Also, of course, all public servants would have access to all of the information and we could optimize this whole process.

    A next step eventually might be to make this library available to Canadians to further expand the research development tools that are available, and there are subscription costs for that.

    The third part is even more fun. In the Canadian federal government, we have approximately 21,266 people--it might be more now--who work in what is referred to as the STM category, which is a category that includes scientific, technological, and medical scientists and researchers. And they do stuff. Well, a lot of the stuff they do is never published, for a few reasons. One of them is the Official Languages Act and another one is peer review. What happens is that many of these documents sit on shelves as drafts. They're distributed to peers but they're not really published.

    I think that from the country's perspective, this money, this effort that's going on, should be available to all scientists across the country and of course between departments, if not even within a department. We have to find a way to do that, and there is an approach that I think we could bring together.

    It's my opinion that if we could gather all of these internal government publications together--which I know absolutely we can--and create an electronic library and bundle the money that's available for research grants across the country, we would really make quite an impact on the country's research and development agenda.

    On the second-last overhead is a favourite saying of mine. As I am being told to look at knowledge information as an asset, I kind of say, “Reinvent yourself, federal government, and act as a leader.”

Á  (1140)  

Again, I come back to what I said a few minutes ago about how you behave.

[Translation]

    The way government behaves has a significant impact on our economy. So get your act together and you'll see that you are a leader in Canada. Your impact will be positive. In other words, get your act together and we'll behave too.

    Those are my comments, and I think I went through them quickly enough.

[English]

    The Chair: Thank you, Monsieur Soublière.

    We'll have a round of questions and we'll see how far we go.

    Mr. Forseth.

    Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you very much. Welcome to our committee as we begin to make our way.

    Sharon Sutherland did talk about some of the problems related to horizontal issues and that a lack of data bank repository structures is difficult. We really need to go down this road of horizontability and who really takes responsibility for cross-system coordination.

    Perhaps you could embellish on that theme as it relates to the Privy Council Office as a coordinating super-ministry. That's one of the rationales as to why it's there. It's supposed to be looking at this system-wide coordination. Is the PCO realizing its potential for this cross-government coordinating role?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Thank you.

    The Privy Council Office as a coordinating agency is...and this is very simple-minded on my part, but I see it as being simply a secretariat to cabinet, really, trying to assist cabinet to coordinate across the various portfolios and ministers. So the PCO's job is to avoid surprises by making sure that public servants from the departments have all been consulted if their ministers' mandates are relevant to the problem at hand, and generally to pull together information for cabinet.

    That said, it's a very difficult task. The Privy Council Office's task of coordinating information for ministers and supporting ministers with the right information and the information they need to make decisions would be made very much more difficult by the existence of the horizontal project, because that's informal. If you think about the fact that there's one secretariat for providing information and coordination to cabinet on economic affairs, which has about 40 staff members, and a second one for social affairs, which I think has under 20 staff members--I'm not exactly sure because I haven't looked at this for some time--those people have an awful lot of work to do very quickly, and the business of tearing across government sideways makes life much more complex and makes it much more difficult to handle. But it's hard to know if increasing their numbers would make things much easier, because there always has to be a helmsman, one person has to hold things in their head, and to the extent that you proliferate heads that are coordinating, you might also lose coordination.

    So I would agree with the purpose of the question, that horizontality increases coordination costs and transaction costs exponentially. Some of those public servants who are totally exhausted are probably in PCO.

    Is it realizing its potential? I think perhaps it's time to examine the central agency structure in Canada, which has long been much more decentralized, with several independent organizations, than many other governments. We have PCO and Treasury Board Secretariat. Part of the Treasury Board Secretariat is the Chief Information Officer. Another important part is the Comptroller General. Then there is Finance, which is the central agency, and kind of split off from PCO is the Federal-Provincial Relations Office.

    So there are a lot of central controllers that have a certain amount of turf concern in their work.

    In the U.K., for example, you find that the cabinet office is one structure, Treasury is another structure, and the Prime Minister's office is a tiny thing, and the coordination costs are much less even for a central government. I don't know enough about France, but I know it's more centralized than our country.

    Did that reach the intent of your question?

Á  (1145)  

    Mr. Paul Forseth: We're getting there.

    I take it, Mr. Soublière, that you'd like to join in on that.

    It's on this theme of connectivity, coordination, and so on. Here we have this animal called the PCO, which I think a lot of people in line ministries don't really see as a secretariat. They see it as something much bigger than that, sometimes to their great upset, concern, or agitation. But the whole theme of what we're looking at is cross-systems, and here we have an agency that claims that is what it's all about. So we have to look there first of all, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and ask, is it doing its job? Maybe we ought to be looking a little more carefully at who's controlling the controllers.

    Go ahead.

Á  (1150)  

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I think everyone, including public servants, agrees that this is important, but it's very difficult to do.

    There are a few givens, to me. One of them is that a cost benefit is required for these things. It's not just a matter of let's just do it, let all hell break loose, and what have you.

    The other one is that verticality will not disappear. Ministerial responsibility is the foundation of our form of government and it isn't going away. The alternative, then, is how to do it or where to do it. And so the way to do it is really with projects, in a sense, more than breaking down the form of government.

    And now, which projects? We can choose projects in two great families of categories. One of them is functions and the other one is communities of interest.

    In my project, what I'm trying to do is demonstrate a project, with a big payback and not many dollars, which is a community of interest, in that sense, without breaking the form of government.

    Now, what pops up when you try to do these things, the elements of the project, is that it needs partnership and it needs leadership. It's very difficult right now, because they all have different priorities the way it's organized. It needs governance, and that's complex. As they move ahead on any one of these activities, how do you govern this with our form of government and the way the budgets are allocated in that sense?

    It needs information management. I think that whole data thing that you were referring to on how to share...and, of course, there's quite a strong privacy commissioner, and he's certainly not going to help the cause.

    Then, of course, the last of this is the whole information technology thing with all the requirement of e-resources and the complexity it engenders. But they want it and they see the importance of it and they're seeing it especially more and more now with the stress of fewer dollars and lots more things to do.

    In my opinion, and I speak to a lot of these people, there's no one out there who's saying, “This is not good, I don't want to do it.”

    The Chair: I'm going to go to Mr. Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ): This is not a new problem, but we should take a very close look at it. That's why I like the new makeup of this committee.

    Why? Precisely because there is more to a country than the Privy Council Office, the Cabinet, the Prime Minister and ministers. I hope this committee will get off on the right foot, because it's a new committee.

    Ms. Sutherland, I liked the points you raised. It's all very nice, but quite theoretical, and the time you had to present it to us was quite limited.

    I hope the committee we strike will be able to work well. The liaison committee you're talking about is on a different level. Here, we're at the parliamentary level, with members of Parliament, who hopefully are closest to the people.

    It would be interesting to be able to tell the Prime Minister or ministers and departments how to work horizontally, because it's going to get more and more horizontal.

    You mentioned Carolyn Bennett, but we didn't get that from Carolyn Bennett alone. I was also sitting on the Subcommittee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities. We got the ball rolling and asked you to establish this horizontality.

    So why not take some specific facts like that... We could talk about young people, we could also target children or teenagers, who are often forgotten. So the issue of persons with disabilities could be the starting point because various departments are involved. There is also sports. We could start with those two issues.

    Mr. Soublière was talking about electronic information gathering. That's fine, but it's putting the cart before the horse, because we haven't yet thought about whether we really want that to be horizontal. We are coming up with a tool that might allow for horizontality.

    Let's start right away with one or two issues and see if it can be done—I'm sure it can—and how it can be done. Then we'll use the tools your asking for.

    I think that as a government, we have to focus on serious problems like persons with disabilities, but we also have to deal with technology, human resources and health issues. You can imagine how overwhelming it is.

    So let's take two different issues, sports and persons with disabilities, and you'll produce results.

    Mr. Soublière, I was listening to you and what you said sounded good. I could listen to you for 20 years, and I get the feeling we would still wind up with the same result.

    I'm all ears.

Á  (1155)  

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: That's interesting. I mentioned two choices to help achieve horizontality: one functionality, for example administration, finances or human resources, and one community of interest. You mentioned two of them, and I have a third: those who do research and development in Canada.

    The investment I'm talking about in my little project is minimal. Currently, across Canada, there are researchers with huge problems. You know innovation is important to our future, for example, for patient care. Those are always the most complex priorities.

    What I'm suggesting is to help a community like that, that is not well-served with the existing resources in our government and in all departments. There is no data sharing, and we have found an inexpensive way to improve national research and development performance, which fits perfectly with your two examples.

    That's really all there is to it. The investment might even be less, and it would be much simpler. In my opinion, it's a much simpler project, with less of an emotional investment. It wouldn't represent a very large investment.

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Ms. Sutherland, as I was saying, your points were quite theoretical and limited. In practical terms, how could we interest this government in achieving horizontality?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: I do think you've made good choices, if the committee is interested in those topics. I think Mr. Soublière's example is quite correct in that it's about being in a position to establish links with other people. He refers to a community of interest. These are people who are interested in the same thing, and he suggests that they be given tools. Programs for persons with disabilities are quite doable, and you are going to learn a lot about that.

    Other things can be done. You could look directly at government bodies in Canada. For example, your colleague was talking earlier about the need for good communication at higher levels of government. That's another thing. Are bodies like the Privy Council, Treasury Board and the Department of Finance communicating properly and effectively? What's the Canadian Centre for Management Development doing? Is it horizontal management?

    There are loads of topics, and I think you're right that you have to choose one or two and focus on them. Thank you.

  (1200)  

[English]

    The Chair: Thank you, Professor Sutherland.

    It's always interesting to me to look at some of the numbers. I note we're going to spend $124 million on the core components of PCO this year. This is before we talk about some of the other activities funded under that envelope. We are also going to spend $173 million on the core coordinating components of Treasury Board. This is nearly $300 million trying to coordinate across government. It's an interesting number.

    Mr. Cullen.

    Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    Thank you, Ms. Sutherland and Mr. Soublière.

    I'm going to ask a question. I hope it's not outside your area of interest or expertise. If you'll bear with me, first of all, I have some background.

    A subcommittee of this committee has recently been established to look at how we can create a modern and accountable public service. That's not to say we don't have one now, but I'm sure there's always room for improvement.

    I'm curious about the idea of horizontal management and what organizational structural implications it might have. Let me introduce it by way of an example. If you look at the private sector or the corporate sector, where, years ago, it moved...and I know that these things are cyclical, so we may end up back with the old type of more hierarchical management. In fact, we may be there today; I haven't really tracked it. But there was a move to a more matrix-type management, of flatter organizations.

    So you might have, let's say, a product launch where you'd have the production, marketing, sales, and logistics, and the HR people kind of skunk-working this thing, moving it through the system, with less hierarchy.

    If you look at horizontal issues and managing more horizontally, I'm wondering if it does present some opportunities or some challenges in terms of how the government and the public service is structured and whether we need to look at changes there. If we're really going to deal with horizontal management, it seems to me that we need to make sure that the structures, the reward systems, and the systems are designed to support it so people are rewarded for good performance in ways that the government is looking for, and that the organization design lends itself to that kind of management.

    Do you have any observations on that? Do you know of others who have done some work in this area? It might be useful to bring them into our subcommittee when we get going in the next little while.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I appear to be a techie, but I'm not a techie.

    Industry remains decentralized, but there are functions that are centralized. “Goaling the compensation” is an expression of mine. The objective that we give people, across a company or across a government, somehow has to correspond to some of the goals. It's more difficult in government for all the reasons we understand.

    When it comes to the mundane topic--and this is a problem that we'll have, monsieur Lanctôt, lors de notre conversation précédente--of information management, it's centralized. It is one of the issues that we have in the structure of government. All information, whether it's for the handicapped or is scientific information, is very decentralized.

    So the governance is a problem, but whatever we do, whatever structure we have, decentralized or centralized, we somehow have to get our act together for information management. And that will bring in more IT centralization.

    The point I was trying to make earlier is, in this restructuring of government, the horizontality, whether for technical or more operational efficiencies, will happen only when information management and information technology has more centralization to it.

    The Ontario provincial government has gone to one extreme. They have, for example, in their case, a CIO who is totally responsible for everything that goes on under information management and information technology. The CIO is at the management board, with clustered CIOs and then departmental CIOs.

    You know, that's all right, that's fine. But in my opinion, in the management of information in the federal government operations and information technology, we're too far to the left. There is too much decentralization, in that sense. It's one of the major issues.

    This does not exist in industry. As someone was saying to me the other day, we have regional operations in all of our departments where regional directors or ADMs are pretty strong people. Often they'll have their own forms for specific programs, notwithstanding forms between departments serving the same constituents. If you were going to a bank in this country, you'd still have the same form or the same interface no matter where you were across the country. We don't have that here.

    Is a government a conglomerate with independent subs or is it in fact an operation? I think it's an operation. I think you are the Government of Canada. You're not this department or that department.

    For information, and unfortunately it brings in technology, we need more centralization than exists in the Canadian federal government. It's a major issue.

    Where that pendulum is, I'm not sure, but it's not where we are.

  (1205)  

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Thank you. I think that was an excellent answer.

    Big business has been decentralized, and that has presented opportunities and challenges. All through this year we've seen the terrible challenges presented when the structure is gone, there's too much freedom, and the incentives aren't aligned right. We've seen Enron and all the big failures that have taken something like more than $8 trillion--I can't even think of how big those sums are--out of the American economy.

    So I agree with Mr. Soublière, absolutely, that if you decentralize the structure you need a structured way of getting information. There's been an enormous internal struggle in Treasury Board Secretariat ever since 1967, when it lost its comptrollership function, it's pre-approval of expenditures. Treasury Board Secretariat walks softly. It doesn't have any stick. And it has not yet found an adequate soft method of getting enough information from departments in order to be able to exert the kind of control that Mr. Soublière was talking about.

    There's another difficulty with decentralization in government that you all of course know, which is that all processes in government have a legal component, a public law component. The process that's followed must be correct because like cases must be treated alike. You must know what you did for Citizen X and why you did it. So those kinds of public law considerations and accountability considerations weigh far more heavily on government.

    I think that the coordination sums that Chairman Alcock mentioned for Privy Council Office and TBS look high. If you looked at the organizations that are tucked under the wing of Privy Council Office, like the Canadian Centre for Management Development, the Policy Research Initiative, and any number of what I call the small bureaus that are horizontal initiatives, in a sense you'll see that there's even more money. And it's a good subject to look at how coordination is done for the centre of the centre. That's a very good subject.

    The Chair: I'm going to intervene here. I'm going to move on to another question, Mr. Cullen. I have you on the list for our second round.

    I would ask both of our very interesting witnesses to shorten up the answers a little bit and we'll pick up the pace on this, because I have a bunch of people who have to ask questions, and frankly, I don't get to ask questions until everybody else does, and I have a bunch of questions. Then we have to start a second round.

    Mr. Szabo, would you like to go now? And I have Madam Frulla, Mr. Mahoney, Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Forseth, and Mr. Cullen.

  (1210)  

    Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I have two themes for the witnesses, prompted by the statements that MPs are at the top of the food chain in terms of accountability and that MPs speak for citizens. These are wonderful, idealistic descriptions, but I think they raise an important question about whether or not MPs--if we're talking about individual MPs, versus, say, the official opposition as a group--have the tools and the resources to be able to discharge the position that you suggest we are at or should be at.

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: MPs have enormous power over their own processes. You don't have to consume information that you don't wish to consume. You can ask for information in other forms. So you are at the top of the food chain. Essentially, it means you have to do it. All it requires is for you to do it, to ask for information in the form in which it's most digestible for you.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: If I could give you an example, there is a bill I am currently interested in. I submitted 23 amendments for the bill. There was a tight line on it, but it took nine days to get the legislative office to simply determine that they were in order and the wording was proper. With nine days' turnaround, the whole issue was over before I even got the information.

    So the point is, yes, we can ask, but can we get timely responses to be able to be effective? I think even a simple example like this shows that your expectations, or maybe your observations, about what we can and cannot do don't seem to match my reality.

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Well, I should perhaps have said that you have the whip hand in retrospective control, or after the fact. In your audit, you have negative control. You have very strong powers of torment and punishing. Of course, the government has the whip hand on legislation.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: It sounds like the public accounts versus the estimates, to me. That is the difference. One is dealing with history and the other is dealing prospectively. We are the prospective ones, and we don't have that power, I believe, Mr. Chairman.

    The second issue, question, or theme has to do with the fact that in a horizontal system some issues are not as clear as others. For instance, if we said seniors' health, it varies, but you could pretty well get there. But there are some matters that are not as precise. Some things would be covered by discretionary funds available in departments, and are therefore not very clearly identified as being associated. As well, a particular program or expenditure line may have multiple objectives, which include, say, seniors' health and somebody else's health. The allocation of these may be less than precise. This means that any determination of cumulative horizontal expenditure is subject to variances.

    Is what I have suggested indeed correct? And if so, could it materially affect our understanding of what the expenditure materiality is?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Oh, yes. What you've said is absolutely true. It's a classic difficulty and it's tormented me my whole research life.

    All administrative systems capture the past, and then the past is forgotten and adjustments are made. Then there are footnotes hanging off everything. So I think there's no substitute for a well-chosen subject that is least likely to dissolve in the confusion puddle. Then after that, there's no substitute for the guidance of your very good researchers.

  (1215)  

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Szabo.

    I have Madame Frulla next.

    Ms. Liza Frulla (Verdun—Saint-Henri—Saint-Paul—Pointe Saint-Charles, Lib.): Thank you, Ms. Sutherland and Mr. Soublière, for being here.

    I have two questions. One is on accountability and the other is on the horizontal effort.

    Coming back to what you were saying on accountability, when you said we have negative control, you're probably right. But once the harm is done, it's done. You can denounce it or do whatever. So when we talk about accountability, you're saying, “You are accountable for....”, but how can we be accountable for something that was done because a decision was taken, and then when you get the information the harm is done?

    So to this observation, I'm asking you the question: from your research, do you think that deputy ministers are sufficiently accountable in their great responsibility for public services? They are accountable amongst themselves. But this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being publicly accountable.

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: I think negative control is important, because there are the lessons that one extracts from it.

[Translation]

Also, research is done to encourage others.

[English]

    Negative control and blaming control do operate into the future, because they show us where we've been, and that helps us to understand where we want to go. As to whether deputy ministers are accountable enough, I don't know. I prefer to make ministers answerable, because by making ministers answerable, you set up a situation where the public service wants their minister to look good and makes sure that the minister is informed, and a lot of diagnosis and change will shake out of good questions. You have the power of questions.

    Ms. Liza Frulla: Then again, you can have the power of questions, but when a minister does negative control, it's too late. It is too late for a minister. We can do it as MPs, yes, but for a minister who's responsible for the whole thing, when he doesn't know what or when the decision is made....

    You're talking about an ideal situation, and it is not always an ideal situation. So here again is my question, and this question is always avoided: Don't you feel that the deputy ministers also should be either publicly accountable or not, and then the minister should have more control on his deputy ministers, which they don't have?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: I think you have more experience in government than I do, and you're talking about things that really, really did get away. But I would say that the minister has less control over the deputy minister when the deputy minister isn't responsible more or less solely to the minister. It's like Machiavelli's “Better many princes far away than one prince very close.”

    There are tragedies in government, and we have to learn from them. Life is full of tragedy and failure.

    Ms. Liza Frulla: You have to say that to the people who are electing us.

    On the horizontal effort, you were saying horizontal efforts do not lead structures to evolve. There have been many trials of horizontal efforts in many governments--provincial governments now--and it's not conclusive. Is it because sometimes the horizontal objectives contravene the vertical objectives? Sometimes when you have a horizontal objective, when you go ministry to ministry, it contravenes the objective of different ministries, and that's why the system sort of blocks.

  (1220)  

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Yes, I agree with you. There is a tendency for the vertical requirements to block the horizontal accomplishment. Sometimes people heroically continue, and sometimes they less heroically continue by ignoring the vertical requirements, and public servants in fact taking considerable authority on themselves. I don't think that's a good situation for the public servants or for the government. I think it's a dilemma, just as you've expressed it.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: There has to be a cost benefit for whatever you wish to do. That's the first important thing. There has to be a logic for it. The verticality is not going to go away. There it is. So there has to be leadership, there has to be project governance, and there has to be a strategy as to how it's going to operate afterwards, and an investment. That is part of the process. Some of these projects might not have worked because the cost benefit is not there, and there's no leadership or proper governance structure, so it falls apart. Those parameters are absolutely required.

    To me, it has to be justified. You can't just say, “Hey, that looks good, why don't we do it?”

    The Chair: Thank you, Madame Frulla. I'm going to go to Monsieur Perron.

    Monsieur Perron, juste en avance, I want to make one interjection here, if I can.

    We have Professor Sutherland, who is a political scientist and has worked a lot on these structural issues of public management, horizontality being one of them, and I'm picking up on Mr. Lanctôt's comment from Mr. Soublière, when he made the comment that some of this stuff seems fun.

    What is interesting to me about the work Mr. Soublière is trying to do is that he has picked up deliberately some relatively minor projects in the overall scheme of things and can't get them done, can't get it driven through the system, even though on the surface they seem pretty inconsequential in terms of where government is going, and yet, even then, you can't reconcile these relatively minor pieces.

    Monsieur Perron.

[Translation]

    Mr. Gilles-A. Perron (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, BQ): Mr. Chairman, you practically took the words right out of my mouth.

    Ms. Sutherland and Mr. Soublière, I've been listening to you from the start and it's seems to me we've got quite a challenge to deal with here. Do you think the various departments will come on board with this horizontal procedure? I think the departments will instead try to remain vertical to retain their power, and protect their turf. Do you think it's possible they'll be willing to share it ?

[English]

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: I do think it's possible. The British have had better luck than we have.

[Translation]

Their ministers meet together in a council. All ministers are responsible for the project in question, and they see what the problems and needs are. The ministers are encouraged and even forced to meet the needs of cooperation.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: Some deputy ministers are very satisfied with the current system. That is a personal opinion, but I believe the problem is structural. When you talk about horizontal projects, that attitude is more visible among officials than among ministers.

    Some deputy ministers are satisfied with the status quo, but a greater number of them now want to work together, want to have horizontal projects. We could talk about simplistic projects. Why does each department have an independent financial system? That is how it is federally, and the same thing goes for Quebec. It is the same everywhere. And it is because of history. It is not because some stupid person said that was how he wanted the system built, but that is just the way things were done.

    The problem today is bringing people together. I know that a number of deputy ministers are now discussing ways of working horizontally.

    It is simplistic, but there has to be a justification, i.e. a positive cost-benefit ratio. There also has to be a leader, someone who is willing to make this a priority, and a minister who says that the priority is not to help the government in general, but to see to the accomplishment of departmental priorities.

    So there has to be governance. Governance is complex. There is also resource sharing among departments. That is not easy.

    I mentioned negative evaluation earlier. You must have noticed that I am not an academic, but I am telling you that you are responsible for managing government for the future.

    I was a manager for a company. We had some problems, but I hope my management was not negative management based on punishing people for poor results. As a manager, I asked myself how we were going to fix our problems and improve the outlook for our company. That is what you have to do for Canada.

    I am asking you to not just go on a witch hunt. You must see that you are faced with something very complex because of government structure. There is an increasing willingness to work together, because officials are starting to see that there is not enough money to do everything they have and want to do.

    I have a modest proposal for you. I have discussed it with a few ministers and a good number of deputy ministers and officials, and everyone is in favour. But I assure you it is not Mount Tremblant in this case, it is Mount Everest.

  (1225)  

[English]

    The Chair: How does this translate? I'm not sure. I don't think the translator got it right.

    Monsieur Soublière, c'est tout?

    Mr. Mahoney.

    Mr. Steve Mahoney (Mississauga West, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    I sometimes come to the realization that we're not nearly as smart as we maybe think we are. I'm somewhat surprised about the lack of some form of electronic clearinghouse or electronic library, in relation to research studies and things of that nature, and the lack of sharing that goes on. Who knew?

    It's a project that we shouldn't frankly...and Mr. Soublière, I appreciate your efforts and your enthusiasm, but we actually shouldn't need you to push us in that direction. But it's good that you're here doing it.

    The accountability issue is interesting, because with accountability there should be consequences. It's my sense, after twenty-some years in various levels of government, that the only real accountability rests with the elected official. It's the guillotine approach that comes around, and whether you're responsible for it or not as an individual is neither here nor there. At the end of the day you are accountable for it. I'm not sure that necessarily gives you power or puts you at the top of the food chain; it rather makes you the hewers of wood and carriers of water, and the foot soldiers in the battle to try to figure all of this out. I don't say that to denigrate the role of MPs. I think it's vitally important, and I'm proud to be one.

    I'm wondering, though, if all of this doesn't just break down to a simple question. If you were fired by Mike Harris after nine days, Mr. Soublière, you'd be a friend of mine. But he established a process in relation to the municipal level that was called “Who does what?” It was a study conducted in the greater Toronto area that, for better or worse, led to major changes, some would say to more horizontal activity within the service delivery mechanisms of municipal government; others would debate that issue. But I think that was the goal.

    I wonder if that's really what we're talking about here. At the end of the day, somebody has to look at the big picture. Whether you like it or not, a PCO or somebody up there has to look at all of the different issues that are being put forward.

    On one of the frustrations I've found, I put forward an idea for a national apprenticeship program for aboriginal youth to see if there was some way we could generate skilled workers from within the existing population of aboriginal youth between the ages of 16 and 24, who were unemployed, under-educated, whatever. It was quite remarkable the different silos I had to go through to get any information, and at the end of the day I'm still not there.

    I'm just wondering if this is not an issue of somebody--a committee like this--taking a look at who does what within the government, having whatever department it is do what they do best, and not worrying necessarily about who's accountable, at the end of the day, but just figuring out how to put a system in place that's easier to work with.

    Your example, sir, of how the private sector accesses the ability to deal with the government is a very good point. But the question could also be, how does government access the ability to deal with government itself--and not just federal? There's so much interaction provincially in this country that some would describe it as being impossible to govern. While your goal of centralization really deals with information, we're constantly in a situation where people are demanding we decentralize. When they don't like our decisions or processes, they have be devolved to the provinces, the municipal governments, or the private sector.

    There's a question in there somewhere. I could just ask if you agree, but it has more to do with the issue of who does what. Is that really what you're talking about, and what you think we should be looking at?

  (1230)  

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: I'd say that who does what is a relatively easy piece of the puzzle to put together. If it's handled in the right way, it's absolutely safe. If you look at the British cabinet office site, you'll see an officer's name and a point of contact for information against every single one of the initiatives. It's very helpful, and that can be done.

    About accountability, I'd like to second what Mr. Soublière said, that accountability in the retrospective mode can be a very positive activity because it's about learning lessons and it's about learning how to shape something like Parliament for the future.

    And if you can learn how to be on top instead of working to get other people's messages across, then you will have done something very huge. I would say that your project about aboriginal youth 16 to 20 and the different silos is a beautiful example of another sort of project your colleague was talking about. That's something where you could really have an impact and give them a profile. It's a terrible tragedy.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I think what you're saying is absolutely important, but in my opinion, if you launch yourself into that, you're going to get buried because it's so complex and what have you.

    My other Don Quixote project is as a volunteer trying to get the health care institutions in our region here to work together on information technology and information systems, to share information. I'm doing this pro bono and I have convinced them to have someone working on contract for me.

    The engagement at the beginning started off by us saying, we're going to do a strategy; here we're going to study everything and just come up with a strategy. Frankly, we decided after a while that we were going to go after what I call fruit lying on the ground, not even low-hanging fruit.

    Because this committee is important, I would push for horizontality. That's a key mandate, as well as the question of how you do it. You have certain deputy ministers who in terms of philosophy would like to centralize a lot more, and there are others who say, I'm okay, Jack. And then there's a third group who say, well, let's do it on projects. I think I would go after projects--or functions or groups--where you can have a lot of impact and start changing and working on the culture.

    If you start working on the organization and on who does what, you're going to be talking about this until you're blue in the face, in my opinion, because it is so complex. This is not, again, because people are dumb or because they don't want it, but because we can't get our act together because it is very complex.

    The institutions in Ottawa, in Ontario--it's the only province that doesn't have regional governments for health, so all of our 22 hospitals in Ottawa-Carleton and the eastern Ontario region, for example, work independently. Au Québec il y a la régie. So information is not shared. Right now we're trying to work with them to get them to share without changing the structure.

  (1235)  

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Soublière.

    If I can, I'll just interject again before I move on to the next questioner, who is Mr. Shepherd, the clerk has raised with me one minor matter of business I would just like to deal with at the end of this session. If I could just have your indulgence, we'll save about five minutes at the end. It's a relatively minor matter, but we should deal with it today. It's on the issue of order in council appointments.

    Mr. Shepherd.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.): You've touched on an issue that has bothered me since the first time I came to this place, and that is that the Treasury Board doesn't seem to have a comptrollership function. It seems to me that they've been lost in this maze of not having a comptrollership function vis-à-vis the other departments of government, and at the same time they come to Parliament looking for some kind of direction and quite frankly don't get it there.

    I would think of them as a sort of central agency that seems to be lost in the woods. They seem to have become simply an organization that tries to keep various departments within what the budget prescribes. They don't even seem to be able to affect financial management within various departments, and that's been evident with the HRDC sponsorship program and all these issues.

    If we're saying that we want to move more towards this horizontal aspect, we have to build it on some kind of structure, and the Treasury Board would seem to be the obvious place to start. The question would be, if we could all come to an agreement that the Treasury Board is lost in this maze, then how do we move forward in power?

    What we're saying, to answer both your questions, is that we're moving away from that sort of left side of the government, overextension to decentralization, and moving more towards a central feature where the Treasury Board has more structural power. How do we empower the Treasury Board so it can at least deliver the message of horizontality to the rest of government?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: I feel guilty about my colleagues in the Treasury Board, but I do agree with 90% of what you said. Treasury Board can't exert anything like a comptrollership function of the kind that's exercised in Britain. I believe it's because Treasury Board's units of analysis are far too broad and too grand.

    Right now we're supposed to be measuring performance. We do performance assessment, performance audit, outcome measures--it used to be called results. This terminology changes every year or so, and they're always looking for a very highly aggregated way of summarizing a bottom line of performance somehow. That's not going to happen because it's not a valid enterprise in social science. You can't aggregate words and so on, as you all know.

    That was the burden of my earlier plea, to encourage Treasury Board to be more like one of the provincial treasury boards and get more fine-grained financial information from the departments. Whether it needs a version of the Statistics Act or whether their Financial Administration Act needs to be reviewed, I don't know. Financial auditing is probably boring, and that's why less and less financial work is done. We do less and less well at the detail, and then we have a grand picture that you can't connect to reality, to the people on the ground, to the facts of the situation.

    I guess I'm talking about Mr. Soublière's field of expertise. I think that we need more detail from those agencies, from the Auditor General and from Treasury Board.

  (1240)  

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: The question I'm trying to articulate is, how would we change this? How would we change the functions of the Treasury Board? Because the examples that are given over and over are the same in the sense that nobody can deliver the product. Conceptually, it should be Treasury Board that says, okay, we want to talk about disabilities; I want these departments to do this by x date, and in your further functionality I want the ministers to sit down and talk about where we're going, and let's just do that.

    Treasury Board, the way it's designed today, is in a position of ascendancy, yet it doesn't have the power to go around telling people what they should or should not do. So the question is, how would you change it? How would you make it different?

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: How would I make it different? I would have the president of the Treasury Board and the deputy secretary of Treasury Board come to the committee and talk about how they propose to collect information and insist on information in the format that you would like to have it, in a way that's meaningful to you. That means some homework...by pouring over the documents and asking for information that they don't have.

    You have a new deputy secretary of Treasury Board who, I think, wants to try to build a business case for Treasury Board, if I can borrow that phrase. So I think you're taking an interest at an opportune time.

    The Chair: Perhaps I can ask a question now.

    It strikes me, though, that at the heart of this discussion are the questions around this commodity called information. Whether it's for the scrutiny by members of Parliament of particular activities, or whether it's for accountability exercises, or whether it's for policy development, the ability to act quickly and efficiently access the information is at the heart of a lot of these interests.

    It also strikes me that what the new technology and what all governments are confronting is change. It's a tool that allows them to do something differently, that does contain within it the precursors to very substantial change in how the entire organization....

    These questions of horizontality didn't exist in any serious way before the technology to enact them was available.

    Whether it's ministerial accountability, deputy minister accountability, or accountability to a House of Commons committee, or the actions of a particular department or a service, being able to understand what goes on is important.

    The second piece of it is this. In order to change it you need to understand what's going on and if you can't see the organization....

    I don't like private sector examples all the time because I don't think they're always a fair comparison to public sector organizations. Public sector organizations are much more complex and driven by a different set of factors.

    However, one of the developments, I'm told, Mr. Soublière, was in the Fortune 500. These very large companies all went through this phase of having decentralized systems because they were producing units in different countries, they'd bought different kinds of technology. Virtually all of them, I believe, have gone to enterprise-wide solutions. You could perhaps give us the number there. Out of the 500, I think it's a very substantial number.

    As we head down that road, before we even begin to talk about what should be the appropriate role of a particular organization, the problem here in government seems to be that it's hard to even understand how they all fit together. And yet our attempts to do that.... I think we heard last time that we've come down from 65 financial accounting systems to seven or nine. I believe this was the number we were given here at the table.

    Mr. Soublière, you may have some information on human resource systems. It strikes me that getting the information framework right carries within it an enormous potential to address some of the concerns that we're all raising. That said, let's look at something as simple as identifying, beyond the scientific libraries, the some 350 libraries within government that you identified as having resources attached to them. In an age where virtually all information is produced electronically, just getting that consolidated is proving insurmountable.

    And getting the four granting councils to do something as simple as a common curriculum vitae so people don't have to continue to redo their CVs in order to apply to the different councils would produce big efficiencies.

    Could you comment a little on the reality of doing it?

    Professor Sutherland, could you give us a sense of the information as the driving force for a systems change?

  (1245)  

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: Yes, it shouldn't be impossible to work towards commonality in information systems or at least information systems that can talk to each other. As you know, that's part of the answer, though.

    What was said earlier by my colleague about the human dimension of the problems of aboriginal youth is true. He essentially said that you can get far too much information, and as soon as you start digging into it you drown in the human side of reasons and history and impossibilities and so on.

    I think the technical thing should be easy; it isn't. And the human thing, we all know, is difficult.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: Mr. Alcock, who gave you the information on the six or seven financial systems?

    The Chair: It was the ADM from Treasury Board who was here two weeks ago.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: It is true that many years ago when the federal government had, I think, 42 departments before it went to 28, they all had independent financial systems. Then there was an effort to...[Technical difficulty--Editor]...some standard financial systems, and the same thing for Human Resources. I believe there were seven different financial systems the department could implement, and two HR systems. But they implemented it all differently, so what we have is 28 different financial systems. All of the coding was done differently and the reporting was done differently. It was very complex.

    So even though they--

    The Chair: Why, in your opinion, could they not get to one?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I think because they all had different charts of accountants, and it would be quite an issue to get them together.

    One of the topics that you and I have discussed a few times is that it's almost impossible for the Canadian federal government to know how much it spends on information management, information technology.

    If you go through the coding structure of the federal government, the standard objects--what purchased, what rented--it's very difficult to bring it together because of the coding and because of different vertical.... Everybody did their own thing.

    The Chair: But the person who was here testifying said that they had a standard chart of accounts, a standard set of codes.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: But they're all different--well, not all different--at line objects. When it gets to a lower level, project accounting and cost centres and what have you are different. When you get to reporting objects and standard objects, yes, they are the same, but the levels below that have been...because of different programs.

    The Chair: Is this an insurmountable problem?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: Absolutely not. No. It's a complex issue.

    As I've said, there's a culture, and it's not a negative culture. Really, you have the same issue in all sorts of organizations: Are you better to be totally centralized? To use the example of health care, are you better to have just one big hospital in a region that has become so bureaucratic and efficient in one way but at least you have everything, or many small ones that don't talk?

    Well, you have trade-offs--lots of efficiency at a local level except that the system itself suffers, and here you can have lots of inefficiencies. It's a trade-off, in a sense, but I believe it has to move from where it is. It's too much of a....

  (1250)  

    The Chair: And the solution chosen by large private sector organizations...?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: Well, I hate to sound as if I'm focusing on the information technology, but it would be interesting for you to listen to CIOs of large corporations who are responsible for their information management.

    The CIO--quote, unquote--from Rogers Telecom, which has telecom and cable and the whole series, says, you know, if it plugs into the wall, I own it, and if it's not a microwave--

    The Chair: Is that a way of saying that they use a standard enterprise-wide model?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: Absolutely.

    The Chair: And how many of the Fortune 500 companies do the same?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I don't know how many, but it's the same. Ford all over the world has the same financial HR systems and General Motors and so forth.

    The Chair: So they can reconcile these problems?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: Yes.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I repeat, no one is stupid, no one is negative, but the history of the approach of these things has been vertically oriented by departments.

    The Chair: And you can't integrate libraries because...? You're beginning to sound like a public servant, Mr. Soublière.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: They're my friends, they're my buddies, right?

    No, in fact, as I said, as somebody tells me, across this country you will have the Canada...housed in different parts of the country, and the mailrooms will often be separate, by department. This is an anecdote somebody else told me. It's true.

    The Chair: Okay, I have time for two brief questions, one from Mr. Forseth and one from Mr. Cullen. We're going to wrap and deal with one little piece of business we have at hand.

    Mr. Forseth.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: I'll just make the observation that probably in the private sector overcoming the problem is a case of I don't know what I don't know. The problems that arise directly strike at their financial viability, the existence of the organization. They either solve the problem or they go bankrupt. We don't have that kind of imperative where we are.

    We talked about Treasury Board not really having any stick. I did talk to the Treasury Board minister about that and got some agreement from the minister about how we go on in the news media about Treasury Board guidelines and a particular minister stands up and says, yes, I did everything according to Treasury Board guidelines. Then we say, no, you didn't. And so I asked the minister of the Treasury Board whether guidelines were followed.

    We have all kinds of guidelines, but the thing is, when guidelines are violated, or perhaps there is no really good coordination as to how you fulfil those guidelines, there's no back-end, no accountability to it. You violated the guidelines, but then what?

    Maybe you can address that whole issue of about when you said that Treasury Board really has no stick.

    The Chair: Can I ask you to pose your question also, Mr. Cullen? Then we'll deal with both questions with a one-minute response each.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Actually, mine is more of a comment.

    When we talk about matrix-style management, I think we need to be careful that we don't just automatically associate that with centralization and decentralization. They are separate beasts. I just wanted to make the point that I think we are talking about different things.

    On the question of the role of Treasury Board, when we had the ADM here the other day, we basically heard that in terms of allocation of resources across departments, the Treasury Board Secretariat doesn't have much of a role or mandate. I think that can be solved organizationally. If the Prime Minister, for example, says to the ministers that the Treasury Board will be very much more involved in economy and effectiveness and the way the resources are allocated across government, then it will happen.

    Right now, I think in Ottawa we tend to be too politically correct so that the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Treasury Board, doesn't really feel comfortable. They're getting into the area of ministerial and deputy minister accountability in the department, so they play much more of a passive role, very much a staff role, a functional role. I think that can be changed by changing the nature of their role. I don't think it's that complicated. Right now, they're in a much more passive role, and that could be changed just by the stroke of a pen.

  (1255)  

    Prof. Sharon Sutherland: In a sense, the second one answers the first one. Treasury Board Secretariat says now that its role is to enable better management or to encourage better management. I asked, “Why not insist on better management?” and basically was looked at as though I were suddenly transformed into a huge Neanderthal from my small person.

    Treasury Board does not think of itself any more as having the right to insist on anything. When people go over in their estimates, Treasury Board doesn't get dressed up in its three-piece suit and go yell at anyone. It probably just pays it.

    So I think you're right. It's as simple as reinforcing something like the earlier role and insisting that it do more accountancy type of work.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Soublière: I'll be quick.

    Horizontality, I agree, is not centralization. What I'm talking about is the fact that getting more horizontality will have to be done through projects. It will have to be done through special functions or communities of interest, and it's going to have matrix management and it's going to have special governance.

    On the other hand, there needs to be more centralization for information management and IT in the Canadian federal government.

    The Chair: In terms of stick and central control, I note that Treasury Board, in its core operating line, is asking for a 46% supplemental increase in its budget. It's strange that one would have an unanticipated expenditure of that order of magnitude in the supplementals. However, that would just be a kind of a sloppy observation rather than any kind of analytic conclusion.

    Thank you both very much. I appreciate you spending the time here. I appreciate the information you bring to the table.

    I'm going to have to move quickly to a discussion with members. You're welcome to stay and I can thank you more fulsomely individually as soon as I've done my piece of business.

    Members, for your information, I want to draw your attention to one information article and then I have a piece of business that will require a motion. So I will need unanimous consent for the motion once I've explained what it is.

    The piece of information here is on the notes that were sent out about the next meeting, the meeting on Thursday. There was a mistake in the date, it is the 5th of December and not the 6th of December as is shown, and Madame Robillard will not be with us, but officials from her department will be here to discuss the horizontal report.

    That's next Thursday at 11 o'clock. I trust I will see you all there and we will have fun together, as we always do.

    Now, we have one issue. Mr. Valeri is going to move a motion in a minute, seconded by Mr. Forseth, assuming I have unanimous consent to put this motion. And the motion is about the following.

    We agreed last time that an individual member could just ask for the CV of an order in council appointment. This has kicked off a bit of a discussion among the various clerks' departments and apparently they are concerned about a whole bunch of things, volumes and all of that; because there are procedures here that if one person gets something, it's got to go to everybody and all of that.

    And then, should it be a committee request? I would like to propose that we adopt a practice here that any member of the committee can simply contact the clerk and request the CV of any order in council appointment and the clerk will supply the CV just to the person who requests.

    If the person then comes back to the committee and says, I would like to call this person, then that decision will be a decision of the committee and the CV will then be circulated to everybody.

    But rather than, as the numbers build up, having the clerk circulate a whole bunch of unrequested information to everybody, could we have a policy that we would only do that if it was going to come before the committee?

    If it's simply an information request on the part of any member, let them do what they want. Does that make sense in principle?

    Mr. Tony Valeri: I'l move that.

    The Chair: First, do I have unanimous consent to pass such a guiding motion to...?

    Please, Mr. Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: You do not have my consent, not because I want to be disagreeable, but because we are not always here and when I get that at my office, I have the time to look at it.

    If you are always here, it is not a problem, but I sit on a number of committees and often cannot be here. If I have the information at my office, I can tell if it is relevant or not.

·  (1300)  

[English]

    The Chair: Let me explain, Mr. Lanctôt, what's behind this, because this is a very simple administrative procedure.

    The clerk circulates all order in council appointments to everybody, right? You have the right, as a member, to request, on a particular one, to see the curriculum vitae of that person.

    You may get that and look at it and say, there's no issue. And lots of members do that. They'll ask for a particular CV. The problem is, there's a lack of clarity in our rules in the Standing Orders that the committee has to decide upon.

    Should you have to ask the clerk to ask me to put it on the agenda of the committee so every time you want to see a CV, you have to get the committee to request the CV, which means it slows down your ability to get access to the CV and it raises the amount of paperwork that gets circulated, because then every request has to be dealt with by the whole committee or can we put in place a practice that, for information purposes, if you wish to get a CV, you simply ask the clerk. The clerk gets that CV and gives it to you, doesn't give it to every member of the committee.

    Then if you have a concern where you might want to call that person before the committee, then you come back to the committee, the clerk circulates the CV to all members and we have a proper.... All this is just to clarify a lack of clarity in our Standing Orders.

    I personally would take the position that all members of the committee should have access to the information they need to do their work and then we'll come back to the committee to make decisions collectively on committee business. That's really the intent of it. It's no more than that.

    So?

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: That just eliminates a bit of paperwork. Between you and me, I would still prefer getting it so that my assistant could see it and would know... It is paperwork, but useful paperwork.

[English]

    The Chair: I'm not sure what you'd like to receive. You'd like to receive what somebody else is getting. Is that it?

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: The CV? Why not? What harm could it do?

    Ms. Liza Frulla: Because you don't know why you are getting the CV.

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: A CV is submitted in order for appointments to be made.

[English]

    Mr. Tony Valeri (Stoney Creek, Lib.): I think the point is, if you would like to receive a CV, I don't really need to know what you have requested until you are prepared to bring that person before the committee. Then we'll have a discussion as a committee. It doesn't prevent any knowledge from flowing to you. If Mr. Cullen wants to request a CV just to personally review on his own, I don't think the rest of the members of the committee need to know that. If Mr. Cullen wants to bring that before the committee, then we will engage as a committee. Everyone gets the CV, everyone reviews it, and then we engage in a debate. I think it's a way of streamlining the process. It makes it easier for the clerk, and it saves paper. But we would not be out any information.

    The Chair: Mr. Lanctôt, you will receive notice of all of the appointments. It's not going to reduce your notice. You'll get exactly the same notice you always do. It is just to facilitate this. Otherwise, there are so many of them that it just becomes.... Would that be acceptable?

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: We are on the same page.

[English]

    The Chair: Mr. Forseth, is that acceptable to you, sir?

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Yes.

    The Chair: Is there agreement that we will proceed in that fashion?

    Some hon. members: Agreed.

    The Chair: Does that clarify things for the clerk?

    The Clerk of the Committee: Yes.

    The Chair: Thank you very much, members. We'll see you on Thursday.

    The meeting is adjourned.