Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Finance
Issue 29 - Evidence - October 26, 2005
OTTAWA, Wednesday, October 26, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance met this day at 6:18 p.m. to examine the Main Estimates laid before Parliament for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2006.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I would like to call this, our forty-fourth meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, to order. This committee's field of interest is government spending, either directly through the estimates or indirectly through bills.
[Translation]
On Monday, March 7, 2005, our committee was mandated to examine and report on the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2006. This is our twelfth meeting devoted to examining 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 ministers in charge of a particular 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 are honoured to welcome Professor David Good and Professor Paul Thomas.
Professor Thomas is currently the Duff Roblin Professor of Government of the political studies department at the University of Manitoba and has had a 35-year career in teaching and public administration. He founded the Manitoba Legislative Internship Program in the 1970s and helped establish and manage the Joint Master's Program in Public Administration at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg.
Throughout his career Professor Thomas has provided widely cited analysis and commentary and worked with all three levels of government in Canada, earning him the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Distinguished Public Service in 1994. In August of 2003 he was awarded the Vanier Medal of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada in honour of his outstanding contributions to the public service.
David A. Good is currently Adjunct Professor of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. He has 30 years of experience as a federal public servant with 15 years as an assistant deputy minister in a number of departments and central agencies, including Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and as assistant secretary, expenditure management, in the Treasury Board Secretariat.
He also worked in the Privy Council Office with responsibilities for the development and implementation of policy and expenditure management systems.
Professor Good is the author of two books and eight articles in the fields of public administration and social policy.
David A. Good, Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, as an individual: I appreciate the opportunity to come before the committee.
I know you have heard much testimony on the important and timely question of ministerial accountability. From my reading you received a broad range of views and an equally broad range of suggestions for improving the system.
It is interesting that everyone who has come before the committee has made suggestions for improvement. This is a telling point to me, particularly given our deep and important traditions as a parliamentary government. No one has recommended maintaining the status quo when it comes to matters of accountability.
It is not my intention to argue with others about what they said but I do want to set out what I think are the important issues for the committee to focus on and suggest some improvements.
From my experience in government I have learned some lessons the hard way. One obvious thing is accountability in government is a complex matter and is becoming more complex as decision making and responsibility are increasingly diffused throughout government. Before talking about prescriptions and suggestions we need diagnosis, and in that regard I want to begin by talking about definitions of four key terms: responsibility, accountability, answerability and blame.
These terms have different and distinct meanings with respect to how our form of parliamentary government is practised in Canada.
These terms are increasingly being used interchangeably.
They are increasingly being used when things go wrong in government, and when things go wrong, more and more people are skipping over who is responsible, who is accountable and who is answerable, and are simply looking at the single question of who is to blame.
Responsibility is about taking charge. When Parliament votes confidence in a minister, it confers responsibility on the government and its ministers. When a minister is responsible for a department of government, the minister is in charge. When a minister is in charge, he or she has the responsibility and the obligation to oversee and direct what is done in the department.
When problems occur, and we know they will always occur, the minister is obliged to find out what the causes were, explain to Parliament what happened, and then to find some corrective action. Exercising responsibility does not require that the minister know and control everything that is going on in the department.
Responsibility does mean that when things go wrong, the minister will not automatically be blamed for it. Blame depends upon what the minister did or failed to do in light of what one could reasonably have expected the minister to have known and to have done with the information at the time. Figuring out what was known and what was done in light of reasonable expectations is the important job of Parliament and its committees.
That the minister is responsible does not mean that the minister has to resign for actions or inactions on the part of public servants. This convention is clear and is necessary, because if it did not exist, ministers could be destroyed by inappropriate actions and inactions of public servants. On the other hand, the convention of ministerial responsibility is not there to provide a security blanket for public servants in case of mistakes. It is quite the opposite. It is there to preserve the authority of ministers and to make it clear to public servants and to parliamentarians who is in charge, as the chairman indicated in his opening comments.
Responsibility applies to all public servants. At the top of the responsibility chain is the minister, but responsibility applies to all public servants at every level, from the deputy minister in Ottawa to the Fisheries officer in the field.
A director is responsible for the program that he or she has to deliver. If something goes wrong, that director is responsible for finding out what happened, giving an account to his or her supervisor and taking corrective action. Sanctions and penalties do apply to public servants when mistakes are made. While they are not generally made public, I can say from experience that they do have an effect.
Accountability is about enforcing and explaining responsibility. Accountability is about a person's obligations to explain to an authority how responsibility conferred by that authority has been discharged, whether successfully or not. Accountability has two parts; it places an obligation on two parties. It imposes an obligation on those who exercise authority to render accounts to superiors. It also imposes obligations on superiors to extract accounts, to scrutinize, to evaluate, and to pass judgment on them. When the judgment is negative, superiors take actions and/or apply sanctions.
The term "accountability" has come to take on a broader meaning in contemporary society, a somewhat different meaning. For example, citizens expect that ministers, members of Parliament and public servants will be accountable directly to them. As a result, people in authority, whether in the private sector or the public sector, are regularly called upon to explain and justify their actions and inactions. This type of obligation for people in authority to justify their actions to individuals who did not directly assign them the responsibility we define as answerability.
This is not an academic point. This distinction between accountability and answerability, as you know, has been fundamentally described in the relationship of public servants to Parliament. In short, public servants are seen as answerable to Parliament and before parliamentary committees.
Answerability to Parliament does not include the personal consequences that are a fundamental part of accountability. The answerability of public servants before parliamentary committees is important and critical. In order for Parliament to function, it requires the ability to access the information and knowledge of public servants, and that information and knowledge is necessary for Parliament to properly hold ministers to account.
I will make one final point before making a couple of suggestions for improving accountability.
Accountability under our form of responsible government is, by design, political. It is partisan and adversarial. It assumes that there is no technical substitute for democratic politics in the accountability process. In other words, public accountability cannot simply be turned into a management profession, a process of audits and results-based reports that simply speak to technical, objective matters. In short, accountability in government is wrapped in politics.
Public accountability therefore requires checks and balances — checks on the powers of government and its ministers and on the public service and its officials. It requires balances — balances in the competing requirements of efficient government on the one hand and meaningful democratic control over public administration on the other. In this context, trust and self-reporting are never sufficient; independent audit, independent reporting and rigorous scrutiny by Parliament are required. Audits and reports are used for administrative purposes but also for political purposes.
I know the committee has heard considerable testimony about the concept or principle of the accounting officer in Britain. I understand that you will visit Britain to see how it operates firsthand. I believe the concept can provide some inspiration for improving accountability in Canada, but I am firmly of the view that it does not provide the precise and proper model for the situation here. Stripped to its essence, it is based on the premise that it is possible to separate administration from policy, to carve out an area of economy, efficiency and effectiveness, assign that space to deputy ministers and then make them directly accountable to Parliament.
I believe that the wholesale adoption of this British practice, with all its provisions for written instructions to deputies, which would be made public, would create significant problems for public servants, ministers and Parliament. From my experience in public policy and public administration, I have come to have a healthy regard for what I call the law of unintended consequences. From my experience, any reform in public administration will create new problems, and you need to ensure that the problems you create are smaller than the ones you have solved.
I have three suggestions in this regard. First, more should be done to increase the accountability of ministers and the answerability of officials before parliamentary committees. This will require strengthening the analytical and research capacity of parliamentary committees. It will also require that parliamentarians become more focused and systematic in their questioning of ministers and officials; that parliamentary committees find ways to become less partisan.
Also, I do not, however, believe that simply strengthening the answerability of officials to parliamentary committees will be enough. I think that more can be done to clarify the accountability and thereby strengthen it. In my view, we need to explicitly and clearly recognize that deputy ministers have personal assigned and delegated authorities and responsibilities from the Treasury Board and the Public Service Commission. Formal and explicit recognition of these assigned and delegated authorities and responsibilities would help clarify their accountability.
I am proposing a made-in-Canada principal accounting officer. I specifically propose that deputy ministers should be held publicly accountable, exclusively and solely, for the authorities and responsibilities assigned by statute or delegated to them by the Treasury Board and the Public Service Commission.
Second, deputy ministers should not expect their ministers to accept responsibility for decisions that fall within this deputy sphere of authority and responsibility.
In my view, this recognizes a limited and clearly defined space for the deputy minister for authority, responsibility and accountability. Making it clear and explicit would send an important signal to other officials, to ministers and to parliamentarians.
Third, we have recognized errors of commission by ministers and public servants, but we have not done a good enough job in dealing with what one might call errors of omission, that is, the failure to take appropriate action in situations that require it.
In this regard, I believe that the Clerk of the Privy Council's appointment letter to deputy ministers and the supporting protocols need to be considerably strengthened. There is a need to clearly and explicitly set out to the deputy minister his or her twofold duty and obligation. The first duty and obligation is to be informed about what is going on between officials who are accountable to him or her and any ministers and political staff. The second duty is to inform the Clerk of the Privy Council of instances where the correct exercise of the deputy's duties may be inconsistent with the views of ministers or political staff. Making these obligations of deputy ministers clear and more explicit would help strengthen accountability.
Errors in government will continue to be made; it cannot be otherwise. However, we need to find better ways to correct public mistakes without destroying the fragile layer of public trust that supports the interaction between public servants, ministers and parliamentarians and also underpins the integrity of our public institutions.
I look forward to comments and questions from senators.
The Chairman: Thank you for that excellent presentation. Some of your suggestions for improvement in Canada are also practical so I am sure senators will have questions for you.
Paul G. Thomas, Professor, Political Studies Department, University of Manitoba, as an individual: It is a privilege and an honour to be here. I have been watching this committee's work over the years. You probably did not know you had a fan out in Winnipeg. You have done constructive work on a number of topics — public policy topics and public administration topics — work that was not being done in the other House and in other committees. In a book that Senator Joyal put together, I contributed a chapter that wrote a flattering portrait of the Senate. I was planning to title it "In Defence of the Indefensible, the Case for the Canadian Senate," but Senator Joyal would not stand for that.
You will hear an echo of David Good here. This happened through serendipity, not through conspiracy on our part. I wanted to start with the point that it would be helpful to the debate about these matters if we could use terms more clearly and precisely. I have been on a one-person crusade to try to restrict the ever-expanding elastic meaning of the term "accountability," without much success. It has now become part of the war among political parties in the House of Commons and of the mantra of public debate, so we do not make careful distinctions between terms like responsibility, accountability, answerability, transparency and responsiveness.
I will not repeat some of the things that Mr. Good has said, but you could go into each of those words and distinguish them from one another. They are clearly closely related but they should not be used synonymously because they imply different types of relationships. I am trying to make the case that accountability should be restricted to a particular situation; one where there is an authoritative relationship supported by an interactive process of some kind. I suggest that that relationship involves four components.
There is the assignment of responsibility to individuals or institutions, including the transfer of authority, the assignment of a mandate and resources. Ideally, part of this transfer involves some agreement in advance on what the expectations and standards of performance are. That is the first component.
The second component, the one that is most talked about, is the obligation on the persons who have been delegated responsibility to answer for their performance of their assigned responsibility. Related to that is the presumption that the answering will be done on the basis of valid, reliable, balanced and, presumably, reasonably comprehensive information, so that the provision of information is at the heart of accountability.
Third, and this is a neglected component, I believe, there is a duty on the part of the authorizing body to monitor performance, to provide guidance and to take remedial action. You can have accountability failures not just because people ignore their obligations to perform appropriately, but also because ministers do not pay appropriate attention to what is going on in their departments, or deputy ministers are not on top of what is happening. That is a failure of accountability as much as the other side of the equation.
Finally, in theory, accountability involves the bestowal of rewards and punishments. In practice, if you talk to most public servants, they think it is more about penalties than rewards. Not many public servants I know tell me stories about when they were held accountable for their successes. They usually have been held accountable for their shortcomings.
The other point I would make, about the idea that there are rewards and sanctions, is that it does not always have to be fatal. It does not have to be resignation or demotion or something like that. We underestimate the importance of reputation, the potential loss of reputation and damage to one's career as a basis for keeping people attentive to their responsibilities and obligations.
I know the public usually wants to see someone pay a significant, visible price when something goes seriously wrong in government. The fact that it is not visible, as Professor Good said, often leads them to conclude no price was paid. In fact, it does happen. It is just not visible.
The next set of comments I want to make has to do with what I take to be the continuing relevance, importance and, indeed, the effectiveness of the principles of ministerial responsibility. I would start with this point: Back in 1996 there was an important task force on public service ethics and values led by the late John Tait. It led the Chrétien government to issue a guide for ministers and parliamentary secretaries in 2002. It was a useful attempt to try to codify the principles of ministerial responsibility and related principles of administrative accountability. Now, it does not answer all the questions because no short guide or statement of principles will do that, but it is a starting point. That is what the Tait task force had called for: A concise, clear statement that would help parliamentarians and the public to understand these tricky issues of accountability in government.
I start with collective ministerial responsibility, and we need to be mindful of the fact that under our system of government we clearly focus on responsibility. We concentrate authority over legislation, taxing and spending in the hands of a group of partisan politicians in cabinet. Then we seek to hold them continuously accountable before Parliament. That is the way our system is meant to work.
It is hard under those arrangements for the Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues to evade responsibility. Even in the tough times of the 1990s and the Mulroney government, when there were downsizings, restraining budgets and things like that, it could not be blamed on Parliament or some other party. Whereas the American system is almost what I would call institutionalized buck passing. There is division of powers, checks and balances, and at the end of the day, even when he has a friendly Congress, the president can say that Congress made him do it and he cannot be held responsible. It is extremely difficult for the Prime Minister, especially recognizing the concentration of power now, to evade responsibility.
That is how the collective side of ministerial responsibility works in conjunction with individual ministerial responsibility. In one of the papers produced in Mr. Alcock's operation over at the Treasury Board, I do not think enough attention was paid to the way in which the growing insistence on greater collective responsibility of cabinet, through cabinet solidarity, cabinet confidentiality, puts limits on how far you can hold individual ministers responsible, because sometimes they will be carrying out policies that they may not have entirely agreed with. Subject to cabinet confidentiality, they cannot express disagreements unless they are prepared to resign.
Individual ministerial responsibility still has great value within our political system because it provides an identifiable person to challenge when things go wrong in government — a person to whom you can bring the grievances of the people you represent in your region or particular constituency. Ministers are required on an ongoing basis to boast about and confess what they have done with the authority and the resources that they have been granted and they provide a focal point for ultimate democratic accountability.
I then suggest that there are five components of what I would call the bottom line of individual ministerial responsibility. We are still in the situation where the minister has to answer for everything that goes on in her or his department — answer in the sense that they owe a duty to account for the policies, for what has taken place in the department, for the conduct of the officials and, when there are problems, to demonstrate what has been done to correct them. There is a duty of remedial accountability. It does not always rise to the level of punitive accountability, where ministers are forced to resign, but there is a duty to correct problems.
I would echo David Good's point that accepting responsibility is not the same as accepting blame when it comes to the operation of the principle of ministerial responsibility. Ministers answer for former ministers, for things that went on before they assumed their ministerial duties. They answer for the activities of and actions taken by public servants, but they should not accept the blame for it necessarily if they were not aware of it in advance.
That is the first principle. The second is that they bear responsibility if there are persistent problems of poor policy or serious maladministration within the department. However, it does not rise to the level necessarily of requiring them to resign.
When parliament passes a motion of censure, or proposes to do that, to reduce a minister's salary, it is an expression of parliamentary opinion. Parliament cannot cause ministers to resign, as other witnesses have told you. Ultimately, whether ministers stay or go in office is a political judgment. It is made by the Prime Minister, perhaps with the advice of cabinet. It is made more on political calculations than on legal or constitutional principles.
The point I try to make here is that too often we undervalue the role that Parliament can play in enforcing personal responsibility of ministers, in requiring them to pay closer attention to the operations of their departments and take action when things go wrong. I think we go too far trying to pinpoint blame on individual ministers and not seeing the corrective value of rigorous scrutiny through the parliamentary process.
Finally, consistent with the principle of full ministerial disclosure, ministers have a duty to keep Parliament informed in an accurate and truthful manner. When they mislead parliament, I see that as the most serious offence that they can be guilty of. If they do not take immediate steps to correct that misinformation, they should be forced to resign. Parliament is at the centre of the accountability process. It should remain there.
When it comes to the accounting officer concept, I think the government is not entirely clear in its own mind. The guide I mentioned earlier, that Prime Minister Chrétien issued in 2002, made favourable reference to importing this concept from Britain. Professor Franks came and said that as he reads what the Privy Council is saying these days, they are not in favour of the concept. As I see some of the material that Minister Alcock is putting out these days, they seem to be coming around to accepting the concept. My view, and it is a bit agnostic in a way, is that I do not think it will make that much difference. Professor Franks cited the small number of times when the permanent heads in the U.K. have withstood ministerial directions and issued their own statement of dissent. It is tiny.
There is a recognized right of deputy ministers now in Canada to say to the minister, "Minister, I will not do that unless you explicitly instruct me to do so." There is the acknowledged right to go to talk with the Clerk of the Privy Council. There is the right to talk to the Treasury Board about violations of the Financial Administration Act. If you were the deputy in the midst of the Gomery affair, you could have said no to the minister about some of the things that were being done. You could have, and probably should have.
I think the U.K. example is worth looking at. The way you bring it to Canada needs to take account of some of our distinctive context. Deputies now regularly appear before parliamentary committees. It is very much in the back of their minds — some are my friends — that this is a personal accountability session on their leadership and management of the department. In terms of the psychological impact, you are part of the way there, whether you have an accounting officer concept at work or not. If you do go that route, there is the danger that you will weaken the authority of the Prime Minister and other ministers over deputy ministers.
In New Zealand, where they went with contracts with CEOs, as they were called, they tried to delineate where ministerial responsibility ended and CEOs' accountability began, and you got a lot of blame shifting. There was excellent work by Robert Gregory from New Zealand, in Tragedy at Cave Creek, it was called, where the minister said it was the deputy's fault. The deputy said, "I did not have the policy authority and resources to do the job."
There are some risks if you institutionalize a dividing line that gets blurred in practice. Our Public Accounts Committee is far more partisan than the one in the U.K. It meets more often in public, whereas the U.K. committee goes in camera when they have public servants before them. There is less grandstanding and fewer attempts to score political points.
Finally, we need to debate a new paradigm of accountability. We need somehow to change the parliamentary culture, away from an emphasis on error detection and blaming and more toward error prevention and learning. That cultural shift is not as necessary in the institution I am speaking before tonight as it is in the House of Commons, but I think that a more constructive approach to accountability is necessary.
As my second point, increasingly, governments are operating with a kind of whole-of-government approach, a cross-departmental approach, a cross-governmental approach with other levels of government, and relying on third parties outside of government to deliver programs. The traditional linear, vertical, individualistic approach to accountability does not match with the changing realities of governance, which are increasingly horizontal and collective in nature. We need to develop collective mechanisms of accountability and move away from trying to identify a specific individual who will walk the plank when something goes wrong. The problem with that is that it comes up against not only the adversarial, negative, theatrical approach that prevails in the House of Commons, where you are looking for someone to pay a price, it also comes up against the public's expectation that somebody will pay a price when something goes wrong.
We live in a suspicious, blaming period in the public culture of this country. I did a study on the tragedy in Manitoba, on baby deaths in the pediatric cardiac surgery program. There was plenty of blame to go around. Many people failed in their responsibilities. You can say that the system failed, but the families who suffered the tragedy of losing a child or infant and the public will not accept that. They want somebody to be named and blamed and shamed. We have to somehow move beyond that if we want to use accountability for more positive purposes of learning how to make government work better. I will stop there.
The Chairman: Thank you both for two excellent presentations. Professor Thomas, in one of your papers that we were given, "The Swirling Meanings and Practices of Accountability," you go into the concept of when a minister should resign and so on in great detail. That was a helpful analysis that we will read as well.
Senator Day: I echo our chair's comments thanking you for your presentations. They were clear and appropriate to what we are studying here. I have asked other presenters on a number of occasions about the definitions of the terms, because that seems to be the place where we have to start. I do not want to say there is misuse of these terms, but confusion is being created between responsibilities and accountability, so when you laid out the definition at the front end it was very helpful.
My first question is about the new paradigm. Professor Thomas, we had a presentation that did not describe it in just this way, but it also made the point about the public looking to lay blame and the opposition either being led by or leading the public down that road. The point was made that the media have a big role to play here. The comparison was between a more sophisticated media in the U.K. that expected certain things to happen from time to time and did not make a huge deal of it, and the media here that have tended to focus on that. Have you any comment? Have you done any thinking along those lines? Is that part of the paradigm shift we have to work on?
Mr. Thomas: Senator Oliver mentioned this longer paper. There is a section in there where I talk about how the parliamentary process of accountability intersects with the media process. The media now claim to be almost a fourth branch of government. Especially witnessing a fragmented opposition in Parliament, they seem to have taken on the duty of opposition and being critical of government. Of course, Mr. Good has had firsthand experience in his distinguished career as a public servant in dealing with the media frenzy.
The media do emphasize the sensational aspects of the operations of government. Most of the things that go right in government get no media notice. Even the work of this committee, cross-examining public service witnesses and getting at the heart of what is right and what is maybe not as good as it should be, gets reported rarely. The media play a critical role in this. It is the 22 minutes each night on CBC where we get our picture of how government is working. Most of us are spectators to the governmental process most of the time. It is the kaleidoscopic images that Peter Mansbridge puts in front of us that sum up government.
There is a wonderful little book, The Case for Bureaucracy by Charles Goodsell, using American data, unfortunately, where he argues that we have a negative stereotype of the public service.
However, when you ask individuals about their experience with the public service, it is generally positive. What they then conclude is, "I was atypical; I got good treatment from the public service. The person behind me in line will obviously get screwed around by an officious public servant who is sticking to the rules and will not recognize the individual nature of people's concerns."
That is true in the health field as well; I am doing a lot of my work now on accountability in health care. That is a problem. The media have created a false image of the public service as inefficient, ineffective, arrogant, bloated, and all the rest of it.
That is why you get media coverage in the other place. You raise a question in Question Period and play games in Question Period.
Senator Day: Or the other way around. I do not mean to interrupt, but if you want to know what the questions will be in Question Period, read The Globe and Mail in the morning. You will know what the opposition will ask.
Mr. Thomas: The media play a big role in setting the accountability agenda by identifying what stories they will run and how prominently they will feature them — and then whether they turn up in the parliamentary process. It is a two-way street, I agree.
Senator Day: That is part of the paradigm shift you are talking about.
Mr. Thomas: Yes.
Mr. Good: Let me make a comment to follow on from what Mr. Thomas has said about the role of the media. We need to find a way to operate our democratic processes and traditions in a world where the role of the media has fundamentally changed.
The media today have a set of standard operating procedures they use to deal with individual situations. One is simplicity; they keep it simple. Another is dramatization. Drama becomes very important, and that requires juxtaposition of officials against ministers, ministers against ministers and prime ministers, et cetera.
The other is personalization — how they personalize the process. It raises interesting questions about the role of public servants in that process, who generally have been anonymous but are increasingly less so as they do public administration business in a fishbowl — hence we have greater demands for transparency.
The last point about the media is that the preformed storylines are very much there. To hold a readership, you need a preformed storyline about what the problem was. An $85,000 overpayment can become a billion-dollar boondoggle, for instance.
What this then raises in my mind on the words of accountability, as Mr. Thomas has described them, is the obligation of those who are doing the scrutinizing, the review, those from whom the authority has been delegated, to ensure that in their follow-up and the questioning, in the process, in the scrutiny and the assessing and evaluating, they are doing a good job — because the media will do theirs. What then is the role of Parliament, the Senate and the committees?
I must add that when I was a Treasury Board official, I always liked meeting the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. We always had the most substantive discussions on matters of the Treasury, unlike other committees. That puts an obligation on those doing the scrutinizing to ensure that what they are looking at is not necessarily simple, it may not be dramatic; what they are looking at may not be personalized and it will not have a preformed storyline. To get to the bottom of what is going on requires a certain expertise on the part of committees, members and others. I only hope we can do more of that in a more organized way against the backdrop of the media.
Senator Day: My other line of questioning is in relation to the point you make about errors of commission versus omission. I am pleased you raised that point in terms of assessing the work of deputy ministers and other civil servants. I think that is an important area that maybe we have not been thinking about until now.
You indicated that one of the roles of the deputy minister is to be informed about the contact between the political staff and the staff of the department. Does that put the deputy minister in a difficult position? Is he spying on what his boss is doing? Does that create a difficult working environment for him?
Mr. Good: I do not think it need create a difficult working environment. The deputy minister is there as the permanent administrative head. The deputy minister is also a key adviser to the minister on matters of policy. They also have direct accountabilities to the minister, which are absolutely critical. They need to have a broad span. They need to be informed of interactions taking place.
Do not forget, we do have a chain of authority and of command under our system. The chain of authority is that individual public servants are accountable up the line of command. If an individual public servant is dealing with political staff of other ministers or elsewhere in the system, it is incumbent upon the deputy to be informed of the nature of those relationships and what is going on.
The last thing that any deputy minister wants to have said to him by a minister is "Why was I not informed?" The obligation to be informed is absolutely critical. It is easy to talk about but hard in practice. It requires trust, a clear understanding of the role of the minister and the deputy, and of the role of the exempt staff in the minister's office and how that links into the process. It becomes critical to the process.
Senator Day: Since you are making a point of saying this, do you believe that may not be clear and that role is not being exercised as it should be in Canada currently?
Mr. Good: It waxes and wanes. As ministers' offices were strengthened in the Mulroney period with chiefs of staff, it created a trilateral relationship, with some lack of clarity in the system. I think there is always a need to clarify that situation. It works on behalf of the minister and on behalf of the public servant.
You must understand that the minister's staff and the minister are indeed one, as one of your witnesses said. They are a single personality. Accountability for everything done in a minister's office rests exclusively and solely with that minister.
It also links closely to the question of taking direction. In a busy day with lots of things happening, what is the difference between a suggestion and a direction? There is a lot of interaction between public servants and ministers' offices. In reality — and all the skilled ministers' staff and the skilled ministers and others know this — public servants do not take direction from ministers' staff; they take direction from ministers, as they should, through the line of command. It is important that, when suggestions are made and those discussions occur, one is clear about how to handle that.
I do not think you can necessarily codify this in a rule book. It requires a lot of interaction, a lot of discussion — particularly when there are new ministers, new deputy ministers — and an understanding of how that will operate. You need a great deal of attention to so-called errors of omission, which can be much more damaging than the errors of commission; those are the ones we need to look for.
Mr. Thomas: I would push it further than Mr. Good. I would say with the strength in ministerial staffs — the chief of staff position, particularly — if you are trying to write an authoritative statement about ministerial responsibility, you should declare absolutely that ministerial staff falls within the scope of individual ministerial responsibility; that the ministers have to answer for the behaviour of their staff. They should not occupy a constitutional twilight zone.
You have career public servants and ministers. You cannot have these people who are on the public payroll and have influence because of where they sit in the system, and not have them accountable in some way. It was a gap — this goes back to the Pearson era, when ministerial staff were involved in some shenanigans and the minister walked away from it. That is unacceptable behaviour. It should be made clear that it is part of ministerial responsibility.
Senator Stratton: This is a fascinating discussion so far. However, for the folks back home, we always have to relate this to what is happening on the ground now and has happened in the past.
You may have read in our previous hearings that what people are interested in is the reoccurrence of, say, the gun control fiasco. We have discussed that here, hopefully in an apolitical way. It is not just the Liberal government or the Conservative government, it is government. That focuses on ministerial responsibility, because year after year in this committee — and I have been a member for quite some time — we would bring it up. We were assured this would be the last time there would be an increase. Every year thereafter there was an increase and nothing was ever done, no matter how loudly we shouted or cried out.
Second is, for everyone's sake, something that led to the Gomery inquiry should not happen again. I would like you to take those two instances, because we are well aware of them today, and describe how we could apply what you are proposing, because that is what people are interested in. How can we prevent those from happening again?
Mr. Good: Well, I will not guarantee that things will never happen again. As I said in my comments, I think errors will be made.
The question one must think about is whether the errors that have been made are errors of individuals or fundamental errors of the structure of the system. I do not think the system is broken and needs to be fundamentally overhauled. I do believe some patching and some repairs need to be done. Let's face it; making changes to this system is like the automobile repairman trying to fix the engine while it is running. That is tricky to do. However, that is what you and all of us are trying to do.
In the case of gun control, obviously, getting prudent estimates of the expenditures and being clear about them becomes important. Understanding the political and policy environment in which things are done becomes important. If one is working on a policy file to which there is a huge amount of resistance, then that will cost more money. If that is not acknowledged up front, the level of resistance can change. If one is assuming that provincial governments will cooperate, that will alter the process as one goes through the estimates of the expenditures. If there is limited experience as an operating department — in this case, the Department of Justice — that may make a difference as well.
I was pleased to see that the Senate and others were pushing this issue hard and saying to ministers, "How much will it cost and what are the proper estimates?" With each estimate going up in cost, the question is raised: Should we continue with it or not? Having pushed the estimates to what they should properly be in terms of the true costs, one can argue that the proper calculation, which is a political, policy and government calculation, was made. Instead of thinking the program would cost this much, it will actually cost this much. Let us now look at the benefits in relationship to the cost. That has certain advantages.
With regard to your second question, I will be brief. My suggestions for a modified, made-in-Canada accounting officer concept, which would recognize the legislative and delegated responsibilities under law of deputies and make them accountable only for those, would recognize in part — in light of what Mr. Thomas has said — what was already the case. When deputy ministers go before a parliamentary committee, they prepare well. It would acknowledge that and make it explicit, which would then have the supplementary impact of pushing that further down into the bureaucracy to make it clear. When a deputy minister says to his deputy, "I am now personally accountable; you, by definition, are accountable." That may help to ensure one is informed in avoiding those mistakes.
I do not think there is a panacea here. The idea is to make changes that will not cause other problems but will address, in a surgical way, some of the gaps that now exist in the system.
Mr. Thomas: Following up on the last point, it is important to have these opportunities for Parliament to challenge ministers and public servants because it galvanizes the norms of responsible and accountable behaviour in the minister's office and, below the minister, down the levels within the department. You get people's attention. Ministers do not like to be embarrassed before a committee. They do not like to get negative report cards from the Auditor General.
First, I think that parliamentary oversight of the operations of government is critically important. I wish there were more MPs dedicated to that as an activity. They think of themselves as lawmakers. They do not in fact make laws in the sense of formulating them, they approve them. When you interview them, they talk as if they are lawmakers and they are not. They should accept that most legislation will pass largely unchanged. If they want to influence future legislation they should study past policies to see what has gone wrong. Increasingly, that is where new legislation arises — what we have learned from applying past laws.
Second, we often try to focus accountability on public servants for what are inherently flawed policy designs. Even with the best management in the world, if the policy is flawed you will not get the results you want. Mr. Good has lived through these experiences in a way that I have not. On the HRDC issue, that was a policy crafted by ministers. The idea was to move the money as quickly as possible into the hands of community groups, with the accompanying photo opportunities, and get the political credit for it. Maybe there were good intentions behind it, but in effect it involved politicians in the administration of programs. When I served on the advisory committee to the Office of the Auditor General that reviewed the HRDC issue, I was the lone dissenting voice arguing that the Auditor General of the day was placing too much of the blame at the door of the public servants, who were asked to put into action a program with political content built into it.
The answer from the Auditor General was, "I have to stop short of criticizing policy. I have to comment on the management of programs." Well, I am sorry, but they are closely intertwined. It then lets ministers off the hook and public servants are hung out to dry because they are answering. At least in this case there were identifiable individuals because they were all over the media. I think that is a problem.
Finally, on Gomery, it goes beyond administrative accountability and deputy ministerial answerability. It is about breaking the Elections Act, violating the Financial Administration Act, inappropriate politicization of the public service and a deputy not having the courage to speak up and stop something. That is probably unfair to the individual involved. However, it is not that we did not have statutory arrangements and administrative procedures to block this. People broke the law. I think we will hear that next Tuesday, when we hear from Justice Gomery.
Senator Downe: I am interested, Mr. Good, in your comments about the gun registry, and I want to follow up on Senator Stratton's comment. In the current environment, I do not see any reason why a similar problem could not develop because there has been no change in the rules.
As you pointed out, one problem was the department was not used to delivering operational programs; there was a host of problems. It would seem to me that no minister would appear before a Senate or House of Commons committee giving estimates that were understated year after year unless they were getting the wrong information from somewhere in the system. I am sure the system did not want to generate the erroneous information, but those are the facts. For years, Canadians were told that it would cost X. That amount was exceeded by a wide margin. There is no change in the system. It could happen again in another program elsewhere. I am wondering whether you disagree.
Mr. Good: I do not necessarily disagree. I do know that in doing estimates of anything, sometimes assumptions can radically change and contingencies are not prepared for. I will be hypothetical because I do not know the details of this case.
If one were to make a general assumption about the willingness of people to register for something and one turned out to be incorrect by a significant factor that could increase the costs.
I do not think it always follows that the estimates are as scientific as one may think they are. We certainly see this in what we might call mundane estimates of how much will the government collect in revenues and how much will it spend in expenditures. We see that area as fraught with considerable uncertainty, predicated on what will happen with the economy, assumptions of economic growth, inflation, unemployment, and considerable assumptions about the contingency one wishes to build into the fiscal framework. We have had near royal commissions with regard to the handling of that important fiscal question, because it is important.
From my experience, estimates of revenue or expenditure, or estimates of project cost, are not always as simple as one may assume them to be. Your point is that they are getting more complicated because we are doing them with third parties, through procurement arrangements, through private and public sectors and other arrangements, which are a requirement, and I agree that more good analytical work is needed to get the facts right. I agree that is an important job for the public service to do, particularly in a world where numbers make a difference. First numbers are first impressions and they create the base from which one begins to look at something.
Mr. Thomas: This question highlights the weakest part of the parliamentary process, namely, reviewing estimates and the supply process, particularly in the House of Commons. A number of years ago I was asked by Treasury Board Secretariat to interview members of the House of Commons about what they thought would make the supply process more meaningful. I had to read many committee hearing transcripts to see to what extent the available documentation was being used. It was used very little. I titled the report: "Why MPs are more interested in vindicators than indicators." The partisan orientation that prevails in that chamber does not go away when you move into the committee setting. Members are not that interested in understanding what the numbers mean. They may be mesmerized and intimidated by the numbers in many ways.
There is a role for a separate committee — and I would recommend a joint committee — on expenditures in the Government of Canada, with a significant staff capability. When Treasury Board or Finance officials come forward, they would be challenged in a significant way. I have watched the estimates process recently in Australia, and their Senate committees, with the availability of staff, grill ministers and public servants seriously. It makes those witnesses confess how they are using public money. That is healthy. That galvanizes other people to pay more attention. That is what needs to happen. That is why Parliament counts at the end of the day. If Parliament is weak in that, that is the fundamental basis for accountability; it is how you raise the money and how you spend it. The process started from there and that is where it should be examined. The system has been weakened over time and is now a joke. It is not done to any great extent.
Senator Segal: Professor Good spoke about the appointment letters for deputies. One of the contexts we now face is what I call the visiting deputy minister. He is there for about 18, maybe 36 months maximum. That used to be okay when you had a corps of ADMs who were there for long periods, actually knew their knitting and had come up through the department.
In many parts of government these days — it pains me to say — when someone is referred to as a "lifer," that is seen as a debilitating comment as opposed to praise for someone who has worked his way up through the system.
We can all recall around this table when you did not become the deputy minister of Natural Resources or Health or Community Services unless you had worked your way up through field officers and middle management and had some specific expertise. Then the notion of the new public management, that managerial skills are transferable and applicable, was put into place.
One issue is the rotation of deputies. In the approach to the appointment of deputies, would you like to see a longer term, the notion that a deputy is appointed not for two or three years, but for five or six, unless there is a reason why not, so that you have some stability at the top?
A subject that is not generally discussed in the public domain is delegation letters. That is when the Privy Council Office generates a letter to a minister, signed by the Prime Minister — and it happens under governments of all affiliations — indicating the precise scope of his or her responsibility. Often, for reasons that are germane to politics or partisan balance or national interest in some way, a minister of state is given a responsibility within a department — the minister of state for senior citizens or whatever — and then a separate delegation letter is written to that minister. As soon as you have two or three ministers feeding out of the same core, statutory obligation, you begin to get some accountability problems that are almost being generated generically by the system.
There is a practice that is normative now and statutory in the private sector; that is, if you are running a public corporation, publicly traded on the TSX or any stock exchange, you have to produce a detailed quarterly report. There is a precise, statutory pro forma as to what has to be in that quarterly report in terms of fiscal performance, money in and money out, material changes in staff; you have to have a management discussion. In regard to the gun registry, this would have allowed the Department of Justice to be brutally frank about the difficulties it was encountering ahead of the money spent, because they would have had a statutory basis to do so. Would that be helpful relative to accountability and transparency?
My final area of inquiry relates to Professor Thomas's last comments in response to Senator Downe's questions. Is it fair, in your judgment, to conclude that when the Parliament of Canada, including all the political parties, gave up its rights in the early 1970s to control estimates and accepted the premise that if a committee had not reported estimates by a certain date they would be deemed to be reported to the House, that created the conditions whereby the media and others decided they had to wade in because there was no effective, de facto control, based on the principles of Runnymede and Magna Carta, over the fundamentals of public expenditure? That was apparent to anyone who looked at it carefully. I say this in defence of public servants and the media, who I do not think have been particularly malicious here, quite the contrary. Politicians made a decision — all the parties did, not only one — to back away from that; it was too complex, the Blue Book was too big. There were a million reasons not to do it. The end result was where we are now. I would ask our guests to reflect on those questions.
The Chairman: Those are four gigantic questions. Please take each question at a time and Professor Good can comment on it and Professor Thomas, and then we will go to questions two, three and four.
Mr. Good: We will be economical in our answers, but not necessarily with the truth.
On the question of deputy ministers, the low point, when the average length in a position was down to about 18 months, was some 25 years ago or more. Since that time, we have seen an increase to, I believe, two or three years. I agree with Senator Segal. I do not know what the number is, but it should be more than two or three.
Coupled with that is a clear recognition that the deputy's responsibility is twofold: first, for policy advice and, second, to bolster the management side as well. It is not just about policy advice; it is about management. That requires understanding the nature of the business of the department, not just the policy changes that are happening there. If you stress the management side and set out requirements that way, people will then have to stay longer in order to do the job effectively, particularly if you are assessing how well they manage.
Mr. Thomas: I am not sure there is a magic span of years that is just right. It is a bit like a baby's porridge; not too hot, not too cold, but just right.
Jurisdictions that have hired deputy ministers on contract are using four or five years to correspond with the electoral cycle. The implication is that an incoming government has the choice of replacing all or some of the deputy ministers.
If you address deputy ministerial accountability, you will get into the problem of intermingling policy and administrative roles between the minister and the deputy minister. In some ways it also implies that there has been a contractual relationship created that is not based on trust. It is creating a more legal undertaking.
One problem is that ministers tend to change at the same time. There will be musical chairs in the department, and everyone comes in with a new idea about how the department should be organized or what the policy priorities should be. That creates additional turbulence, and we need some continuity.
I think we have benefited from a professional, impartial and neutral public service that has assisted governments as they have arrived in office. That has been valuable to incoming governments.
Senator Downe: Do you have any concern that there is a difference between departments, such as between line departments and central agencies? In effect, not all departments are equal. The responsibility of someone in a department for five or six years is greater than that of a colleague at the same level but in a department that is easier on a range of aspects: size, budget, responsibility, political scrutiny and so on. Should there be more than one level for deputy ministers?
Mr. Good: That is a very good question. What I have learned about government is how diverse it is. When we treat government departments the same, we make fundamental mistakes.
The stretch and reach of governments into all parts of society requires that the challenges that are there — mentioning nothing about the politics — are fundamentally changing and diverse. Therefore, diversity becomes important.
That is why I do not like rules. It may be that in certain instances one could argue that because it is an easier department, there may be various reasons why one would want to do that.
You also want to ensure you get a good fit between the deputy minister and the department. We know the Department of Finance is a policy department. We know that Public Works and Government Services is a management department. That is not to say that deputy ministers of Finance do not know something about management; they have to. That is not to say that Public Works and Government Services do not know something about policy.
We need to look at that in the context of the length of time of those appointments. You could have shorter appointments. In that case, the learning curve may be less.
The Chairman: The next question is about delegation letters. Do you both have comments on that?
Mr. Good: The terminology we normally use is mandate letters. They are written by the Prime Minister to new ministers and ministers of state.
I take a classic view of that. Normally, the mandate letter should ensure that accountability rests with the minister. The secretary of state, who is not a privy councillor or a member of cabinet, is there to serve under the minister in respect of that.
The dilemma occurs when you begin to combine the minister of state with a privy councillor and a member of cabinet with delegated responsibilities. In those instances, I think it is important to apply the fundamental rule. If that minister of state is indeed a minister in charge, he or she must have the statutory responsibilities, the delegation, and assume the accountability that goes with it. We cannot have a halfway house. It simply will not work in our parliamentary form of government.
Mr. Thomas: First, I like the idea of mandate letters. It reinforces the principle of collective decision making through cabinet and the leadership of the Prime Minister in terms of setting the agenda within the government.
I do not subscribe to the fear, often expressed publicly, that too much power is concentrated in the hands of the Prime Minister. In a difficult country to govern such as Canada, the Prime Minister needs significant power. It is different from Britain or Australia. The requirements for maintaining a unified government are tricky in this country. I like the idea, but it means that ministers have less freedom within their own departments to do things because they are serving a collective agenda of government.
An annual event in Ottawa is the appraisal of deputy ministers conducted by the Committee on Senior Officials. More frequently, deputy ministers are given direction regarding how their departmental efforts will support the corporate agenda of government as a whole.
To some extent, deputy ministers do not owe exclusive loyalty to their minister or department. Part of the appraisal process looks at how they have contributed to the collective purposes of government.
Senator Mitchell: I would like to dig deeper into your point about the power of the Prime Minister, ministerial power and so on. My concern in much of this debate is that we erode political power out of a sense of things going wrong, and in doing that, we begin to erode democracy.
In the discussion today, which I have found extremely valuable, we have focused on certain forms of accountability, such as giving proper information, et cetera.
Could you put this in the context of political/electoral accountability? It is significant when you begin to assess the power of a prime minister, which you alluded to.
Mr. Thomas: In a week I will be presenting a paper for the institution that Senator Segal used to be the president of, the Institute for Research on Public Policy. The closing section of it deals with why TQP, total quality politics, is more important than TQM, total quality management. New public management folks invented infallible principles expressed in a list of pros and cons. I am saying: Here are the 10 principles of total quality politics.
There was a strong anti-politics message in new public management; that you had to remove accountability and management from the swamp of politics. I think that is absolutely wrong, and we should not mistake managerial responses for what are inherently political problems.
If government is in disrepute and people do not trust or have confidence in it, it relates more to the shortcomings of politicians and the political process than to poor management. They can be voted out.
You do not want to short-circuit accountability through Parliament by trying to find managerial alternatives. Avoid the disease that I call hardening of the auditors. Auditors are accountants and management discipline-type people, but they do not have answers to the difficult questions about what value is in public programs. That is not an accounting equation.
The Chairman: Since the House of Commons has given up its right to examine these issues, do they have a right to complain now?
Mr. Thomas: I was part of this institution as a parliamentary intern in 1971-72. I worked for a fine gentleman, Gordon Fairweather, and I got to know Robert Stanfield well. There were people in Mr. Stanfield's caucus who believed he surrendered a tremendous lever in the hands of opposition parties; namely, control over the time of the House of Commons.
Senator Segal is right; it had a broader impact in terms of changing the culture of the institution. It is a form of surrender; we give up, it is too difficult. Let us have more auditors general and officers of Parliament to do the work that parliamentarians used to do. It is a surrender philosophy, and I think it is wrong.
We need supplementary agencies and staff to help Parliament do its job. In the end, however, politicians must step up to the plate and do the jobs themselves.
I would like to see an ability to withhold supply at certain junctures in the fiscal year so we do not have eleventh-hour crises. We can have a hybrid model that will require the government to pay more attention and be more responsive. Then they can take the credit or the blame.
It is fine if they override Parliament. They will win in the end, but let us make them hesitate and be more careful and thoughtful about how they use public money.
Senator Ringuette: It has been interesting. Thank you very much. Of all the meetings we have had on this issue, you have brought forth the most realism, simplicity and practicality to the issue as far as I am concerned.
You have put forth in both your presentations key words: information and the art of accountability, trust, policy and program design, and administration. In the practical world of government, policy is designed by politicians, or at least the guidelines — maybe not the dots on the road, but the road. The greater policy is designed there. Then you need the civil servants to look at the policy and come up with program designs, estimates in regard to costs, impact, and the administration of those programs. I think it was Mr. Good who said that there should not be a clear distinction in regard to who is responsible for the policy and who is responsible for program design and administration. I would like you to further comment on that concept.
Mr. Good: It is a good question. It is one that has always perplexed practitioners and theoreticians. It is constantly talked about.
The job of the deputy minister is to speak truth to power, to speak with authority and provide ministers with policy options and policy advice. It is not the only policy advice they will receive, but they need to shape and provide that agenda. Therefore, deputy ministers will play on the policy agenda. They are expected to do that.
Having had the discussion, the debate, with the minister, within cabinet, and a decision having been taken by government that this is the policy we want, this is the way we want to go with the program, it is up to the deputy, having been fearless in his policy advice, to be loyal in his implementation, take it up and begin to do that.
The fundamental question, particularly acute in Canadian society, is that ministers like to get involved in matters of administration, largely because they touch people. In a country as vast and broad as ours, the touching of people by the federal government and by federal ministers is extraordinarily important. Linking the country together, dealing with regional differences, an entire set of arrangements, they want to be close to people; they want to make sure they are effective and efficient.
Where does the policy end and where does the administration begin? When one looks at the service units, how many offices there will be is an administrative decision, but it also has political and policy ramifications. One expects there may be a tension there. There will be a need for discussion. What is required then is a frank and open exchange about the nature of the additional costs that might be associated with doing it that way or this way to ensure aspects are brought to bear.
Generally, you are right: Ministers will focus on the policy and the political direction, and clearly, public servants' task is to implement the agenda of the day. That is what the textbooks say. The reality is there is interplay back and forth. That is why the accountabilities and the responsibilities in how it is set up become extremely important; but there is a sharing. The minister has to hold the deputy accountable in the end.
Senator Ringuette: Thank you. Mr. Thomas, do you have some comments?
Mr. Thomas: I have a quick comment. Some of the terms that you said are central to these debates I have tried to wrestle with, particularly the shifting meanings. There is a paper available online on the PPX — the professional planning exchange website — where I try to look at what has happened to the meaning of control, trust, performance and accountability in the operations of the Government of Canada through the 1990s. There was rhetoric about empowering public servants, requiring them to be more effective managers or freeing them from all the bureaucratic red tape and procedures. By December of 2003, in the aftermath of HRDC, Radwanski, the gun registry and other issues, the financial officers of Canada, through the Association of Public Service Financial Administrators, argued that we had witnessed a breakdown in controls and we had to go back towards tighter financial control on the front end, as opposed to insisting simply on results being reported as an outcome.
They may have exaggerated the extent to which managers were free to spend money recklessly or the internal audit function disappeared. Nonetheless, they argued that we had gone too far, too fast in delegating authority to people. We put too much trust in them and there was not enough verifying going on.
That is the motto of accountability. It is trust, but verified.
You mentioned control. Control took on rather negative connotations. It was about policing, monitoring and catching people doing things wrongly. However, to be in control of something means you can make positive things happen. There is an enabling aspect to being in control. If I am in control of my department and have the authority, the resources and a supportive environment, I can make positive things happen. Control should not be seen as entirely negative.
Finally, we now table in Parliament in the spring over 80 documents called performance plans; in the fall, performance reports. This is to help parliamentarians understand how money is being spent and the value they are getting for that money. There has been a careful study of the use of those documents in the estimates process: two instances where they were referred to over two years. Someone has to ask the question: What is the cost-effectiveness of producing all of that? Even if it is only online, someone has to gather the information, put it in an analytical format, and for many MPs they must make hard copies. Many MPs would not touch the computer to read it.
Much money goes into that. You have to ask yourself what you get back in accountability and improved performance. That is the last point I would make on this. Academics like me often assume that you can draw an arrow from enhanced accountability to improved performance. That is a hypothesis we need to test. Just because we have more accountability procedures operating, do we in fact get improved performance? That is as much an act of faith as it is a demonstrated relationship.
Senator Ringuette: You just went into my third question.
The Chairman: Before you ask your third, I think Professor Good wanted to say something about your second. Senator Downe had a supplementary on your second question.
Mr. Good: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to take the opportunity to answer the question that Senator Segal raised, which links to this and which we did not address. It is the question of whether there should be quarterly reports from each of the departments. I wanted to say — and I regret he is not here right now — there are some 1,000 reports that go to Parliament each year. They are reports that are required by statute, by law. I would ask Senator Segal, if he wants, by my calculation, to have another 320 reports go to Parliament — 80 times 4 — then which of the current 1,000 would he like to not go to Parliament? That is a legitimate question. I am saying that more information is the answer here.
Senator Downe: My question is a follow-up to some comments you made in response to the last question. I am wondering what your views are of public servants in the current climate of accountability, reports, scrutiny and so on. If you want to be a careful public servant in this environment, the best thing is to basically do as little as possible. That gets to the heart of the issue of serving Canadians, which is the role of the government.
I raise this because on the news this evening we heard that the expenses of the former head of the Canadian Mint apparently were fine, according to an accounting firm. However, if you were the incoming president of the mint and wanted to avoid any controversy, then the solution would be to simply not travel. I read in the newspaper that the union of employees who work at the Canadian Mint was pleased with Mr. Dingwall because he increased the work. Apparently, under the previous management the number of workers decreased because of layoffs. He travelled the world and, as we know from the media, secured contracts in Thailand and other places. The number of workers, particularly in Winnipeg, was increasing. They were happy with Mr. Dingwall's work and disappointed to hear that he was leaving. It would seem to me that if you were coming to the mint, you would have to be careful. If 60 workers were laid off in Winnipeg, that would not affect you as much as if you were to travel the world trying to obtain contracts but were held up to this kind of scrutiny. My question is: Do we have too much caution in the system that is married to the accountability?
Mr. Good: If we want government to be error free, then we can create it. We create bureaucratic government. We follow all the rules because the rules have to be followed. We put in place so many rules, requirements, guidelines and procedures that government is unable to function, to do what it has to do to respond to Canadians in an accountable way. That is a fear. I learned the hard way that so many regimes or fundamental administrative reforms are put in place in a period of crisis. In any period of crisis, the key is to regain stability and credibility. Often, one finds there has been an overreaction. It is human to overreact, and governments and bureaucracies do it. I understand why overreaction has to happen. A few years thereafter, it is important to undo some of the overreaction that is no longer required, but in a manner that is explicit and clear to the Public Accounts Committee, to Parliament, to Senate committees and to ministers and deputies, so that the auditors can understand that the procedures have changed and that the highly restrictive regime, which was put in place for a set of political, bureaucratic and other reasons, is no longer required. We can begin to make those adjustments prudently. That is called a "readjustment." We need to examine the readjustment, keeping in mind that it has to be done in an explicit way.
The reality is that good public servants used to make those adjustments implicitly in the past in order to make the system work. Under the tightness that has developed over the last number of years against the backdrop of the amplification of the media and other aspects, it is much more unlikely that public servants would make adjustments unless it were part of a plan and set out in a proper way. That needs to be done. Getting that balance among innovation, flexibility and accountability, service and responsibility is absolutely critical.
Mr. Thomas: Ministers and commentators on government have been insisting that we want creativity, innovation and risk taking. However, we want strength and accountability as well. Mr. Good said, we do not want mistakes to be made, but we cannot have it both ways. There will be mistakes. The system is complicated, and so embarrassing situations will occur and have to be explained and corrected.
I wrote a paper in which I suggested that telling public servants to take risks was akin to a sign at a bungee jump site that said, "If the bungee cord breaks, your next jump is free." Some public servants' careers have been severely damaged by doing what they have been told to do — take prudent, calculated risks.
Accountability does not trump all values, even in a democracy. We want efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness and fairness. We can overdo a good thing by having too much accountability at the expense of having a government that is not as creative and effective as we would like it to be. In the aftermath of Gomery, there will be a huge outcry for restoring more accountability devices. We can read about the multiple forms of accountability in the paper, and I like to talk about the "multiple accountabilities disorder" — the mad disease, as I call it. We have endless kinds of accountability mechanisms. It is a blurred and confusing world for people working within it and for the public looking at it from the outside.
Senator Ringuette: I have always questioned the fact that government is no different from the private sector, in that it likes trendy, new administrative programs. We have embarked on many of these over time. It contributes to the phenomenon of sensationalism in the press. It is all about dollars.
We have gone into value-for-money auditing, which seems strange for a business — government — that is in the service industry, the human factor industry. A report was recently tabled that indicates that because of this greater flexibility in the bureaucracy and risk taking, on a yearly basis, 73 per cent of new public service employees are not hired through competition. This is a broad question, because value for money is about dollars, and this is a service industry that should focus on human resources, because people deliver services, not machines. Yet, we have people who cannot properly plan and manage their staff. Perhaps I have stretched the topic of accountability, but I find that it is part and parcel of the current situation.
Mr. Thomas: I have a sermon on the limits of value-for-money auditing, although the Auditor General has paid me on a few occasions to be an adviser. The accountants can contribute important information to debates about public money. However, there is a limit to their disciplinary expertise, just as there is for everything else. We should not subscribe to the reports of the Auditor General as truth in capital letters. They are merely the starting point of the debate about what was found and what that signifies in terms of what has gone wrong. The Auditor General will claim objectivity, but in reality, she has independence. Auditing and accounting are inherently subjective and value laden, although they have a veneer of being scientific. There is much judgment involved in what you measure, how you measure and how you interpret the results. We have to be careful not to "worship" the Auditor General. Some politicians in Ottawa want to add substantially to the budget of the Office of the Auditor General, as though the cure to the absence of a bottom line in government were to have a more powerful Auditor General. There are limits to that, quite frankly. Without the help of the Auditor General, Parliament's efforts to scrutinize would be weaker. I am not denigrating the office, but it has to be kept in perspective and within limits.
Mr. Good: We should recognize that at the federal level in Canada compared to other countries around the world, we have the most independent, credible and, hence, the most influential Office of the Auditor General for a set of reasons: the nature and length of the appointment, the independence derived from it, the history and tradition, et cetera.
I share Mr. Thomas's concerns that we should see the Auditor General as the agent of Parliament, operating within the democratic disciplines of that.
The second point, we must be careful of our terminology. When people think of audit, they think of dollars and cents, financial matters. The reality is that most performance so-called audits do not look at dollars and cents, but at management practices. They are no more than management studies; they are not true audits. I strongly recommend in my book that we use correct terminology. I am not winning on this. If we call the studies, "studies," performance reviews, "performance reviews," and call a financial audit, an "audit," that would be fine. We could use the word "forensic audit," which means we are really looking at the numbers. We are muddled and hide behind the audit rhetoric; we need to be concerned about that.
I would like to see a lot more reviews, a lot more analysis and independent evaluations by outsiders informing the discussion, not just those coming from a single agent.
The Chairman: What do you mean by "outsiders?"
Mr. Good: I mean think tanks, groups, research institutes and the like. They could flow into the Parliamentary committees so that a multitude of policy questions and policy choices can be put on the table, with evaluations of the effectiveness and efficiency side and human resources.
Senator Ringuette: This is a follow-up comment on your statement about the media needing drama and to find someone to blame. Unfortunately, in the general public perspective, only the politicians are to blame. We never see the media being disciplined. I think we are missing a healthy part of what is happening in government and in the public service. The politician is always a target and the public servants seem to be the people who are worrying in the background, but we know that they are the ones who deliver and manage.
The Chairman: Professor Thomas dealt with that point in the paper that he circulated and the one that deals with resignations. He has also dealt with the issue of deputies and their sanctions.
Senator Ringuette: I have not received a copy.
The Chairman: On the meaning and practice of accountability in Canadian government.
Mr. Thomas: There was, as we traditionally understood it, ministerial responsibility and the related conventions around a neutral, professional, relatively anonymous public service. Ministers got sound policy advice and careful professional implementation of the programs and policies they adopted from the public service. In return, the minister took all the credit or the blame. We are getting more and more lapses nowadays, where ministers want to slough off responsibility and put public servants forward as scapegoats when things go wrong. It is not an epidemic; I do not want to exaggerate, but it is happening more. The public wants to be able to identify a single individual or institution that will answer for what went wrong and pay a price. That instinct is strongest when the problems or the mistakes are more egregious. I do not know where we are going with this. If public servants are held up to be publicly more accountable before parliamentary committees, how will they cope with that? It is breaking the bargain. We have not invented a new set of rules for the game.
I would recommend that we have rules for public servants from the Privy Council Office covering their behaviour before Parliamentary committees, what the protocols are that should guide them in appearing as an official witness before Parliament. We do not have the same kind of rules for how parliamentarians will treat public servants, particularly on the House side. It is an unfair contest. There are no rules for the public servants, and depending on the issue of the day, they can be the main course in some kind of battle.
Senator Ringuette: There do not seem to be rules in regards to politicians appearing before committees.
Mr. Thomas: That is the occupational hazard of the politician. The public servant had a cloak of ministerial responsibility. When you go into these partisan forums they will come after you as a public servant. You still have to uphold a vow of loyalty and confidentiality. You cannot share the secrets of what went on in the back rooms when the minister instructed you to do something that was against your best professional judgment.
Mr. Good: Just because we do not see the discipline that goes on does not mean it does not happen. It goes on in the private sector and we do not see it there either. We do not see it in the public sector. We cannot fashion it as a game of Clue — Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe in the dining room. These situations do not always lend themselves to that. A broad range of disciplinary actions can be taken: verbal reprimand, written reprimand, discharge. There is a discharge without pay, a movement of personnel that affects the pension, and the most important is the reputation. That is critical. All those are, in fact, severe penalties. There is a bit of a conundrum, in that what people do not see they do not appreciate. We have to respect the dignity of individuals and the importance of a politically neutral and somewhat anonymous public service in the same way some norms are respected in the private sector. How people are treated is important. I do not think we are a country that likes a lot of public executions. That is not our nature.
The Chairman: When you were answering one of the senators earlier you said that the minister should not accept the blame for what went before. What about a department where there have been some financial problems and the minister and the deputy minister are transferred to other departments? When the problem comes to light there is a new deputy and new minister. In the Canadian system, the minister and the deputy minister who have been reassigned cannot be called back to account for what went on. If the people are new, they certainly will be bright enough to be brought up to speed. I would like to hear your views on the current Canadian practice in terms of answerability and accountability.
Mr. Good: That is a very good question. Thank you for that. Of course, the accountability of the new minister is there because that new minister has the capacity in the present situation to take corrective action. The old minister and deputy have left. They no longer have that capacity.
The Chairman: You use the word "accountability?"
Mr. Good: Accountable in the sense of taking corrective action to fix the problem. The problem was not fixed, the new minister is alerted. There is a situation that happened under the previous minister and deputy, a serious problem to be fixed. The only person who can be accountable to fix the problem is the minister who is there today. However, I think we are seeing greater opportunities for deputies, and in some cases, ministers, to come before committees to explain and to elaborate upon situations. I recall in the HRDC case, the former deputy minister of HRDC, who happened to be the Clerk of the Privy Council, was called before the parliamentary committee to explain the situation even though that individual was not the current deputy minister.
I think we can handle both those practices, but the important point is who we hold accountable to fix the problem today as distinct from who is accountable for causing the problem in the past.
The Chairman: I do not think that is a difficult question. It seems to me that the people who should be responsible for fixing the problem today are the current minister and deputy minister of the given department.
Mr. Good: I agree.
Mr. Thomas: We might be more flexible about the conventions around ministerial responsibility and whether ministers, either voluntarily or under compulsion, can talk about what went on in their portfolio at a previous time. They no longer have the authority, but they have facts that are relevant to understanding what went wrong. If this is more about trying to diagnose the problems and fix them, then they may have something to offer. On the basis of a parliamentary procedure of ancient origin, it is probably past time that we might be more flexible. One of the virtues of ministerial responsibility in cabinet/parliamentary government is that it is a flexible system and not as rule-bound as the American system.
The Chairman: That is what I would have thought too.
Mr. Thomas: Mr. Good made reference to the HRDC affair. During that, I always insisted that the last thing Minister Stewart should do was resign and have an inexperienced minister come in to try to fix the problems. The problems did not originate on her watch, but she inherited them. You would then have had an inexperienced minister trying to learn the file and what needed to be done. We sometimes exaggerate, except for the symbolic value of having someone to whom we can point, whom we have sacrificed in the interests of upholding the principle of accountability. I think that remedial accountability rather than punitive accountability is where we should be heading.
The Chairman: Professor Good, on page 5 of your suggestions for this committee on some fundamental changes that might be made without going the full step of the accountability officer, you say that deputy ministers should not expect their minister to accept responsibility for decisions that fall within the deputy's sphere of authority and responsibility. As you know, there are certain statutes in Canada that name the deputy minister as the person responsible.
From a legal point of view, how would you go about making the change so that deputy ministers would not expect their ministers to accept responsibility for those decisions? Is a new law or a regulation required? How can that be effected?
Mr. Good: I do not believe one needs to create a new law. I think one simply has to clearly understand and set it out in the mandate letter, in the proper protocols. I think the first amendment should be made to the document dealing with the appearance of deputy ministers before parliamentary committees. That needs to be clarified, and if one were to adopt this approach, that would be the communiqué or the protocol under which that would operate.
It is important that that protocol be clearly understood by parliamentarians, by ministers and by deputy ministers. Unless there is a complete understanding across all parties, this will not work. There has to be an acceptance across all parties that the range of direct accountability of the deputy to the committee would be under law. That would codify current practice, in part, and would also make it clear how it would operate, but we do not need to change the laws for that.
Mr. Thomas: We are talking about what I would call soft law. It is the guides to ministers and deputy ministers. It is about codes of ethics and values that have been adopted as a condition of employment in the public service. It is about the charter of the public service that this government has promised it will introduce in the future. It is those kinds of documents. If you begin to codify it too narrowly in law, you get into some tricky areas where it is ambiguous. The ambiguity reflects the reality.
Professor Good said that if we had protocols that described in general, admittedly somewhat vague, terms the relationships amongst ministers, public servants and parliamentarians, there would have to be understanding and acceptance of them. I would just add to that, to complete the trilogy, a willingness to play by those rules. To understand and to accept is one thing, but to decide in the heat of the moment that public servants are a useful device for scoring points against the government is bad form.
The Chairman: As you know, we have had a number of professors, former deputy ministers and others appear before this committee on this study. Both of you have suggested, as have a number of them, that there should be some way of strengthening parliamentary committees so that they can do their job. With respect to the estimates, you have suggested strengthening the analytical and research capacity in support of parliamentary committees. We have researchers from the Library of Parliament, who are wonderful resource people for this committee. What did you have in mind besides that?
Senator Downe: Just an additional comment — you referred to the Australian experience. I am not familiar with that, so perhaps you could elaborate on what resources they have and how they work.
Mr. Good: I will talk specifically about the estimates. We had the previous discussion about the actual approval of the estimates and the requirement there. If one looks at the history of estimates in legislative systems going back to the Magna Carta, which I think we need to do, one understands that legislatures have always passed estimates late in the year. They did that because they wanted the Crown to put forward all its money and spend that before they appropriated any money from the Commons. There has been a longstanding tradition in how this operates. That sounds like a prudent and understandable approach to take.
Our dilemma is that we are asking parliamentarians to pass something upon which they have no impact. From my experience in government, if you want to deal with budgets, focus on budgets, the moment you indicate that someone can change or adjust that budget, people will pay attention. After-the-fact reporting is very difficult to do.
I strongly support greater analysis, and I want to congratulate the Library of Parliament for the work they have done, but it is not enough. That is not a necessary and sufficient condition. More reports will not be enough. The reality is that the kinds of reports that do exist operate in a fundamental dynamic.
The reports that public servants prepare for ministers are not designed to embarrass them. The kinds of reports that parliamentary committees want to use are those that will embarrass ministers.
The Chairman: Or hold them to account.
Mr. Good: I agree. I am perhaps exaggerating a little.
There has been some discussion of whether it is possible under certain circumstances to allow parliamentary committees to define some action not as a confidence vote, but rather to allow some modest reallocation in specific areas of the budget. That would allow the committee to say that, for good policy reasons, or good objective reasons, we think that the money in this department and this operating budget might be better reflected in a particular area. You would have to put some strong limits on it, you would have to have strong reasons and you would have to put in place mechanisms to allow Parliament to override that should they wish to, but you could see that happening.
I am not suggesting that is a panacea. We had that, in part, in the last Parliament with a minority government, but we did see a much greater interest in the estimates on the part of parliamentarians. Some mischief was obviously created, but at the same time there was a much greater interest because people knew that in the current situation they could actually affect the estimates.
We need to think about how we can let parliamentarians affect the estimates in a more direct way.
Mr. Thomas: In the paper that you have mentioned a couple of times I argue that Parliament has a dual role. One is to support the existence of strong, responsive governments, engaging them to pass legislation, get spending approved and implement the mandate that they have been given in an election. On the other hand, Parliament is also expected to enforce accountability of the political executive, the Prime Minister and the cabinet, to insist that they explain and defend their actions and to push governments to be more responsive to society. There is a contradiction between supporting strong government and holding them accountable, and it comes out most vividly in the role that government MPs play in committees. There are dilemmas in that because not many ministers encourage their backbench followers to go to committees and find things that will embarrass them.
I can share with the committee a three-or four-page paper. People in the office of Paul Martin, at the time he was waiting to become Prime Minister Martin, asked me to write a four-pager as part of a speech on the democratic deficit. I am not a practicing anything, let alone Liberal; however, I wrote the speech, "How to strengthen parliamentary committees, presuming that you wanted to," and there are a series of ideas there. Part of it is that MPs have to change their view that they are not likely to modify the major pieces of legislation that come before them.
On some pieces of legislation they should have heated, partisan debates and the public should be alerted to the implications of the legislation, but a lot of the legislation now is of the housekeeping variety. It is amending existing statutes, or framework legislation. There is a far bigger job to be done on the scrutiny role and MPs are neglecting that. That is partly because we have had a fragmented opposition and a group of MPs in the official opposition who come from an anti-politics-movement background, and they came here not believing much in the parliamentary process, not to be editorial or partisan about the matter.
The Chairman: Speaking of that four-page report, are you prepared to make that available to our committee?
Mr. Thomas: Absolutely, I would be pleased to do so.
The other paper that the Martin camp asked me to write was about what to do with the Senate, and how to fix the Senate without touching the Constitution. The Senate is not perfect, but it is a much better institution than its reputation.
The Australian Senate is interesting because now, for the first time in 25 years, the government has a majority in the Senate because they are using a proportional representation form of election. John Howard has a majority in the Senate. I was there in the summer, before July, before the government gained a majority position because the senators were not installed yet. I watched the estimates process and interviewed about 15 people. Their estimates process before the Senate is quite impressive. It takes place every day over two weeks. It is on the parliamentary channel. It is the main item on the news at night. Public servants come with big binders and know they will be asked tough questions. They have to be effective. They do not have the defensive mechanisms of ministers because there are very few ministers in the cabinet who come directly from the Senate so there is not that protection. They do not use parliamentary secretaries to protect public servants the way we do here.
The minister sits there but answers very few questions because the minister is answering on behalf of another minister, who is in the House of Representatives. They are now changing the parliamentary practice so that ministers who sit in the House of Representatives now come before the committees as well.
They hold major Senate inquiries. I think this institution has done admirable work in terms of general inquiries into public policy issues, but they conduct major inquiries. I interviewed the parliamentary staff there and they are PhD-credentialed people in economics and public administration. They are high-calibre staff, and this is an institution that has political clout. It matters. Somehow, you have to create enough incentives for MPs not to feel — and get permission from governments — that they are being disloyal when they go off to a committee and raise potentially embarrassing questions. That is a big cultural shift. You can do that partly by procedural and organizational changes, but ultimately, it is about saying to the minister, "You would be better off, Madam Minister, if you had inquisitive MPs helping you to give direction to the department and finding out where the problems are, because you cannot do it all on your own, so give us permission to go to the committees and do that."
The Chairman: That is a big cultural shift. It may be easier for a committee such as Public Accounts or National Finance, where you are looking at estimates and numbers, rather than committees on health or transportation; I do not know.
Mr. Thomas: This has been a favourite hobby horse of mine. I used to carefully read the transcripts of the Scrutiny of Regulations Committee, particularly in the days of Eugene Forsey, because I was interested in delegated law-making authority. That committee would not have been effective had it not been for the Senate contingent and, more particularly, the chair, obviously, and the lawyer who served the committee. We need a joint committee on the public service with a contingent of MPs who are interested in how the public service operates, interested in making a constructive contribution to improving the public service so it can make its contribution in turn to good government, and understanding what the implications and trade-offs are. I do not think there are enough MPs who are dedicated consistently to this, and given the high turnover amongst them, it needs a core of senators there. I have watched this group. I have read about this group. It does good work, it asks good questions, and it is constructive. It is not anxious to score points, and that is what we need.
We need a joint committee on expenditures to review estimates, a joint committee on the public service to review machinery-of-government issues, and to continue the work on regulations. I believe that trilogy is a good plan for tackling difficult, submerged issues of accountability that need to be debated without the hysterics of the House of Commons.
The Chairman: That is very interesting.
We have been here for some two hours and every moment was exciting, interesting and highly informative. I thank you both for sharing with us the wealth of your information from many years of study. It has been useful for this committee.
Honourable senators, our next meeting will be on November 1.
The committee adjourned.