OGGO Committee Report

If there is a consensus among MPs about the estimates review process, it is that the documents submitted to Parliament (the Main Estimates, the Supplementary Estimates, the Report on Plans and Priorities and the departmental Performance Report) raise little, if any, enthusiasm. The size of the documents, their layout and the type of information they contain, their tone and the style of language they use have been criticized time and time again by committee members. Despite the fact that progress has been made, this is a persistent problem, as we mentioned in Section II of this report.

A.        Compliance with Treasury Board Secretariat policies

First, the Subcommittee found that the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) has not managed to achieve compliance with its policies on the contents of reports submitted to Parliament. Moreover, Maria Barrados, from the Office of the Auditor General, told the Subcommittee that, in the reports on Plans and Priorities, departments have difficulty presenting concrete elements and wish to conserve a degree of latitude while not committing themselves to objectives that may be too specific. (Maria Barrados, Assistant Auditor General, Wednesday, February 26, 2003 at 18h00)

According to the TBS policies published in September 2002, every Report on Plans and Priorities (RPP) should meet certain principles for effective public reporting. The Secretariat has set out six principles to be met by departments and agencies when preparing their RPPs. Based on their experience as set out in this chapter and on other committees, members of the Subcommittee believe that these principles continue to provide the key standards that RPPs need to meet, in order to support meaningful scrutiny of departmental programs and expenditures. The six principles are:⁸

1.    Benefits/Results for Canadians:

2.    Plans and priorities that will be used to deliver the Benefits/Results to Canadians:

3.    Lessons learned and applied from past experiences:

4.    Challenges, risks and the rationale for the choices made:

5.    Total planned spending:

6.    Assessing performance:

After hearing general observations from the Office of the General Auditor (OAG), the Subcommittee began the detailed study of the documents submitted to Parliament by the PWGSC Real Property Services program as described in the preceding chapter. Putting the process to the test, the Subcommittee noted that the information contained in the Real Property Services program 2003-2004 Report on Plans and Priorities showed some of the deficiencies widely observed by the OAG in the departmental reports submitted to Parliament. Some of the principles set out in the Treasury Board Secretariat policies were rarely, if ever, complied with. Specifically, the Subcommittee noted the absence of indicators and clear and quantifiable benchmarks, as well as specific timeframes for all the intended program results. The Subcommittee was also concerned about the lack of clear information about the resources allotted to each departmental priority within each strategic outcome. Moreover, in its 2003-2004 Report on Plans and Priorities, the Real Property Services Program has not looked back at its commitments or its performance over the previous year, nor does it clearly describe the measures it plans to take to correct the situation where the intended results were not achieved or must be improved. On the basis of the documents submitted to Parliament, it was difficult for the Subcommittee to know whether the intended results had been achieved from one year to the next.

On the other hand, information that may well meet the needs of parliamentarians is available internally and is used by Real Property Services program managers in their balanced scorecard mentioned in the previous chapter. In this connection, the Subcommittee questioned PWGSC officials in order to find out why the information in the balanced scorecard was not reflected in the reports submitted to Parliament. The officials answered that they did not know what kind of information was required by MPs. Nonetheless, the Treasury Board Secretariat policies are clear, and compliance with them would permit a number of the parliamentarians’ information needs to be met more effectively.

And yet, to be fair to the PWGSC Real Property Services program, it should be mentioned that, in view of what the members of the Subcommittee have observed in other cases, this program is doing well compared to other federal programs or agencies in terms of reporting to Parliament. Nonetheless, there is still room for improvement.

B.        The Role of the Treasury Board Secretariat

Following the meetings with PWGSC Real Property Services Program officials, the Subcommittee wanted to find specific information about the role of the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) in the preparation of the reports submitted to Parliament by federal departments and agencies. The TBS has developed policies, but they do not appear to be followed consistently.

TBS officials told the Subcommittee that reports submitted by 15 out of 87 federal agencies will be audited in terms of their adherence to policies on the preparation of reports submitted to Parliament. Last year, TBS assessed the reports of ten agencies. The bulk of the TBS review is done after the reports have been tabled in Parliament. Few reports submitted to the TBS are ever audited before tabling in the House of Commons because there is little time and few resources for this task.

This situation led the members of the Subcommittee to question the role of the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) in preparing reports submitted to Parliament. Should the TBS be limited to its current role of adviser to federal departments and agencies or should its role involve greater “oversight”, with responsibility to ensure that its policies are followed? Both options have advantages and disadvantages.

Granting more oversight authority to the TBS would of course lead to greater adherence to policies for preparing reports to Parliament. There is however a likelihood that departments might be demotivated and lose their sense of ownership and final responsibility; they might also be satisfied with just meeting the TBS requirements, rather than adopting a creative approach and providing more relevant and higher quality information.

TBS’s current role of “advisor” sets the stage for departments to show greater independence. The main risk in this approach is that departments can ignore TBS instructions and recommendations and, in the worst case, recycle bad reports, year after year.

The Subcommittee believes that the Treasury Board Secretariat must now move toward greater involvement with and greater control over federal departments and agencies in their preparation of reports to Parliament. This view derives not only from the Subcommittee’s work with the PWGSC Real Property Services program, but also from the experiences of other committees and opinions gathered over the past few years from colleagues in Parliament. The Subcommittee recommends:

Subcommittee members believe that the Subcommittee on the Estimates Process can support the work of Treasury Board Secretariat and departments in improving the content of Performance Reports and Reports on Plans and Priorities. Future work of the Subcommittee may involve the review of a sample of these reports to assess their success in meeting the Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines, as well as the requirements emphasized elsewhere in this Report. Systematic review of departmental reports by the Subcommittee would enable consistent feedback to individual departments, supplementary to that from other standing committees, and would provide a clear basis for assessing progress by the Treasury Board Secretariat in improving the quality of reports.

C.        Modernizing Reports to Parliament While Moving Toward More Dynamic Communication

The Subcommittee is of the view that a thorough-going modernization of reports submitted to Parliament is necessary now to facilitate their review by MPs. Over the long term, the layout and content of reports should use some of the elements contained in the annual reports of public and private sector companies. Moreover, the PWGSC Real Property Services program officials told the Subcommittee that they used performance reports submitted to boards of directors by private sector companies as a starting point for developing their own performance measurement strategy.

It is essential that, in reports submitted to Parliament, the federal government enhance its ability to communicate clearly the information considered relevant by its clients — MPs and the Canadian public — and release it in an appropriate format. Like other economic or financial publications containing numerical data, beginning with estimates documents, for example, reports submitted to Parliament should make more intensive use of statistical tools such as trends and annual variations and present ideas and findings in tables and graphs; these tables and graphs should be accompanied by brief texts with value added to substantiate the figures. Apart from basic information on the budget allocation, reports should highlight failures as well as successes of programs, departments and agencies, their causes and the corrective measures to be taken to reach the objectives. The Subcommittee recommends:

Because they have so little time in which to review the estimates, parliamentary committees need rapid access to all relevant information. At the same time, an approach is needed that will strike a balance between the need for detailed information and the need for conciseness, so that documents are not too cumbersome. The Subcommittee recommends:

17.   That all federal departments and agencies include hyperlinks to Internet sites and appendices in their Estimates documents , in order to give readers access to detailed information regarding programs.⁹

This information includes general information on the program or agency, the program evaluation reports, Office of the Auditor General reports, in-house performance reports, client surveys, and so on.

D.        Strengthening Incentives

The Subcommittee believes that several of the recommendations provided above will strengthen the incentives for departments and other organizations to provide better reports to Parliament. Notable among these are the recommendations relating to the role of Treasury Board Secretariat and the need for parliamentary committees to report more frequently in response to the information supplied by government organizations.

Attention also needs to be given to the incentives that apply to parliamentary committees, and the individual parliamentarians who serve on them. This side of the incentives challenge has multiple dimensions, most of which lie outside the scope of a report focussed on practical steps that can be taken immediately.

However, the Subcommittee believes that there is one modification to the format of Reports on Plans and Priorities that could contribute significantly to strengthening the incentive for parliamentary committees to devote time to work on the estimates. This would be the inclusion of a short section, ideally near the beginning of each departmental report, noting previous recommendations of parliamentary committees and detailing the ways in which the department has responded through existing resource allocations and program changes, and future plans. Such information would provide parliamentarians with concrete evidence that their work on estimates and the related reports has been considered by departments, and has produced results. It would also publicize the work that committees do on Departmental Performance Reports and Reports on Plans and Priorities or, alternatively, publicize their failure to do such work.

The Subcommittee therefore recommends:

Furthermore, members of the Subcommittee believe that the procedures currently employed by Parliament in the handling of estimates, as set out in Standing Order 81(4), do not provide adequate incentives for the kind of attention elsewhere recommended in this report. At the present time, as has been noted in previous chapters, estimates are deemed to have been reported to the House without amendments if committees do not provide reports by the end of the supply period during which they are referred for committee study. At this point, the House proceeds with the consideration of estimates.

The effect of the current procedure is to facilitate the unacceptably low level of inattention currently provided by parliamentary committees to estimates and related accountability issues. Given the central role played by committee chairs in developing and implementing committee agendas, and ensuring that estimates and related reports are given adequate attention, members of the Subcommittee recommend:

The final recommendation relating to incentives that the Subcommittee wishes to make stems from its 4 June meeting with Mr. Robert Marleau, retired Clerk of the House of Commons. Mr. Marleau argued, persuasively, that existing practices (and the Standing Orders upon which they are based) create significant disincentives for Members of Parliament to devote extensive time to the study of estimates. A central disincentive is the lengthy 150-day period allowed to the government for preparing formal responses to substantive reports that committees might prepare on Reports on Plans and Priorities, or Departmental Performance Reports. While it may be appropriate for wide-ranging policy studies, this time period in combination with the difficulty in obtaining time to debate reports or responses on the floor of the House of Commons creates barriers to the sustained dialogue between committee members and Ministers, and dynamic tension between Parliament and the Government, that is needed as a basis for effective accountability. For similar reasons, potential influence by Parliament on future spending is impeded. Unless committee reports are given serious attention in the legislative chamber by ministers, there will not be an adequate incentive to develop them.

Mr. Marleau drew the attention of Subcommittee members to existing procedures relating to recommendations from the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations. The Standing Orders (s 123-128) provide that reports from this Committee recommending the revocation of a regulation shall be deemed adopted, unless a minister responds in the House within 15 days, in a one-hour debate for which the Standing Orders provide. The effect, according to Mr. Marleau, has been that departments have an incentive to dialogue constructively with the Committee, and that in most cases issues are resolved without reports being needed.

Members of the Subcommittee agree with Mr. Marleau’s suggestion that the procedure applying to reports of the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations may provide a model that would create stronger incentives within the estimates process — both for work by committees and for responsive action by ministers and departments. This model would have special importance for committees reporting on single issues that could be suitable for focussed debate and rapid resolution. Given the possibility that committees may also choose to undertake more extensive and complex studies in response to RPPs or DPRs, we therefore recommend:

(a)    a “one hour debate in the House or deemed adoption” option modeled on the existing procedure for reports from the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations, and

(b)   a 90 day mandatory written response option, modeled on that currently provided by Standing Order 109.

Members of the Subcommittee believe that a new option providing committees with a means to ensure attention by the minister responsible, on the floor of the House, to their recommendations concerning departmental performance and future plans would provide committees with a powerful tool for ensuring accountability and responsiveness. However, the potential impact of this procedure also implies a need for caution. Such a procedure would need to be reserved for substantive issues that are suitable for consideration in a brief House debate, and used in the non-partisan spirit elsewhere identified in this report as a necessary part of more effective work by committees on estimates.