Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Finance
Issue 28 - Evidence - September 28, 2005
OTTAWA, Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance met this day at 6:37 p.m. to examine the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2006.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I would like to call this forty-first meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance to order. The mandate of our committee is to examine government spending, either directly through the Estimates or indirectly through bills.
On Monday, March 7, 2005, our committee received an order of reference to examine and subsequently report on the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2006. This is our ninth meeting on the Main Estimates since March 9, 2005.
[English]
We have been examining government spending in the context of greater accountability and transparency. At the core of Canada's parliamentary system is the constitutional convention and practice of ministerial accountability. Ministers of the Crown are responsible and accountable to Parliament collectively as part of cabinet and individually as minister in charge of a department. This convention arises out of the democratic principle that only elected officials and not the public servants who assist them should be held accountable for the functioning of the government. To discuss these and other issues, we welcome today Mr. Arthur Kroeger and Mr. James R. Mitchell.
Arthur Kroeger has had a long and very distinguished career in the federal public service. He first became a public servant in 1958 when he joined Foreign Affairs, serving as a Foreign Service officer in Geneva, New Delhi, Washington and Ottawa. In 1974, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs. He then served as deputy minister in four other departments, including Transport Canada; Regional and Industrial Expansion; Energy, Mines and Resources; and Employment and Immigration Canada.
[Translation]
Mr. Kroeger earned the nickname "the Dean of Deputy Ministers" for both his experience and the skill with which he accomplished his duties.
[English]
After leaving government in 1992, he became a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1993-94 and a visiting fellow at Queen's University from 1993-99. From 1993 to 2002, he was Chancellor at Carleton University, and he continues to serve as Chancellor Emeritus. He was Chairman of the Public Policy Forum from 1992-94 and, since 1999, has been Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Policy Research Networks.
James R. Mitchell was educated at the University of Colorado, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in philosophy. After several years as a university lecturer Mr. Mitchell began a long and distinguished career in the federal public service. He first became a public servant in 1978 with Foreign Affairs. He subsequently moved to the Privy Council Office in 1983. He later served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Board where, among other things, he was responsible for the government's Employment Equity Program.
From 1991-94, Mr. Mitchell held the position of Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet (Machinery of Government). In that capacity he was responsible for providing advice to successive secretaries to the cabinet and Prime Ministers on matters related to the organization of government, the reform and renewal of the public service and a host of other issues related to governance and change in Canada. He was a principal adviser on the 1993 reorganization of the federal government.
[Translation]
In 1994, Mr. Mitchell founded with other partners the Sussex Circle, an Ottawa-based consulting group which provides advice on strategy, policy, organization and finance to senior clients in government, business and the voluntary sector.
[English]
I would like to introduce the members of the committee present today: Senator Joseph Day, from New Brunswick and Deputy Chair of the Committee; Senator Percy Downe, from Prince Edward Island and member of the steering committee; Senator Mac Harb, from Ontario; Senator Grant Mitchell, from Alberta; Senator Pierrette Ringuette, from New Brunswick; and Senator Terry Stratton, from Manitoba.
Mr. Kroeger, please proceed with your presentation.
Arthur Kroeger, as an individual: Thank you for your invitation, honourable senators, we will do our best to provide help as we can.
Mr. Jim Mitchell will make an opening statement; he can cover the main subject for both of us.
James R. Mitchell, Partner, Sussex Circle: Mr. Chairman, honourable senators, thank you for inviting us here today.
It is fair to say I am here as a proponent of the understanding of our system of government that the chair expressed succinctly in his opening remarks. That is the view of our Westminster system and accountability that I hold and that I advocate.
I prepared a short paper which has been distributed to members of the committee. I believe most members have had a chance to read it, so I will not read it now. I would like to take just a few minutes to make four points.
The Chairman: Please take more time than that for the benefit of our television viewers and the people who read the transcripts. I would like them to have the advantage of knowing some of the background to your conclusions.
Please take your time.
Mr. Mitchell: Mr. Chairman, it would be useful to you if I focused on the issues that I think are most relevant to you as parliamentarians. I have not bothered to take up some of the points discussed with you by witnesses who appeared previously. You will not find me arguing with what other people have said to you before; rather, I would like to make a few basic points that I think are relevant to your interests and concerns as senators.
First, in my view, the debate we have heard recently over accounting officers and the answerability of officials before Parliament has obscured the fundamental issues that are at stake.
In the sense that your committee is considering the matter, I believe that accountability is about democratic control over the actions of government. That is the nub of the issue as I see it. That is why, in my view, accountability matters so much to parliamentarians, and especially to members of the House of Commons.
Accountability is about a person's obligation to explain to an authority how a responsibility conferred by that authority has been discharged, whether successfully or not. Accountability is neither about who is to blame, nor, about who will or will not accept responsibility for things gone wrong. It is not about why it is sometimes difficult for members of Parliament to figure out in a particular case who is responsible for a particular decision or for a particular course of action.
The real question that I think should matter to parliamentarians is who is responsible before Parliament? Who can you hold responsible? Whose duty is it to account to you or, technically, to account to the members of the House of Commons for what has been done, for what has gone wrong? Whose duty is it to explain to you what will be done to fix the problem? In my view, that is what accountability is really all about.
I believe that our system of government provides a clear answer. If you are talking about the departments of government, and not about things like independent tribunals or Crown corporations which are deliberately at arm's length from ministers, then the answer is clear: The minister is responsible, just as the chairman said in his opening remarks.
The minister is accountable to Parliament for what has been done in and by his or her department. Our system is very clear on that point.
Our system is clear and simple. Most important, it is workable. There is always a minister responsible directly or indirectly for every aspect of government activity. Should there ever be any doubt as to which minister is responsible; you can always turn to the Prime Minister, who is responsible for everything.
Thus, it is a simple system. This is what responsible government is all about, as I think you said, Mr. Chairman, in your remarks. Responsible government abides by the principle that the people in whose hands the powers of the state have been entrusted by Parliament are themselves accountable to Parliament for the use of those powers. This, together with our system of regular, free elections is what makes us a democracy.
In my paper I ask: What is the matter with that? Why do people have problems with that? Why do some eminent and respectable people have problems with that? What is there about our system that needs fixing? This brings me to my second point.
I think the critics of accountability in our Westminster system of government are looking at the wrong kinds of solutions to the problems that arise from time to time in the workings of government.
What sorts of problems have we seen recently? We have seen evidence of mismanagement of government programs. We have seen serious allegations of improper conduct by ministers and officials in relation to those programs. We have seen that on the television and in the newspapers. It has been a subject of intense interest to Parliament and the public.
These are serious issues in which Parliament clearly has a major interest. Parliamentarians have a right to know what happens inside government and they have a duty to correct the problems.
Our system, our doctrine of accountability, must support this fundamental responsibility of Parliament.
Through its committees, Parliament can bring facts to light. Through committees like this, the Senate and the House can bring facts to light. Parliament can hold up ministers and officials to critical scrutiny and ask ministers and officials to explain and justify their decisions and their conduct. In a political sense, it can assign blame and even apply sanctions to political actors. This is all to say that Parliament can hold politicians accountable, if it chooses to do so.
I would observe that the solidarity of the government caucus is not a hindrance to holding politicians accountable. If the opposition is sufficiently critical of a minister, the government caucus may reach the point that it too wants to see the minister gone for the good of the government. Our system accommodates a rigorous exercise of parliamentary authority and relationship of accountability over ministers.
In my view, what Parliament cannot do is serve as a court. It does not have the jurisdiction or the tools to conduct investigations or to pronounce with finality on whether someone has broken the law. Parliament should not try to hold non-political actors, that is, officials, to account for matters of administration. This is one of my key points before you today, honourable senators. I do not think that Parliament should try to hold officials accountable directly for administration. I take the traditional view.
The non-political actors, the officials, have no political standing. They have no capacity and no right to speak in their own defence before you. Indeed, if they were to speak in response to political criticism, they would become, by definition, political. Those officials would become politicized. In effect, they would be trying to be political actors. That would destroy their usefulness as permanent officials. They would become politically identified and coloured. If this were to happen, they could hardly serve, as our Westminster system expects, as the loyal servants of a new government from the opposing party after the next election.
Thus, if officials have performed badly, it is the responsibility of the government and not Parliament to correct that problem.
One of the great frustrations in the various inquiries into the sponsorship affair was that when asked who was responsible for various decisions, ministers and officials did not reply with clear answers. In such a situation people concluded, that no one was responsible, and this was clearly unacceptable to them, to members of Parliament, editorialists and the people of Canada. This would be unacceptable, if and only if, there was no one responsible, but that is not so. The current minister is always responsible for what is and has been done in and by his or her department. Our Westminster doctrine says quite clearly that there is always a minister responsible, and members of Parliament are entitled to hold the minister accountable for what has happened.
That is not to say that the minister is necessarily to blame for what has happened. The minister is not to blame unless he or she gave inappropriate direction, failed to exercise proper oversight of the department or was otherwise engaged in personal misconduct. Commissions of inquiry settle those sorts of questions, and it is certainly not for me to prejudge the work of Mr. Justice Gomery, so I have no comment on that particular subject.
There can be no doubt, when talking about the departments of government, who is responsible, who is accountable, and who will devise a corrective action for problems that have arisen. It is the minister. That is automatic.
Senators may recall that in recent years many of the difficulties on matters of accountability have come up because some ministers failed to understand the difference between being responsible and accountable for something, and being personally to blame when things go wrong. This confusion inevitably occurs when officials make errors of which ministers had no prior knowledge and of which ministers would not have approved had they known what would happen, and where ministers did not give direction. In such cases, a minister's natural instinct is to deflect public criticism by putting responsibility for the errors or misjudgments on the shoulders of those who committed those errors or misjudgements, the officials. There is a natural tendency to say, "I did not know about it; he did it. How can you blame me?"
Hence, the hunt for the guilty party begins and it almost always ends badly. The officials carry some public blame, but they appear to suffer no bad consequences. This is a perception that is not really borne out by the facts. Departmental officials are fully accountable up the chain of command to their deputy minister, and far more frequently than the public appreciates, officials suffer discipline, damage to careers and reputations, and even dismissal for serious mistakes they have made. If they commit criminal offences, they can be prosecuted and convicted. We have seen cases of that in recent weeks and months. That is something that neither Arthur nor I are pleased to see, but it drives home the point that there are consequences for misconduct or for illegal conduct. This is where parliamentarians and Canadians in general become frustrated with the "not my fault" syndrome that seems to have shown up in the Gomery process as well.
As my colleague Mr. Kroeger has explained very well in other settings, government decision making is very complex, and questions of responsibility and fault are seldom crystal clear. There are many people involved in almost every decision, and there are many officials involved in the implementation of almost every decision.
The issue for Parliament is not so much whose fault it is, rather, the questions is what has gone wrong, and what is being done to fix it? What assurance do we have that these kinds of problems will not recur? What steps are being taken to discipline officials who may have acted unwisely or improperly?
These are all questions to which parliamentarians can and should demand answers from ministers.
People are advocating change, so why not change our system? I believe that if we were to change our doctrine to make the minister not responsible to Parliament for things done under the authority of the deputy, two things would happen. The authority of the minister over the department would be greatly diminished, and political authority in our system would be greatly diminished. Equally important, the authority of Parliament over the minister and the department would be significantly weakened.
Surely this is not what parliamentarians would like to see; nor, I believe, is it what Canadians would like to see. I will take a moment to explain why I think changing our doctrine in the way that some people have suggested would have these pernicious consequences.
Some people have suggested that we should limit the authority and accountability of the minister to policy, and declare that the minister has no responsibility before Parliament for matters of administration. If you did that, you would change the fundamental relationship between the minister and the deputy minister. Rather than having the minister as a single focus of authority and accountability, you would have two such authorities essentially coequal, except that the second one, the deputy minister, would be effectively outside the purview of Parliament. That is because, as I observed a few minutes ago, Parliament and its committees are a political forum and the deputy minister is not a political actor.
A parliamentary committee is not a management forum; it has no authority over the deputy. The committee can ask questions but it cannot direct or sanction the deputy. The committee is not an enduring entity; its membership changes. It has no powers to remedy a situation; it does not stand in the line of command.
It is worth noting that the distinction that is drawn between policy, on the one hand, and administration, on the other, paints much too crude a picture of what is done inside government. Departments and agencies, as senators know well, are also involved in things like regulation and program delivery. The political-bureaucratic interface is most frequent and most difficult to sort out in these two areas.
Under the alternative model proposed by some critics, who would be responsible and accountable for those aspects of government activity? Is it the minister or the deputy or both of them together? In my view, drawing a clear, hard line is not possible.
Notice also that a minister who was not responsible for the department in all its aspects would have no right to demand any particular standard of management performance from the deputy minister, because the minister would also be outside the line of command. If the minister and the deputy were to disagree on a matter of administration, the minister would be reduced to writing to the deputy and to having their differences made known to the Auditor General and the public accounts Committee, or perhaps the committee on national finance.
The Chairman: To whom would the deputy report and to whom would he be responsible?
Mr. Mitchell: On this theory, the deputy would be accountable to Parliament but would report to the Treasury Board, the Comptroller General, the Clerk of the Privy Council. It becomes unclear on the alternative view, whereas on the classical view of which I am a proponent it is clear that the deputy is accountable to the minister.
These kinds of changes would change the relationship between the minister and the deputy minister from one of trust and close collaboration to an uneasy cooperation between equals across spheres of distinct authority and responsibility.
Senators, I do not think that is Canadian democracy. I think that is something different. You could go down that path, but it is not clear that you would end up with something that you would recognize as Canadian democracy.
I will conclude by saying that I am not a complete stick in the mud. It is not as though we cannot make changes that would make things better. I have three recommendations.
I recommend that Parliament, through the committees of the House and Senate, reaffirm its determination to hold ministers accountable for everything that is done in and by their departments.
I recommend that Parliament take steps to make that accountability meaningful. I recommend that you reaffirm this fundamental relationship between Parliament and ministers.
How do we make it meaningful? As one example, you could get ministers and parliamentary secretaries before committee more frequently.
In addition, committees could make better use of their time for sustained, in-depth questioning of witnesses. I have views on how that could be made meaningful and effective for committees and for officials as well. You could ensure that members of committees are well prepared for these sessions, in part by seeing that committees have adequate staff resources, budgets and whatnot to help them get to the meat of the programs and issues they are examining.
If you would like to ask about that later, I have many views on how to make it meaningful and effective for committees and for officials as well.
My second recommendation is that ministers, recommit themselves to this traditional doctrine of accountability; and that ministers commit themselves also to engaging with committees more seriously than they may have in the past.
I recommend that the House and the Senate take the necessary steps to articulate in written form the classical doctrine of ministerial accountability and communicate the substance and merits of that doctrine to Canadians.
I obviously see important strengths in our Westminster system of government and in the principles of accountability that underpin it. My basic message to the committee is that we do not need to change the system; we need to use it as it was intended to be used.
That is a rather long opening statement, Mr. Chairman, but there you go. That is my statement.
The Chairman: That was an excellent and extremely useful opening statement, particularly your three recommendations, which you invited us to ask you about later on; I know we will.
You say that now, officials or deputy ministers do not have political status because of the doctrine that you have clearly explained. There are some statutes in Canada today that have clauses in them that say things like, "the deputy minister shall be solely and exclusively responsible for and have the power over and be exclusively responsible to do the following..."
What happens to the doctrine of ministerial responsibility in that case?
You say that there is always a minister responsible; but in our Canadian position, once a minister leaves the department where the infraction took place and goes to another department, that minister is no longer responsible and answerable.
Do you see that there is a problem with that doctrine?
You say very clearly that we do not have to do anything or change anything because there is always a minister responsible. However, it is not fair to a new departmental minister who has to deal with all the rotten eggs. That is not a good way to have our system.
I would love to hear your response to my first two questions.
Mr. Mitchell: With respect to your first point, Mr. Chairman, you are absolutely right; there are some specific cases — six, eight or 10 of them or perhaps more — where statutory authority is vested in the deputy head rather than the minister. That is absolutely true. In those cases, obviously, the minister does not have the legal authority; the authority rests with one of his or her officials.
Our system can accommodate that situation. Those are the exceptions that, in effect, prove the rule. In cases like that, when the deputy comes before your committee to answer on a matter for which the deputy is statutorily responsible, the deputy is going to take that questioning very seriously. The committee knows that the deputy was not acting under ministerial direction on that matter. The deputy will have to answer for how he exercised that statutory authority that was vested in him.
The Chairman: In answer to a parliamentary committee or parliamentary committees?
Mr. Mitchell: Yes, in answer to the parliamentary committee. That does not mean, however, that the deputy is politically accountable to that committee. For example, if the committee wants to launch a political attack on the actions taken by the deputy under that statute, that is where the minister would step in and say, "Mr. Chairman, I am here, I am the minister, I will answer for everything that is done in my department. This is something where the authority rests with the deputy, but the deputy has no political capacity to defend himself or herself before the committee. If you want a political defence, turn to me; if you want to know what happened, ask the deputy minister what was done there and you will get a full answer."
I think Parliament's interest in getting a full answer and the public's interest can be fully satisfied without turning the deputy minister into a political figure.
Do you see my point?
The Chairman: Yes.
Mr. Mitchell: With regard to your second point about the fact that ministers change, if I may say, Mr. Chairman, my point still stands. What Parliament wants to know is who is responsible, and the current minister is responsible. If the current minister took up the job last month, the minister might have to say, "I will find out but it is my responsibility, I am the minister."
The Chairman: As a philosopher, does that make sense to you?
Mr. Mitchell: Yes, because accountability is not about blame; it is about who will stand up before us and take responsibility for this matter. Who will tell us what went on? Who will find out what went on? Who will take the corrective action if there is a problem?
The simple fact is that if there is a problem today and a new minister arrives, the one who will take the corrective action and who will take the heat for the problem is the current minister. The one who may be to blame might be the one who left office. Members of Parliament can blame whomever they want and the public can blame whomever they want. However, the one who is responsible before you is the minister who holds the office that is before you today.
Mr. Kroeger: The important point is if you discover that something has gone wrong in the department, you have to be in a position of authority to fix the problem. If you are the Minister of Energy and a problem turns up in the Department of Energy and your predecessor is off in the Department of Agriculture, he or she cannot fix that problem.
The Chairman: That is the Canadian law.
Mr. Kroeger: Yes. It does not mean, incidentally, that there are no penalties if it comes to light that a minister did a bad job; it is just that those penalties usually apply and relate to the Prime Minister in his next appointment.
The Chairman: What about the doctrine of accountability? Should we question the previous minister and hold him or her to account?
Mr. Kroeger: To explain the problem?
The Chairman: Yes, to account.
Mr. Kroeger: That has been known to happen, Mr. Chairman, in the sense that in the human resources affair of a few years ago — this was not a minister, but it is the same principle — the former deputy minister did appear in front of a parliamentary committee to provide an explanation of what happened.
In the case of officials, I do not see anything particularly wrong with that. I am more hesitant about blurring the picture of which minister is in charge of a particular department at a particular time, no matter what went on before.
To be responsible means you are in charge; it does not mean you are to blame. It means you are in charge and that you have the authority to ask the questions and to give directions on how to fix the problem.
Senator Stratton: I agree with you on the Westminster system and that we should stick to it and make it work.
My problem — and I think the problem on the part of most Canadians — is that this system does not seem to work in many instances. I am not blaming any particular government in this case; it just does not seem to be working. Whether it is becoming too complex or whatever is happening, the public perception is that the wheels are off and something must be done. That is why I think we are seeing these alternative solutions coming forward.
To sit here and say to ourselves and to the Canadian public that the Westminster system is really quite good and we should stick to it, Canadians are sitting there, looking at us and saying, "Oh? Show me."
We need to prove to the public that your recommendations will work. They want to see the proof that this will work. I think that is how the public feels right now.
Can you answer that question?
I do not want to refer to Gomery and HRDC because the issue is not to go into specifics but to determine how to prevent such issues from happening again. That is what the Canadian public wants to see and hear. We have this recurring every few years in government and yet we are telling Canadians that the Westminster parliamentary system works. Naturally, their view is that it does not work. The public can speak to specific issues to show that the "wheels have come off."
Mr. Kroeger: The Westminster system is not a foolproof way of preventing things from happening. The Westminster system is designed to deal with things when they happen. There is no 100 per cent guarantee that a department will not have something go wrong.
The question is what you do when things go wrong. The answer is an existing accountability system involving ministers and officials at all levels. In terms of preventing such occurrences, there will never be a foolproof system.
Mr. Mitchell: I would add to Mr. Kroeger's comment by saying that it would make a difference if committee proceedings in both the House of Commons and the Senate provided a more serious, in-depth, searching and critical scrutiny of government programs and policies.
On policies you can call the minister or the parliamentary secretary and on government programs you can call officials, whether the deputy minister or ADM or some other official.
It is my view that the more we dignify and give credence to what Parliament does in respect of those programs and policies, the more officials will stay on their toes, and the more ministers will be responsible. The will act in this way because they will know that they may face a grilling before a committee.
With more televised committee proceedings, more staff doing more and better-prepared research to support committee work, the more you will extract a meaningful accountability from the government.
Senator, you would probably see a genuine improvement over time, although there would are no guarantees that problems would not arise.
Senator Stratton: I have been around here long enough to have seen one particular case continue for year's, Bill C-68 in respect of gun control.
This committee grilled officials from Treasury Board and each year there would be another chunk and another explanation. It gradually mounted until it blew up. How do we prevent that from happening? Treasury Board officials might say that they want something now but what about next year? That is what happened with the gun control budget; it was out of control and yet it continued. Despite examination by this committee and the House committee, it continued year after year.
The question posed by Canadians is how do we prevent that from happening?
Mr. Kroeger, you are shaking your head.
Mr. Kroeger: You can make a judgment. A minister deals with an operation within a department, such as the gun registry. Officials might come in and say that it will cost much more than originally forecast, it will be more complicated and will take a longer time to implement. The minister then can make a judgment by saying one of two things: First, he can decide to scrap the program or, second, he can decide to proceed with it, even though it will cost more.
That is a political judgment call made by the minister, who then informs Parliament that the program will cost more money and that he thinks it is worth it and that he has directed the department to go ahead with it. The only person who can make that judgment is a minister or a cabinet. Therefore, it is right that they should then have to account to a committee, such as this one, as to why they did it. The value judgment of the importance of a program like the gun registry does not rest with officials. That is a political judgment of the cabinet.
Senator Stratton: I accept that. Forgive me, I want to finish.
The Chairman: Senator, are you moving on to another area?
Senator Stratton: No, this is a continuation of my original question. I accept that because that is exactly what the minister did, he determined that the program was too important to give up but the same thing happened year after year.
What were the consequences for government in this issue, because that is what upsets the citizens of this country? Thank you.
Senator Downe: I wish to follow up on the gun registry example used by Senator Stratton.
If the minister received the same information that the House of Commons and Senate committees received at a time when the problem was manageable, then the minister could have said it would take X number of dollars to fix it that year. However, the next year the minister was informed, once again, that there was a little cost overrun and that it would cost more money yet again. The minister may not have been receiving the correct information any more than the committees were receiving correct information.
Where is the system accountability in that case?
Mr. Kroeger: If the minister finds that the program has been mismanaged by officials, then officials pay for it. You do not have a public hanging, and a minister does not denounce his officials in public but deals with them by moving them or in some cases demoting them.
These things happen, although they do not receive much publicity. A judgment call has to be made on the question of whether it was unforeseeable or was it simply bad management. If it was bad management, an official would have to pay for it, and often more than one official pays for it in one way or another.
Senator Downe: On that example, the conclusion is that it was bad management because the government ended up moving the program from one department to another in an effort to correct some of the problems.
Mr. Mitchell, you said,
Departmental officials are fully accountable, up the chain of command to their deputy ministers.
You both said that this accountability might come to dismissal because of making serious mistakes.
Are you aware of any deputy ministers who have lost their jobs over the last 10 years?
Mr. Kroeger: I know of one who resigned voluntarily because things went badly. It was Ian Stewart, who was Deputy Minister of Finance in 1981. Senator MacEachen, as he later became, brought down a budget that contained many mistakes. Some elements turned out to be unworkable.
It was a great political embarrassment for the government and Mr. Stewart sent a letter to the Prime Minister saying that he had a big hand in the crafting of the budget and it went badly, and so offered his resignation.
Senator Downe: That is a good example because it happened in 1981, and the wheels may have come off just in the last number of years.
My final comment, chair, is to pick up on an earlier question asked before another committee about deputy ministers, to which Mr. Mitchell referred today as well.
It seems that in reality, deputy minister's report to their ministers but they are accountable to the Clerk of the Privy Council who recommends their appointments and determines their future career options. Their accountability is not to the minister, who is in the House of Commons, but to Privy Council.
Mr. Mitchell: Certainly, senators are aware that deputy ministers have multiple accountabilities and that is one of the defining features of their positions.
Deputy ministers are accountable to their respective ministers. They are accountable in a kind of management sense to the Clerk of the Privy Council, who recommends their names to the Prime Minister. Deputy ministers are accountable to the Prime Minister, who signs their recommendation on the Order-in-Council. They are accountable to Treasury Board for certain authorities authorized by Treasury Board, as senators have pointed out. They are accountable to the Public Service Commission for other authorities. At minimum, there are five areas of accountability.
Senator, you are right; deputy ministers have a network of accountabilities that makes their lives complicated. However, each deputy minister is and feels accountable to his or her minister.
Mr. Kroeger, you have been a deputy.
Mr. Kroeger: There is a fundamental, underlying principle that is important. You are appointed by the Prime Minister on the recommendation of the clerk. The Prime Minister appoints you and the Prime Minister is your ultimate boss. The Prime Minister's expectation is that you will be loyal to your minister and that you will work under the direction of that minister.
This position becomes important when and if your minister wants to do something which is improper, if not illegal, or that could cause the government serious embarrassment.
If your sole accountability were to the minister, you would just have to salute and say, "Okay, we will do that." If in your judgment this is such an ill considered action and contrary to government policy, capable of causing the government enormous trouble, you have a duty to alert the Prime Minister because, ultimately, you work for the Prime Minister, and it is the Prime Minister who is in charge of the government.
The Chairman: The deputy minister does that through the Clerk of the Privy Council.
Mr. Kroeger: Yes, he or she reports that through the Clerk of the Privy Council.
You would never go to the PM; at least, I do not think so. You have an absolute duty to alert the Prime Minister that something is going wrong, and he has to make a judgment because you cannot instruct the minister, but the Prime Minister can.
Senator Downe: How does it work the other way where the minister wants to do something that is legal, above board, in the interests of the government of the day, and the deputy is opposed to it and will not see to its implementation?
Mr. Kroeger: That is unprofessional. That is one of the most damaging adjectives that you can apply to a deputy minister.
Senator Downe: Since 1981, has any deputy been dismissed?
Mr. Kroeger: Let me answer the first question.
If the minister wants to do something that is within government policy and respects the rule of law, the deputy minister has a duty to point out why it will not work or why it is a bad idea or why it will upset the provinces.
The minister and deputy can have the longest argument, but if at the end of the day the minister wants to go ahead with the plan, the deputy has to comply. The deputy is not a separate persona from the minister; the minister is the boss.
If the minister is working within the law and within government policy and wants to proceed the deputy must follow, but after having discharged his or her obligation to point out any problems.
Mr. Mitchell: In our system, as Senator Downe has pointed out, the Prime Minister appoints deputies.
In other Westminster governments, for example, Australia and New Zealand, I believe, ministers have a great deal more discretion in the choice of their deputies.
Our view is that those kinds of systems do not work as well as ours because the fact that the Prime Minister appoints the deputy brings a certain unity and balance to the dynamic within government.
If you have a minister and a deputy, each of them looking at one another, both appointed by the Prime Minister, they each have a job to do and they both know that. That helps to bring a bit of unity to a government that, in a country like Canada, with all of the regional differences and all of the variety in our system, could easily fragment. It prevents fragmentation.
Most people who study these things would say that the appointment of deputies by the Prime Minister is a deliberate and positive feature of our system, because they have accountability up in that direction as well as to their minister, as Mr. Kroeger was saying.
Mr. Kroeger: In response to Senator Downe's second question, an academic survey found that one-third of the deputy ministers that were moved were moved involuntarily. In other words, it was not that the deputy wanted to go to another department, but for one reason or another, such as a conflict with the minister or bad performance, the deputy was moved. These moves happen quietly. You do not point fingers or name people; however, ministers, the Prime Minister and others do deal with inadequate performance.
Senator Downe: The point I was trying to make is that a minister, on occasion, can lose his or her position because of problems. Deputies are moved to positions that are sometimes better or sometimes worse or there is little or no accountability.
I have one minor comment: If all the deputy ministers were like Mr. Kroeger, we would not be having this discussion today.
Senator Ringuette: I certainly concur with my colleague Senator Downe in regard to the issues regarding gun control.
You indicate that the minister has to make a "judgment call." You do not make a judgment call out of the blue. No minister elaborates programs. Ministers give policy guidelines and mandate the bureaucracy to provide options and risk analyses and cost analyses and all of what is involved in feasibility studies. That is not done by the political arm of government.
Yet, it is still the political arm of government that bears the responsibility, and you say, "Absolutely, that must be true." There is an old saying: He who has the information, has the power. If the bureaucracy has all the information, and, therefore, all the power, then why is it not held accountable for that power?
Mr. Mitchell: Senator Ringuette, based on my experience, I have to respectfully disagree with you. It is not my experience or that of any senior official that I know that the bureaucracy has all the power.
Senator Ringuette: You provide the information, you design the programs, and you say which option is the best one.
Mr. Mitchell: Far more often than you might think, senator, the minister says, "Look, I want to do this. I was elected to do this. This was in our platform, this is my priority, or this is the Prime Minister's priority. I spoke to the Prime Minister, and we are going to do this. We want to do this." The officials will say, "Well, minister, you know that will cost a lot of money," and the minister says, "I know that, but I want you to keep the costs down, and we are going to do it."
Senator Ringuette: I am sorry. It is not as simple as you would like us to accept. For a minister to bring something to cabinet, to have the proper funding, the proper go-ahead, he or she needs to have all the options, all the costs involved, all the political and non-political bureaucratic ramifications and, if possible, the regional impact studies.
Mr. Mitchell: Yes, absolutely, senator.
Senator Ringuette: I will move on further when I come to my official.
Mr. Kroeger: In a department, there is a huge body of information that is very complicated. One of the most difficult judgment calls is to determine which information is most important to bring to the minister. The minister does not have all day. What are the key things you must absolutely tell the minister so the minister understands the subject clearly?
How do you make it intelligible because some of the stuff about computers is very complex?
You have to do your best to provide information and to make it intelligible to help the minister arrive at an informed view. Anybody who deliberately withheld information that was relevant to the ministers' decisions and it became clear that he or she withheld that information, would have a short career. One of the worst things you can do is to mislead a minister or to withhold information. You just do not do it.
Senator Mitchell: I am concerned we have become squeamish about politics in the modern era and mistake politics for democracy. If you begin to attack politics and politicians' accountability, you run the risk of attacking democracy.
If we went across the country and looked at the legislative and parliamentary democracies, we would find that many deputy ministers were fired.
Let us focus, Senator Downe, on how many governments have been fired and how many ministers have been unelected by the electorate. To say there is no accountability or consequence in our system is to say it does not matter and this government lost its majority for excesses the public may have seen. This is significant in parliamentary democracy.
I fear we overreact and may end up getting what we do not want. I have profound beliefs in parliamentary and representative democracies. We run the risk of reducing democracy and reducing to managerialism, as specified by Mr. Kroeger. Managerialism may appear to be cleaner but it excludes the application of values and people elect governments based on values. These are my views.
This is a definitive point of departure. When we give more power to deputy ministers, de facto, we are taking power away from ministers. The electorate does not elect deputy ministers. The very essence of democracy is undercut, because we want to manage by committee. Eventually, we would have this committee firing deputy ministers or assistant deputy ministers, or calling executive directors. We would also have the executive secretaries or secretaries at the bottom. Where does it end?
Our system is imperfect now, but I think we cannot lose focus on how a minister is held responsible. The electorate does this and has done it effectively over the years in our government. I put a plea in for this focus.
Mr. Mitchell: Senator Mitchell, I agree with and share your concerns. This worries me as well.
Senator Mitchell: I would like to pursue the idea that the public service and servants are omnipotent. They make their case and are very sensitive to what elected politicians say. Ultimately, public servants believe in the democratic process.
The reverse can be true, that they will make their fight. I have seen it in another jurisdiction, where it is quite arbitrary. I would not underestimate the power of the politician over bureaucracy. If bureaucracy or the bureaucrat manipulates or falsely leads a minister, the focus and accountability process should be to hold the minister responsible.
Mr. Kroeger: A minister is in charge and, should a discrepancy arise he or she should deal with it. It is impossible that a minister be expected to know and control everything that goes on in a department. It is for the minister to take charge and delegate to the deputy minister.
People get confused and say government is too big and complicated, and no minister can manage a department of 20,000 people. We do not expect a minister to control everything in a department. If the minister is in charge when something goes wrong, he or she is the person who fixes it and explains it to Parliament. No one else can explain what is being done because that relationship is the one Mr. Mitchell was talking about, which is key.
Mr. Mitchell: Honourable senators, the committee should not take either of us to say that parliamentary committees should not hold officials and their actions up to critical scrutiny. Committees should call in officials and make them answer whether they informed the minister of certain important information. The committees should call the minister when mistakes occur and ask what is going on in his or her department.
There is plenty of room for committees of the Senate and the House to extract full accountability from the minister and to subject officials to proper, thorough, in-depth, and critical questioning about what is going on in those programs and the administration of government.
The Chairman: It is interesting when you refer to committees of the House of Commons and the Senate. This summer Peter Aucoin wrote a paper in which he tried to determine what went wrong and who is to blame. His belief is that the real answer rests with the House of Commons because they are the only legitimate chamber of Parliament because the Senate is illegitimate because it is not elected.
Are you of Peter Aucoin's view?
Mr. Mitchell: I am of the view that democratic accountability is extracted by the House of Commons; that the fundamental relationship of democratic authority and accountability is between the House and the ministers who sit in the House.
The Chairman: Can you tell me what that means?
Mr. Mitchell: The parliamentary body to whom ministers are democratically accountable is the House of Commons.
Mr. Kroeger: Can I put it another way, senator? It is the House that vote's confidence or non-confidence in a government and can confirm a government in office or turn it out of office.
Mr. Mitchell: Maintaining that confidence is what the minister is doing by satisfying Parliament that they have been doing an adequate job.
The Senate, as a legitimate parliamentary chamber and body, has a duty and every right to question officials, ministers and parliamentary secretaries on policies and programs, as it sees fit. I believe officials, and others, should appear before you to respond to your questions.
Mr. Kroeger: When I first appeared in front of a parliamentary committee, it was the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance in 1974. I was not a deputy minister, but a Treasury Board official. Year in and year out, I appeared in front of committees and asked every kind of question.
There is a myth that officials do not have to give an account to a committee. We do it all the time and at length. There is no limit to what kinds of questions committees can ask you. I remember appearing before the House committee on Official Languages and asked why I hated French Canadians so much.
Senator Ringuette: What was your answer?
Mr. Kroeger: They can ask you anything and they do. The one limitation is that although you give an accounting before a committee the committee is unable to instruct you. It cannot instruct you, it cannot punish you because it is not the boss; the minister is your boss.
Senator Mitchell: One of the ironies of giving more power to an unelected official, the deputy minister, particularly one who is appointed by the Privy Council and ultimately responsible therefore to the Prime Minister, is that contrary to what this initiative is seen to be driven by in some people's minds, probably in opposition minds, is it actually centralizes power. It actually reduces the spread of power to a cabinet and centralizes it more and more. Often, populist initiatives end up doing that because they disburse accountability in such a profound way that the reaction to that, or the consequences of that is power is centralized. I think that is something that needs to be considered in this as well. Do you not agree?
Mr. Mitchell: Yes, I do. I think that if accountability becomes confused or diffused, the power still remains somewhere, but the accountability disappears or it is hard to track. I do not think that is good for democracy.
I perfectly agree, if ministers are clearly responsible and accountable you know where to look for answers.
Senator Harb: The last time you were before this committee, you acknowledged that our Westminster system was under review to figure out whether or not it is still relevant in today's technological revolution where in a fraction of a second, you can send information from one end of the globe to the other.
Would you not think, perhaps, it is time for both wings of Parliament to sit down and have a look at the relevancy of this system?
Is it not time to discuss the fact that we have a minister appointed by a Prime Minister, who in essence has overall control in terms of how the system works, both in Parliament and outside Parliament?
Is it still relevant, or should we come up with another system where the minister is not a member of Parliament, but a person who has the time and expertise to run the department? This is how it is done in the United States. Should we follow the American model but maintain the accountability to Parliament?
Mr. Mitchell: That is a wonderful question, senator. The Americans have a fundamentally different system than our system. As you know, their ministers are picked by the President and not accountable to the House or the Senate. It can make for quite a unified administration; that is for sure. It does not do accountability much good at all. The Americans are much weaker on accountability than are we. What you get in America is perpetual politics, without enough of the democracy that to which Senator Mitchell referred.
Personally, I believe that we do not pay enough attention in Canada to the strengths of our system. There is a wonderful resiliency, there is a wonderful sort of self-correcting character to this Westminster system that we have. It balances ministerial authority with prime ministerial leadership.
There are always adjustments that can be made or might need to be made, but the fundamentals of our system are quite impressive. If you notice, the Westminster system is far more easily transplantable around the world than is the American system, which is not transplantable anywhere. I am not aware of a country that has successfully adopted something like the American system. A couple of countries in Africa have had it semi-imposed on them but it has not really worked.
The Chairman: The American system does not work that well.
Senator Harb: One can say our system is not perfect at all because with the push of a button, the Prime Minister or the whip can decide how members will vote on any given legislation. My interest is to go with the government every time because, in the end, the other ones will bring the bread to the table during an election period. I do not have a lot of flexibility as a parliamentarian to have discussions like the one we are having right now. I will toe the party line, so whether the minister is right or wrong, I will defend him because ultimately I am on a ship and if there is a hole in it we will all sink.
Where is the accountability in our system? I am sorry, but the confidence level in politicians is something like 15 per cent, which is slightly behind car salesmen and journalists. There is a problem overall and I do not know how we are going to address that problem. What do you think?
Mr. Kroeger: A member of Parliament or anyone in elected office makes a decision whether to go along with the government of the day; whether to be a rebel and take the consequences; or, whether to vote even though he or she does not think it is a great idea but for a larger purpose decides to support the government. Those are individual decisions. In making that decision, the member becomes responsible for it and has to live with it.
I am not sure that it raises problems of accountability per se, does it?
Senator Harb: Of course it does. I will not bite the hand that feeds me. I was a member of Parliament for a number of years, and I do not ever remember once voting against the government, even though I was often tempted to do so. I knew there would be consequences if I were to embarrass the government and vote against a piece of legislation that was not in the best interests of my constituents. I might be opposed to the legislation, but this is a party system and I have to toe the party line. My loyalty is to the party, not to the public who elected me, as one might think.
Mr. Mitchell: That solidarity in the House that you and others exhibited also gave us majority government, direction and results. Things were done and decisions were taken that let Canadians see what the government was doing. You did not have perpetual paralysis the way it is in some countries where there are 14 parties and nothing ever happens. There are virtues in solidarity too.
Senator Ringuette: Is there not a regularly scheduled meeting of deputy ministers?
Mr. Mitchell: There are a number of committees and a number of meetings. There is a weekly breakfast, and other committees that meet on a regular basis.
Senator Ringuette: Do they shadow the cabinet committees and cabinet?
Mr. Kroeger: In some cases.
Mr. Mitchell: Yes, in some cases. The system was more developed in the past than it is now. It used to be formally established. There would be committees of deputies for each cabinet committee. I am not sure they have it quite as rigidly set up now as it used to be 20 years ago.
Mr. Kroeger: I lived with those rigid systems 20 years ago and they did not work all that well.
What you normally get is if the government wanted to do something about Kyoto and air pollution or climate change, you put together a group of officials from different departments to work on this to try to work out what might be possible, and to reconcile some of the basic conflicting interests.
You do that to develop a set of proposals that you can work on with ministers and they will eventually tell us to go back and do it again or that they do not like it, or they will say that they will take it as it is. However, it is kind of ad hoc.
Usually, now, if you have a meeting of a group of deputy ministers or officials it is about a particular subject, whether it is new agricultural subsidies or the price of oil et cetera. There are not many standing committees dealing with program matters.
Senator Ringuette: In the 13 or 14 years that I have been around government, I have heard that there is a tendency by PCO to have more structured and official committees.
I do believe in the Westminster model of accountability and that ministers and cabinet are ultimately accountable in Parliament; however, I believe that since the 1960s there has been a systematic move by the bureaucracy to take control of the operating arms of government. I believe that the problem of appointing fault lies with accountability. I purposely did not say, "pointing the finger." The problem is with appointing fault to a minister rather than the system and its operation.
I say that because of my knowledge that political parties have broad-line policies and when they become part of the government they turn the policies over to the machinery of government to analyze the issues and come up with options.
I know that there are probably more regular deputy minister meetings than there full-blown cabinet meetings. I believe that deputy ministers bring issues for other deputy ministers to approve before the minister brings those issues to cabinet.
There is a certain matter of ego involved, because a deputy minister gets an option approved by his or her colleagues, yet the minister cannot get it approved by his ministerial colleagues. That dynamic is alive and well and is a major issue in our discussion on accountability. There are two sets of conflicting powers: one that exercises power and one that has to submit to power.
Mr. Kroeger: I will start by saying that it is not wise to assume that when officials meet it is to conspire against ministers.
Senator Ringuette: I did not say "conspire"; I said to agree among themselves.
Mr. Kroeger: One of the very important functions that has to be performed, probably increasingly so as government becomes more horizontal, is to have long discussions about documents to ensure that everything has been covered. The worst thing that can happen is to get into cabinet with a document and have a minister say, "I never heard about this and I don not agree with it," whereupon the chair sends you out of the room, asking you to do your homework before returning.
There is more centralization of government, and successive prime ministers in the past 20 years have seen a need for a certain amount of centralization in order to make government coherent, which is very difficult to do.
If deputy ministers meeting for breakfast for an hour every Wednesday helps, which sometimes it does, then you do it. The purpose of this is to try to make government work and to try to provide support to the cabinet and not to provide ministers with precooked solutions that they have no option but to accept. I have run into enough heavy weather with ministers that I can tell you that they do not simply rubber stamp whatever you take to them.
Mr. Mitchell: In thinking of the six or seven people who have held the job of cabinet secretary since 1975, every one that I can remember has been accused of running too centralized a system. Gordon Robertson might be the last one who was not accused of running too centralized a system.
To some extent, this is always a concern for us. There is always the concern of whether the PCO has too much power, whether there is too much happening in the centre, whether the deputies have too much power. That is a perennial topic. I do not think it is markedly worse now than it was in 1984 or 1974. Much depends on the politicians and, as a citizen, I am glad of that.
By far the most important determinant of the personality, character and nature of a government is the Prime Minister who holds office. That shapes everything, and from a democratic point of view, I think that is a good thing.
The Chairman: That is our system.
Senator Ringuette: I believe there is strong partisanship in the high-ranking public employee community. Senator Harb has described the phenomenon of partisanship with members of Parliament and holding the party line, and I truly believe that the same phenomenon is apparent in the high-ranking public servants of Canada.
I recall that less than 12 months ago, a House of Commons committee received a deputy minister, an assistant deputy minister and a director of the Employment Insurance Program. They put forth an estimate of $350 million to implement an item, when the reality was $50 million. The minister and the House committee based their decisions on that estimate. Somebody, somewhere, other than the minister, has to be accountable for that wrongful information that both the minister and parliamentarians received.
I am in this grey area in this regard. This is our system, but behind that system, there is machinery that does not hold parliamentarians in very high regard and their role and the job we have to do. We must receive the correct information in order to make a proper judgment call. That is my little ball of fire right now.
Mr. Mitchell: I cannot comment on the case you just described because I do not know about that particular committee appearance.
I can tell you, however, that every senior official that I know, without exception, takes appearances before committees of the House and Senate very seriously. Not to do so would be profoundly unprofessional and dangerous.
Second, to mislead a committee or to give false information to a committee is a dangerous thing to do.
Senator Harb: Would that action result in a jail penalty?
Mr. Mitchell: I suppose so. It would be so unprofessional and improper that I have never heard of an official deliberately misleading a committee. I have seen officials go before a committee and stonewall, and I did not like to see that.
The Chairman: That happens frequently. We hear, "I am sorry, I do not know anything about this."
Mr. Mitchell: I do not like that; but the idea that officials would go there and mislead a committee is staggering. May I say, though, that I think some committees do not go far enough in insisting on obtaining full and accurate information from the witnesses that come before them?
Committees could do more to insist that they get the right information, the full information; and if they do not get the right information, they should call the witnesses back.
The Chairman: That was one of your three recommendations. You recommended that committees perform sustained in-depth questioning of witnesses. You also recommend that committees have adequate staff resources. These are excellent recommendations and I would like you to elaborate on them.
Mr. Mitchell: This is something that many members of the Senate and the House have thought about in recent years. I know the current government committed itself before the last election to doing this kind of thing.
I am sure senators know this, but I think particularly on the House side, the rules of questioning in committee do not allow for sustained in-depth examination of witness in a focused way. You get a disconnected series of questions from around the table. Most officials come out of those committees relatively unscathed.
The Chairman: Looking pretty good.
Mr. Mitchell: But feeling bad, if I may say. They come out of those experiences feeling frustrated. I am sure members of committees feel frustrated but officials feel frustrated as well because they seldom feel that they have had an opportunity to really be engaged by the committee.
The Chairman: What do you recommend?
Mr. Mitchell: I recommend that committees look at their rules to see whether they can adjust them to allow for more focused questioning of witnesses. The committee members should agree on the three or four subjects that they wish to discuss with the witnesses, obviously, the committee would make those executive decisions in camera. You would decide what you want to look at, and how to use the two or three hours with the witnesses. You would decide who will ask which questions or however you want to do that, and then really zero in on the witness and do not let the witnesses stonewall you. If someone does not give a good enough answer then the next member can take up the issue and say, "I want to return to the issue, the question that was asked by my colleague and what about this?"
There is much that committees could do in terms of their own proceedings, rules and practices.
The Chairman: Can you think of a jurisdiction where they have a system like the one you have just described?
Mr. Mitchell: British committees tend to be more collegial than Canadian House committees are, although I think Canadian Senate committees are more collegial and you get more in-depth treatment of issues than Canadian House committees that are not collegial generally.
I am the biggest fan in the world of the Library of Parliament. I have said that publicly. The staff you get does a great job.
I am sure that members of all committees could do with more support. I am sure that the library would say the same thing. I am sure you could do with more money to commission research. Perhaps the parties might want to have more money for their own staff support, however you want to do that, but all with the purpose of better equipping members to do the job they want to do in committee.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr. Kroeger you comment that senior public servants are subject to disciplinary action and can be held responsible within their department.
Should such disciplinary measures become public knowledge? Should the general public know if a senior member officer of a department is being disciplined and being demoted because of some breach or problem within the department and some failure of accountability?
Mr. Kroeger: I think public humiliation is a bad idea.
The Chairman: The public wants to know about these things.
Mr. Kroeger: If officials know that they will be held up in public and denounced by the government it will make them overly cautious. They will do everything by the book to keep out of trouble. They will make that their sole task and that is not how we want our officials to perform. We want our officials to be imaginative, to take chances and come forward with bright ideas that might or might not interest the ministers.
In the private sector, you do not hold people up to public ridicule. The chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada would never go to an annual meeting and say, "Our profit picture would have been better if it had not been for my stupid vice-president from Latin America who made some bad moves." You do not do things like that in the private sector; you do not do it in academia and you should not do it in government because, among other things, it would have a terribly inhibiting effect on the way officials do their jobs.
Senator Day: Thank you for a fascinating evening. It has been quite interesting. We must struggle with these issues because, undoubtedly, they will be a focus of Mr. Gomery's report. As parliamentarians, we want to be ready to react to whatever might be in the recommendations that are coming down.
We spent the last hour and a half here talking about accountability and responsibility. Sometimes these terms seem to be interchangeable.
Is a responsibility an authority passed down, and accountability the responsibility to handle the responsibility given to me?
Mr. Kroeger: That is exactly right. If you are responsible for something, somebody put you in charge of it. The Prime Minister put you in charge of the Department of Agriculture as the Minister of Agriculture. I, as a deputy minister, put somebody in charge of the regional office in Winnipeg.
When someone is responsible, and placed in charge of something, then the person who gave them that authority has the right to say, "What did you do?"
Senator Day: To account back up.
Mr. Kroeger: Depending on the answer, you get promoted or you get fired. You have expressed it very simply and you are dead on. Someone confers authority, in other words, responsibility on someone, and the person who receives the authority then has to account for how it is used. That is the essence.
Senator Day: Good, I understand it well; but I noticed we were using these terms interchangeably.
Mr. Kroeger: It happens all the time.
Senator Day: I have an imperfect recollection on this occurrence, but I think there was a Minister of Defence in the U.K. who felt that he must resign. He was a very well-liked minister, but something happened which embarrassed the government and he felt he had to resign. Is that a misinterpretation of responsibility?
You said that they do not know everything that is going on and that their responsibility, when something goes wrong, is to find out what happened and correct it. He fell on his sword; why?
Mr. Kroeger: I do not know the case.
Mr. Mitchell: The case, senator, was the resignation of Lord Carrington during the Falklands War in 1982. In effect, the British government was taken by surprise by the Argentineans actions in the Falklands. Lord Carrington, who was an honourable man, decided, in his own wisdom, to resign. It was not that it was his own fault; he did not mislead anyone. He had conducted himself properly but felt that it was an error by the British defence department and military, for which he was responsible. He felt that the error was sufficiently important, because it led to a war, and he felt it was his duty to step down. He could have carried on, but he decided that it was the right thing to do. He was under no obligation to step down, although the opposition might have criticized him and whatnot. He was not in the House; he was in the House of Lords. They could have forced his resignation but, before that happened, he stepped down.
Mr. Kroeger: If I can shed a little light on this for the committee, I have a few examples that I think will help. Responsibility is unconditional; you are in charge or you are not. If you have been made responsible for something, you are in charge of it. Whether you are to blame is conditional. Whether you are to blame depends on what you did or what you failed to do in light of what you could reasonably be expected to know at the time. I will give you two examples from Canadian political history.
When Michael Wilson was Minister of Finance in the 1980s, Global Television got hold of part of one of his budgets. You probably remember the case. Mr. Wilson could not possibly have been at fault. Somebody in the department, and I do not know how, put pages of the budget into the wrong hands. There is no reason in the world why Mr. Wilson should have resigned because he had nothing to do with it.
The second example passes under the name of Tunagate. Senator Day from New Brunswick will probably remember this one. This was an example in which there was some tainted tuna at the StarKist plant. I think it was New Brunswick.
Senator Day: Yes, it was in New Brunswick.
Mr. Kroeger: The officials went to the minister and said they did not think that stuff should go out onto the public supermarket shelves. They told Mr. Fraser that the turn would not poison anyone but to be sure, it was a good idea to keep it off the shelves. Mr. Fraser was worried about employment at the StarKist plant, and he said to release the tuna. There was a huge public row, and the minister resigned.
The difference was that Mr. Wilson could not by any stretch of the imagination be said to have done something wrong, whereas in the case of the Minister of Fisheries, it had been a decision or an intervention by that minister. It may have been a good decision or a bad decision, but the point is the minister made it and the minister took the fall. That is the difference between being responsible, being in charge, and being to blame or not to blame, depending on circumstances.
Mr. Mitchell: As a quick footnote, I think it is important to remind the committee, and members may already realize this, that even if you do make a mistake as a minister, that does not mean that you must resign.
Whether something is a resigning offence is really a matter for the judgment of the House of Commons. It is not written in a rule book, and there is no tradition that ministers who have erred or who have otherwise misbehaved have to resign.
Whether they have to resign depends on what the House of Commons is prepared to tolerate and that is a matter of political judgment.
Mr. Kroeger: There is a tradition in Britain that if something goes wrong in a department, a minister resigns. No Canadian minister has ever resigned for something that happened in his or her department that he or she had no knowledge of. If an official in the regional office in Vancouver steals money, the minister does not resign. If a program is badly managed in Ontario, the minister does not know anything about it. It has never happened in Canada, and there is this mythology that somehow a minister has to resign if his officials foul up. It does not happen.
The Chairman: I think it is a political thing. The opposition parties say, "Let us call for the resignation." They say, "Do the honourable thing." That is the context in which it so often arises in Canada. Senator Day, I did not mean to cut you off.
Senator Day: I just want to finish off this line of questioning, because we are going to the U.K. and we will be discussing these issues. Is there a different standard? Lord Carrington was not pushed out by the opposition he resigned believing it was his ministerial responsibility to do so. Are we highlighting a difference in this concept of ministerial responsibility in the U.K. versus Canada?
Mr. Mitchell: Senator, if I may answer that, I do not think you are seeing a difference in the concept of ministerial responsibility, but I think you may well find when you go to the U.K. that you will see a difference in political culture in Parliament from what we have here in Canada.
As far as I know, the political history and culture in the U.K. is such that committees of the House of Commons, and perhaps of the House of Lords, tend to operate in a much more non-partisan way than the Canadian House of Commons committees do.
Their committees have an ethos and history of looking rather more dispassionately at program and policy issues than do our committees of the House. That, I think, is just the way their system works. They are able, therefore, to deal differently with ministers and officials than our committees deal with ministers and officials.
It will be interesting to see what you find there, but there is definitely a difference in the political, institutional and parliamentary culture. I do not think it is a difference in the concept of ministerial responsibility.
Senator Day: That is what I was wondering. I appreciate your comments on that.
Mr. Kroeger: Canadian ministers have resigned because things went wrong. Walter Gordon resigned after he brought down his budget in Mr. Pearson's first government. The budget was all wrong and there was a terrible controversy. Mr. Gordon said, "That was my budget; here is my resignation." So it does happen in Canada, too.
Senator Day: And Mr. Clark went to the people.
Your comparison of committee work between the Senate and the House of Commons in Canada fascinates me. We do get a significant amount of comment from various witnesses on that subject.
I have always attributed the ability of the Senate to do that in-depth study to our independence and because we are not always looking at the next election and trying to score political points. Is that your observation as well?
Mr. Mitchell: Yes, sir, that is my observation.
Mr. Kroeger: Absolutely. Any of us can think of a number of Senate reports which are cited as frequently as reports of Royal Commissions, such as David Kroll's report on poverty in Canada or, much more recently, Senator Kirby's report on health care. It is a dead match. It is held up and looked at, and there is Roy Romanow's independent commission, and people treat the two equally. Unfortunately, there are not many examples of House reports of that character.
Senator Day: That is a plug for this committee and Senate committees.
Mr. Kroeger: A historic function of the Senate and its committees is that they can perform thoughtful studies without partisanship and electoral considerations getting in the way.
Mr. Mitchell: Senator Kenny's paper on transportation security is a more recent example of great work from the Senate. There are many other examples.
Senator Day: Is there an unwritten tradition of deputy ministers and officials protecting their ministers?
Do we get the true answers when we bring in officials, or is their first obligation to their minister. Is that the reason why we do not get the full answers that we need?
Mr. Mitchell: That is a hard question.
Mr. Kroeger: That is a judgment call. You have a duty to protect your minister and you have a duty to give your minister the best possible advice. If things start to go wrong, you have a duty to take corrective action as quickly as you can. When you are in front of a parliamentary committee, you cannot mislead a committee.
Senator Ringuette: You stonewall.
Mr. Kroeger: First, you never comment on policy because that is your minister's territory. It can cause an awkward personal decision of conscience. For example, "If I say this, it will get the minister into a significant amount of trouble. Am I under an obligation to tell the committee any way or should this come out by some other way, including the minister answering questions by himself or herself in the House?"
There is no simple answer because deputy ministers and officials are there to serve their minister and how they do that can vary from situation to situation, obviously within certain limits of propriety.
Senator Day: Let me tell you why I asked that question. When we want to investigate something, we will often hear ministers say that they are too busy to appear before us so they send us an official. We should be wary of such offers because we may not get the type of answers in the same kind of detail that we might get from the minister.
Mr. Mitchell: I agree. If you recognize that officials owe a duty of professional loyalty to their minister, you will understand that they will not come before your committee and embarrass their minister. You know that and they know that. If you see that the official is semi-stonewalling you because of professional loyalty then you can say that you are not satisfied and you will have to call the minister.
I think committee members have a perfect right and duty to keep going; however, there is a limit as to how much information you can get from officials. We advise you to go to the politicians.
Senator Day: I just want to make a comment about which you may have a brief comment in return. I am holding up my colleague's opportunity to ask questions, but it flows from Senator Mitchell's earlier question about giving authority to lower-level officials.
About two years ago, we dealt with a bill called the Public Service Modernization Act, which we debated at length. One of the governments' major arguments was that the ministers could not possibly know all of the things that are going on in their respective departments. It is very important to delegate down to the officials to empower the officials to do various things. That is happening now. That empowerment to the deputy minister and then to the associate deputy minister level is happening now.
I am not convinced that the responsibility to account in the same way has moved down. Have you followed this delegation of power? How does that impact on the responsibilities that we have been talking about here today in terms of accountability?
Mr. Mitchell: Senator, I follow it somewhat. It is still early days for the actual implementation of the Public Service Modernization Act, as I am sure you know.
Senator Ringuette: Only 10 per cent of the act has been implemented so far.
Mr. Mitchell: Exactly. Over the next couple of years, the departments will begin to implement and give these authorities to managers below the deputy minister and ADM levels. I think that parliamentarians should follow closely to see whether the deputies have the necessary accountability mechanisms in place to track what is being done under that authority. If the parliamentarians are not satisfied with the job then they should call them in and ask them what is being done and what systems are in place. You can do all of that. You are putting them on notice that you are interested. The National Finance Committee followed this bill. You want to see that the proper accountability measures are in place within the system. I encourage you to do that. It is a very good thing to do. It will take a year or two before you have much to report back on. It is still being implemented.
The Chairman: Mr. Mitchell, you said that one of the important things we should look is to ensure that we have good staff resources. Our good staff from the Library of Parliament, upon whom you commented, has prepared a question for you two.
The question is this: Both Mr. Kroeger and Mr. Mitchell are reluctant to endorse the British model. Could you explain to the committee your views on the accounting officer model and detail the major weaknesses of the British approach?
Second, are you aware that this arrangement has ever diminished the accountability of ministers or impeded them in the exercise of their responsibilities?
Mr. Kroeger: In the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson received a manuscript from an earnest young author. He read it and sent it back saying, "Your manuscript includes ideas that are both original and good. Unfortunately, the good ideas are not original and the original ideas are not good."
When I look at the British accounting officer system, there are some elements that are not new; and the elements that are not new are not good. The elements that are not new deal with this business of whether officials give an accounting in front of parliamentary committees. Professors who write about this seem to think that deputy ministers never appear before parliamentary committees. They do it all the time.
The part of the accounting officer system which involves officials giving an accounting in front of committees is not new. It is a good idea, but it is not new. It has been happening for decades and will continue to happen.
As to the second part, which is new but not good, is where it is said that if your minister and you cannot agree, then you insist that the minister give you a written instruction and then you take it to the Auditor General, which means that you go public.
If you are talking about an action that is highly improper, possibly illegal, then after you have had your argument with the minister and the minister says, "Do it," in the Canadian system what you do is you go to the secretary to the cabinet and you say, "The Prime Minister better know about this." I cannot imagine that any deputy minister would allow the Prime Minister to be blindsided by something that a minister wanted to do that would cause huge embarrassment.
In the Canadian system, as well as in the British system, you would always alert the Prime Minister. If you want to get a written instruction from the minister, fine. It seems to me that it would be much better to deal with this inside the government, for the Prime Minister to deal with a wayward minister and sort it out, without getting on to the front page of The Globe and Mail.
The Public Accounts Committee of the House brought out a report that really suggested, when I read it, that every time your minister wanted to do something that was not least cost and high efficiency that you would go public. Ministers make political decisions all the time, sometimes for very good political reasons. The least cost solution is not always the solution that is in the public interest. It is quite legitimate for ministers to do this and for a deputy to say, "I am not going to go along with that. Give me a written instruction so that I can give it to the Auditor General." It is completely at variance with the way a minister and senior officials ought to work.
My last comment is that no other democracy in the world uses the British accounting officer system, and the British do not use it much either. It has been around since 1873. It almost never happens that a permanent secretary is given a written instruction and goes public with it. I have seen one study that said it happened 37 times since World War II.
The Chairman: We intend to ask them about that when we visit them.
Mr. Kroeger: It fascinates people, but even the British do not use this part of the system. This is the part that I said is new but not good.
The Chairman: What about the Republic of Ireland? Can you comment on the officer accounting system in Ireland?
Mr. Kroeger: I do not know the system in Ireland at all. I am sorry.
Mr. Mitchell: I am not familiar with Ireland. I am familiar with the British system from a distance. I have studied it and written about it, and I have disagreed with Professor Franks on it. I think Mr. Kroeger has put the point well.
The Chairman: Is there anything you want to add to the two questions I read from the Library of Parliament?
Mr. Kroeger: What is the second question, Mr. Chairman?
The Chairman: Are you aware that this arrangement has ever diminished the accountability of ministers or impeded them in the exercise of their responsibilities?
Mr. Kroeger: I do not think that is the problem with the accounting officer system. The problem with that system is what it does to the relationship between a minister and a deputy, and because of the difficulties that it poses for that relationship, nobody uses it, not even the British.
Mr. Mitchell: In response to your second question, Mr. Chairman, that is where Mr. Kroeger's point comes in, that it is not as different as it looks.
The Chairman: Deputies appear before parliamentary committees already, in fact.
Mr. Mitchell: Exactly. In the British model, the accounting officer's role and the relationship with the minister is not used in the way that the critics of our present system would like to use the accounting officer here as a way of clearly getting at the guilty party. The British do not use it for that at all. Their system is not very different, therefore, I would say I do not think it has diminished the authority of ministers there because it is not that much different from ours.
Senator Downe: We have heard a strong defence of the status quo, and I want to thank the witnesses for giving up their time. They have raised a lot of points that we can follow up with other witnesses who will support the accounting system.
The two of you are old Ottawa hands. Do you know or can you give us some context to the Lambert Royal Commission and it recommended that we adopt this system.
Mr. Kroeger: I may have misunderstood Lambert. The House committee said that I did misunderstand Lambert in the version that I gave when I appeared before them.
I thought Lambert actually said that deputy ministers should be accountable not before parliamentary committees but to parliamentary committees. There is a huge difference. In the first instance, you explain what happened; in the second one, they can instruct you.
I am not confident enough in my knowledge of the Lambert report.
I want to say one other thing, which is that to be accused of defending the status quo automatically puts you on the wrong side. In response, when some people raise questions about what is wrong with the present accountability system, I usually say, "What would you change? Should ministers not be accountable to Parliament?" "Do you want parliamentary committees to be able to instruct deputy ministers so that the minister is not the boss any more?" You work your way through the status quo, and by the time the various possible changes have been explored, often you do not find that many departures from what people have been doing for quite a few decades.
I say that in a kind of a sympathetic way because many things about the way government works are unsatisfactory and leave the public frustrated. Second, accountability and responsibility are complicated subjects. Again, I sympathize with parliamentarians and members of the public who think we have to be able to do this better. It is interesting that when you come to the specifics it is rather hard to find what you do that is markedly different from what we do now.
Mr. Mitchell: Senator Downe, I hope I have not left the wrong impression. I am certainly not defending a status quo in which ministers deny responsibility for things for which they are responsible. I am not endorsing a status quo in which officials stonewall committees. I am not endorsing a status quo in which committees seem to accept that because nobody will fess up, nobody is accountable or responsible. I do not believe any of that. If that what is we are witnessing today, I am as big a critic of that as anybody in Canada.
I am arguing for a reaffirmation, a reinforcement and a clear understanding of the fundamental principle of ministerial accountability that underpins our system of government. That is what I am advocating.
Senator Downe: I used the words "status quo" in the context of the Westminster system that we inherited. It seems to me it is a bit of a problem that we inherited it 138 years ago when we formed Canada, but the people we inherited it from have changed and adapted it. The Lambert commission recommended 24 years ago that we do the same, and it was in that context that I was referring to the status quo.
Mr. Mitchell: With respect to Lambert, if it turns out that what Lambert meant, or is now understood to mean, is that deputies should be accountable for some things for which ministers are not accountable any more, then I think Lambert was making a big mistake. I must tell you that you will find it very frustrating then because you will find ministers saying, "It is not my responsibility."
The Chairman: They are saying that now.
Mr. Mitchell: Parliamentarians will be there saying, "Who can we hold accountable, then?"
The Chairman: That is exactly the Gomery dilemma.
Mr. Mitchell: That is not a good idea, however, you are the parliamentarians and I am not.
Mr. Kroeger: To add to that, the right people to identify specific changes to the system are not the likes of us. It is parliamentarians, namely, yourselves and members of the House. If you do not like the way the system of ministerial responsibility works now, devise a new one.
I am worried about academics and others that dream up new systems that would subvert the authority that you as parliamentarians currently have.
Senator Mitchell: One of the important distinctions that you draw between a minister saying, under the Lambert structure, "It is not my responsibility," is that, in fact, it would not be their responsibility. Under this structure, they can say that it is not their responsibility, but, in fact, it is. Is that not true?
Mr. Kroeger: Exactly.
Senator Mitchell: That is a fundamental distinction. Ministers can say whatever they want whenever they want. They are either right or wrong, and that is what the committee would be there to hold them to and, ultimately, Parliament.
The parliamentary system has taken a few hits tonight, all the way, from "the wheels have fallen off" to "it is not working."
The parliamentary system, if I am not mistaken, is the most successful form of government on the face of the earth. It has lasted for hundreds of years. There is not another system of government that has lasted as long. That is not because it is stuck, but because it has evolved and we can see it has evolved tremendously since we inherited it from Britain. Is that not true?
The Chairman: Churchill said that.
Senator Mitchell: Then he was right, and I agree with him. Was he a Liberal when he said that? He had moments of lucidity.
I want to clarify one point. On the one hand, you are saying it is the Westminster model of ministerial accountability that you like. I happen to like it. On the other hand, it is the Westminster model that has spawned this accounting officer. You are saying, though, that the ministerial responsibility part is right and the accounting officer part they got wrong.
Mr. Mitchell: I would not say that, Senator Mitchell. They have evolved the accounting officer concept and it works for them and, as Mr. Kroeger was saying, it is not very much different from what we have.
We would say to the critics of our current system in Canada, who promote adopting a rather strong and highly impractical version of this accounting officer model, that that makes no sense. We are not saying that the British system does not work. In fact, I have a lot of admiration for it. However, if you look at it closely, you will find that it is similar to what we have here. What is the difference?
Senator Mitchell: There are several potential consequences of allocating more and more power to public servants. First, it "Americanizes" the system. Second, a comment was made about the problem with party discipline and political parties. I think political parties are an essential feature of parliamentary democracy and one of the reasons it has worked so well. At the same time, to take away from that is to Americanize even further.
We can look at the American system of accountability and see anecdotal evidence. We can compare Lord Carrington who quit over a war to the U.S. who went to war in Iraq for false reasons; no one has been held accountable for that action. Is that not true?
Mr. Kroeger: Their system of accountability is different. Congress cannot vote an administration out of office. They can criticize and call them before committees, but they cannot lay a glove on them.
Mr. Mitchell: Their accountability is electoral.
Senator Mitchell: So is ours.
Senator Day: There is not a confidence issue there.
The Chairman: We have come to the end of this session of the committee. We have had an excellent exchange. On behalf of the entire committee, I would like to say that we have been honoured to have you two gentlemen present to us. You have a lot of experience and knowledge. You have answered our questions directly, and this will help us in our deliberations.
The committee adjourned.