PACP Committee Report

The Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons

In 1985, the issue was taken up again, this time by a House of Commons Committee, the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons (McGrath Committee). The Special Committee reported that:

The individual responsibility of ministers concerns the administration of their departments. It is no longer reasonable that a minister be accountable or responsible when, through no fault of the minister, senior officials misuse or abuse their powers ^[14].

The notion that a minister could still enjoy the intimate knowledge of the daily workings of his or her department and thus could be held to account for operational and administrative actions may have been valid in the 19th Century but is no longer so under contemporary circumstances. As the members of the Committee argued:

The idea of a minister being responsible for everything that goes on in a department may once have been realistic, but it has long since ceased to be so. A minister cannot possibly know everything that is going on in a department. The doctrine of ministerial accountability undermines the potential for genuine accountability on the part of the person that ought to be accountable — the senior officer of the department ^[15].

Yet 20 years later, there has been no discernable change in the way the doctrine of ministerial accountability is interpreted, and the Public Accounts Committee consequently was unable to obtain any clear acknowledgement of responsibility for the administration of the Sponsorship Program, and thus was unable to hold anyone to account.

The British Approach: Accounting Officers

As is widely known, the Westminster form of parliamentary democracy originated and evolved in the United Kingdom and with it, the doctrine of ministerial accountability. This system, with its doctrines and practices, formed the model for the later stages of colonial governments in British North America, and was the model that was adopted at the time of Confederation for Canada’s own system of representative government.

In the years following Confederation, the British system evolved beyond the state in which it existed and has thus developed a number of unique characteristics not mirrored in Canada.

In 1866, the Exchequer and Audit Act created the position of accounting officer, although the term “accounting officer” did not come into use until 1872 ^[16]. As a result of these measures, British permanent secretaries (deputy ministers) were designated as accounting officers for their departments. They thus became formally responsible and accountable for the financial accounts of their departments and held to account for the performance of their duties before the Public Accounts Committee.

It must be stressed that this change did not impair the doctrine of ministerial accountability. British permanent secretaries are instructed that it is incumbent upon them to combine their duties as accounting officers with their:

[d]uty to serve the Minister in charge of their department, to whom they are responsible and from whom they derive their authority. The Minister in turn is responsible to Parliament in respect of the policies, actions and conduct of the department ^[17].

Accounting officers are personally responsible for:

The overall organisation, management and staffing of the department and for department wide procedures, where these are appropriate, in financial and other matters. [He or she] must ensure that there is a high standard of financial management in the department as a whole; that financial systems and procedures promote the efficient and economical conduct of business and safeguard financial propriety and regularity throughout the department; and that financial consideration are fully taken into account in decisions on policy proposals ^[18].

As accounting officers, permanent secretaries are held to account for performance of their duties before the Public Accounts Committee. The ultimate responsibility of the minister and the responsiveness of the public service to direction from elected officials is preserved by specifying what must happen when a minister and a permanent secretary are in disagreement:

If the minister in charge of the department is contemplating a course of action involving a transaction which the Accounting Officer considers would infringe the requirements of propriety or regularity (including where applicable the need for Treasury authority), the Accounting Officer should set out in writing his or her objections to the proposal, the reasons for those objections and his or her duty to notify the C&AG [Comptroller and Auditor General] should the advice be overruled. If the minister decides, none the less, to proceed, the Accounting Officer should seek a written instruction to take the action in question. Having received such an instruction, he or she must comply with it, but should then inform the Treasury of what has occurred, and should also communicate the papers to the C&AG without undue delay. Provided that this procedure has been followed, the PAC [Public Accounts Committee] can be expected to recognise that the Accounting Officer bears no personal responsibility for the transaction.

If a course of action in contemplation raises an issue not of formal propriety or regularity but relating to the Accounting Officer's wider responsibilities for economy, efficiency and effectiveness …, the Accounting Officer has the duty to draw the relevant factors to the attention of his or her minister and to advise in whatever way he or she deems appropriate ... If the Accounting Officer's advice is overruled and the proposal is one which he or she would not feel able to defend to the PAC as representing value for money, he or she should seek a written instruction before proceeding. He or she will no doubt wish to refer to the probability of a PAC investigation. He or she must then comply with the instruction, but should inform the Treasury and communicate the request for the instruction and the instruction itself to the C&AG without undue delay, as in cases of propriety or regularity ^[19].

These measures clarify the doctrine of ministerial accountability by making a distinction between a minister’s policy role and a deputy minister’s [permanent secretary’s] administrative role while preserving the minister’s ultimate responsibility and accountability for the actions of his or her department.

A final, notable, feature of the accounting officer model is that responsibility and accountability as prescribed by the model attaches to the person — and not to the office. Thus, as Dr. Franks told the Committee, the “responsibility of the accounting officers is personal and remains with them, even when they change or retire.” (43:1115) [*] In Canada, the situation is reversed; according to the prevailing interpretation of ministerial accountability, responsibility belongs with the office and not the individual. This interpretation — which is applied formally to ministerial responsibility — influences the manner in which deputy-ministerial responsibility is perceived. Combined with the rapid turnover of deputy ministers, the result, as Dr. Franks explains, has been that by the time an issue is brought to the attention of the Public Accounts Committee it is more than probable that the deputy minister who presided at the time referenced by an audit has departed leaving the Committee with no one to hold to account from what went wrong ^[20]. And this is indeed what happened in the case of both the minister and the deputy minister with regard to the Committee’s investigation of the Sponsorship Program.