Proceedings of the Standing Committee on
Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration
Issue 4 - Evidence for May 8, 2003
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 8, 2003
The Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration met this day at 9:03 a.m. to consider administrative and other matters.
Senator Lise Bacon (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Senators, unfortunately Mr. Zaccardelli will not be here with us tomorrow. He will appear before us on May 29. Mr. McCallum is here with us as a replacement for Mr. Zaccardelli.
We will turn to the adoption of the minutes of proceedings of March 27 and April 3. Are there any comments?
Senator Gauthier: I so move.
The Chairman: Senator Gauthier moves the adoption of both, there being no comments.
There is a Commonwealth Speakers and Presiding Officers Conference in Montebello in January of 2004. I will ask Mr. Bélisle to give you the information concerning that conference.
Mr. Paul C. Bélisle, Clerk of the Senate and Clerk of the Committee: Honourable senators, this conference was originally planned to be hosted by Bangladesh. At the last minute, they withdrew, which left Canada to host the conference. Speaker Milliken and Speaker Hays agreed that Canada could host this conference in January of 2004.
The conference needs some funding because it was not budgeted in your Main Estimates. We will have to get the funds from existing funds, or they may have to come through Supplementary Estimates.
I spoke to the Clerk of the House of Commons this morning. The House of Commons will receive their funds for the conference from Supplementary Estimates. Nineteen bicameral parliaments and 35 unicameral houses for a total of 74 participants from 54 nations will be present. These conferences are held every second year. It would have been Canada's turn after Bangladesh. The financial implication is estimated at $133,750, and the Senate's share is 30 per cent, or a total of $40,125.
I must add that Ottawa decided to co-host a second conference, the Canadian Presiding Officers Conference at the same time. It is held every year in one of the provinces or territories. Canada decided to put both of them together in Montebello in January, so the total again is the same price.
[Translation]
Senator Gauthier: Since there is no estimate in the 2003-2004 budget for this item, you are announcing incremental expenditures of $130,000.
The Chairman: This expenditure will be financed by reallocating surplus funds from other activities. Funds will be reallocated to pay for this new expenditure.
Mr. Bélisle: In the event that we cannot proceed in this manner, we will come back to Supplementary Estimates. We are only four weeks into the new year.
Senator Gauthier: I did not clearly understand. The first paragraph of the document indicates that the conference will cost $133,750. The second paragraph does not set out any financial provisions.
The Chairman: The recommendation is that the committee agree that the Senate co-host the conference, but the Senate's share of the costs must be financed by reallocating surplus funds from other activities. If, however, there is no surplus to report in September, the amount will be recorded in Supplementary Estimates.
Senator Gauthier: Where are the funds coming from? No funds have been set aside in the 2003-2004 budget for this purpose. You are indicating that the funds will be available, from the surplus. This is, then, the expectation?
The Chairman: Yes, based on past experience.
Senator Gauthier: So, it is management, based on how things usually are?
The Chairman: Based on past experience.
Mr. Bélisle: We will inform you, honourable senator, where the funds come from. It is, however, too early to be able to determine exactly where the amount will be allocated in our Estimates for the 2003-2004 fiscal year.
The Chairman: Any other comments?
Senator Robichaud: I am disturbed by Senator Gauthier's remarks. It was my impression that consideration of Supplementary Estimates would only take place in the fall. We should, as much as possible, try to ensure that the funds come from internal resources, except as a last resort.
Mr. Bélisle: Absolutely, senator.
[English]
Senator Stratton: Do you want to tell that to the chairs of committees?
Senator Robichaud: The Steering Committee will do that.
The Chairman: We are used to it.
Senator Austin: I have the opposite instinct entirely. I believe in ``incremental creep'' when it comes to adding capital and cash to our budget. If the House goes, I think we should go on their coattails, because there will be no objection anywhere in the parallelism. Of course, if they can find it from internal resources, we are stuck, because we cannot go on our own, but I think we should follow a policy of adding to our financial resources when it is as easy as it appears to be in this case. The objective is highly desirable, non-political and non-controversial. Perhaps there will be other similar requests in the future. In fact, given the explosion of parliamentary diplomacy, I cannot believe that these will be adequate resources a year or two from now.
The Chairman: Do you agree that we try to find $40,000?
Senator Austin: Did you say you were going to go for internal resources for the funds?
The Chairman: We will make every effort but, if we cannot, we will go to Supplementary Estimates.
Senator Robichaud: What about the House of Commons?
The Chairman: It is not clear what they are doing.
Mr. Bélisle: You never know what route they may decide to take.
Senator Robichaud: Whatever they decide to do we will follow. Is that correct?
The Chairman: Yes. We will follow closely what they are doing. We will do what they do.
We will move on to the Africa seminar.
Mr. Bélisle: Honourable senators, this is an item to which you agreed in the previous fiscal year. Last year, there was a proposal for this African seminar and this African seminar was supposed to be held in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Nigeria backed out. The program was postponed last year to this fiscal year. The total amount is $198,496 for a total of $60,000 for the Senate. The delegation will be headed by Minister Kilgour, Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, seven other parliamentarians, senators, and MPs representing the current political parties. I gather that would be about two senators and five MPs.
Again, it is the same issue of obtaining funds. I do not know what the House will be doing.
The Chairman: We will follow closely what the House is doing.
Senator Austin: I just love the fourth word in the third line of the second paragraph headed ``Status.'' That is a wonderful word. It states: ``with the postponement until the next fiscal yarn.'' The word ``yarn'' means ``story'' in English, and I think that is so appropriate. Thank you.
Mr. Bélisle: It was corrected but not on your copy.
The Chairman: We will follow closely what the House of Commons is doing and we will do the same thing.
I do not think we want to prevent anyone from doing his or her job properly.
Mr. Bélisle: Nigeria has backed out. That leaves Sierra Leone and Ghana but it will be the same amount of money. Airline tickets are expensive.
Senator Austin: The real objective was Nigeria. I am not being critical, but this is the country that was the target for attention.
Mr. Bélisle: On the other hand, this could be postponed again. I may have to come back and say that even though you authorized it is not going to happen.
Senator Austin: They have just finished an election and maybe they will reconsider.
The Chairman: Do you have any other matters to discuss this morning?
Senator Kroft: Yes. My topic goes to the general subject of our financial capacity.
Mr. Bélisle: Senator, do you want to stay in public for this matter? According to the rules we are allowed to go in camera for budgetary matters. It is up to you; it is not up to the clerk.
Senator Kroft: I have no problem with staying in public.
The debate has been conducted publicly and I see no reason to go in camera. I am following up debate that is already part of the public record.
I am of the view and have always been of the view that we have no reason in principle to see how little money we can spend. As a matter of fact, on the contrary, I have always had the view that the more we can spend the better if we are doing it productively, effectively and in the interests of the Senate and the Canadian people. Those are not just words.
As I have studied the financial management of this institution, I have seen that the mindset with which we approach these things is very important. A decade ago we apparently got involved in the mindset that the thing to do was to spend no money. That affected our base; it affected some of our fundamentals that hurt us for a very long time forward.
I want always to be sure that we are looking ahead to ensure that we have the resources that we need. At one level no one disagrees with that, though there is sometimes a difference of opinion in how we get there. For instance, as Senator Austin just said on the concept of Supplementary Estimates, he believes in incremental growth of our financial capacity. If there is an opportunity to grow, we should.
I am talking about capacity. That does not mean that you therefore spend from that capacity all the time. Still, if we have the resources, there is an even greater onus to be effective with them.
It is getting near to summer and I know that the administration needs things to do over the summer when we are not here, being such nuisances.
I want to come back to a subject that I have discussed with the clerk before and that has been discussed around this table. That is the fundamental bind we are in because of the way that we do our budgeting in reference to what happens in the House of Commons.
We just had a conversation in the last five minutes saying, ``Let us see what they do. If they go, we will go.'' Then we watch their percentage and ensure that we stay within an appropriate percentage. That has been the model for some time.
I believe we need to break out of that model in a very fundamental way. The reason we must do that has been expressed here already. Certainly Senator Kenny and I have expressed it, but I want to do so again because I want to be sure it is fresh in the minds of committee members, some who may not have been here before. We need a fundamentally new approach to our budgeting. We have elements that are being changed. Security is tipping its hand here, but I am also thinking of changes in our communications, in our use of Internet, and in our use of broadcasting. We will have more televising; we will have more committee rooms. One day we will be looking at televising the chamber.
All these initiatives, and I can think of others will cost large sums of money, from $1 million to $3 million. We have never been able to look at them seriously because within a 2.4 per cent increase or a 5.3 per cent increase, we can barely keep our heads above water operationally. We cannot really free up the money for committees even if we all agreed there is great work to be done. We have to make choices that are restrictive, but I am looking at the overall budget.
It is important that we go back to our fundamental approach. One thing that we could do, and I do not know what Treasury Board rules and other rules do, but I do know the way Ottawa works. Perhaps we can do it officially, but in our minds we need to develop what I would consider a capital budget and an operating budget. Our operating budget is funding our committees and our obligations to interparliamentary committees, and so on. For the major expense items, the large-dollar items, they are often blocked because the House of Commons has so much in place already. They have new building plans on Bank Street and all their other projects. However, their base is so large that an increase for them, plus what is already done for them in other ways, leaves them with capacity way beyond what we even begin to have. I include some staff components in that.
For example, two new committee rooms are being built now in the Victoria Building on the main floor; they will be equipped with televisions and sound systems. Room numbers 505 and 705 will be eliminated.
If we took another room that was not on some building plan and wanted to bring it up to the same standard we would have to look in our budget to do so.
We should look at our forward-looking financial needs. Much of this has to do with communicating with the public. We should look to see where the funds are. We should see if we are able to find capital contributions to our budgets for the whole program with regard to televising the proceedings of our committees and possibly the chamber. We have to see if there is another way of getting that money into our budget, be it from Public Works or Heritage Canada, because of the buildings. That way we can get the burden of some of those large amounts where they should appropriately be and make it possible for us to think about doing the operational things that we want to do as an institution.
Mr. Bélisle knows how to begin this process much better than I do. Once begun, it becomes perhaps more of a political task to find out where the right spots are to get that response, but the game plan has to begin in its development within the administration. At least we should know that we could look at these things institutionally as to what we want to do and not have them off the table because there is no financial capacity to do them.
I am suggesting a fresh approach to our budget structure. Some of the implications might be that we could free up more funds for committees and for other things that we want to do on the operating side.
The Chairman: Was there any work done while you were chair?
Senator Kroft: We talked, but I do not know whether or not someone has been doing any sort of thinking in this regard.
The Chairman: Were there any discussions?
Senator Kroft: Yes, but there was nothing that ever really came forward. What exists, exists mostly in conversations I have had with Mr. Bélisle and Mr. Ranger.
Senator Bryden: I do not at all disagree with the usefulness of taking a fresh approach to our budgeting process. If we can find a method whereby we can stand on our own from the point of view of capital investments and technological investments in the institution, as against operational I have no problem with that. However, I do hope there is no headline writer here today because I do not want to associate myself with your first statement, that we should spend as much as possible. You went on to say, ``provided there is good work to be done,'' and there are areas where we can do good work.
The concern that I have had in almost any institution or business that I have ever been involved with is that, work expands to fill the time available. Work has a tendency to expand to use up the funds that are available as well.
In the new structure, it would be extremely important to me that the budgeting be done not simply for the purpose of creating a large block of operational funds, but that the block of operational funds would be a response to a very careful and disciplined approach to our priorities.
If we are talking committee systems, our committees should be directing particular attention to those matters that are of relevance to Canadians with a minimum of concern for those issues that happen to be of particular interest to one particular senator, because that situation also happens. I just want to ensure that there is a concern placed on the record.
Senator Gauthier: It is unusual that I agree with both Senator Austin and Senator Bryden. I do think that we have to tighten up the way we spend our money. As an example, I do not understand why we do not allow senators to use their travel points when they are working on committees. That is a statutory rule that is in the budget, not in our budget but paid by the government whether we like it or not. We allow the senators to go sixty-four times a year. We do not allow senators to use those points. We should look at that policy and try to adjust it. A lot of money is spent on air travel.
Public Works Canada pays for translation and interpretation services, but not for the CART services, computer- assisted reporting. I have been fighting them to get them to agree to come forth and be fair. If they are going to pay for interpreters and translators, they should pay for our CART reporters. They say that is a different system. I disagree. The House of Commons has a different, backward, rearguard system, and the Senate has an advanced, modern system. We would save money that way. I would like to be part of that committee.
My mother was Scottish, so I have a bit of the Scottish trait to save money. I do not understand why senators are not allowed to use their points for official travel with committees. I do not understand why we do not fight Public Works Canada to get them to pay for our CART reporters, and other things.
Senator Kroft: I do not think that this was an unheard of outburst. I have made that same comment before. It began the first time I took the chair of the budget subcommittee. When I said: ``spend as much as possible,'' I mean, obviously, I mean as much as we can possibly spend in a disciplined, effective, appropriate way. However, I have seen too often the negative results that flow when the premise is, ``Let us see how little we can get by on when we do this.'' In my experience, whether in business or in public life, you end up with performing at less than your potential.
Follow the debate that is going on in the chamber. I have had it for five years with Senator Lynch-Staunton. He said ``What is the point of bringing forward a term of reference and then find there is no money for it?''
The flip side of that is, as he suggested, they should go to Internal Economy and put out the terms of reference, find out if there is a budget for it, and then come to the chamber. My argument, and this is on the record, is that that turns this body into a priorities committee. This body becomes a body for deciding what is most important to the Senate, and then that is who gets the budget. I believe that usurps an appropriate function of caucuses and the chamber.
At one level, he is quite right that there is no point in granting a mandate to a committee if you do not have the money. We tried to reduce the procedure, but the problem is that this committee then has to become a priorities exercise, and we have to decide whether a medical study is more important than a media study and so on. Obviously, by definition, everything cannot be done at the same time and in the same way.
There is no perfect answer, but I do believe that one of the answers is that we should begin by determining what there is that we could do and do well, given the capacity of the Senate, and then let us see if we can find the money to do it.
If you start out by saying we only have so much money, or, let us see how little we can spend and what can we do within that, the Senate will always under-perform its potential.
This is a broad philosophic debate, but I feel strongly on this point. When you start asking how little can we spend you will get what you pay for.
I do not know if there are committees that do not have enough of a budget to do anything in the fall session. I suspect there are. I am not sure what is contemplated in terms of Supplementary Estimates for committees, but in terms of planning forward work, if committees now have spent what they have, we have a long time ahead.
I do not know what the parliamentary schedule will be like in the fall because of the circumstances, but there may be lots of opportunities for committees to be working. I am not sure that the funding is in place to allow those committees to be working.
Even though I know we always budget and do not spend everything we have budgeted for, and I have studied those figures for hundreds of hours, I do know that if a plan of work is to be done in a time frame that is meaningful, a committee, like any other part of any organization, is not different than one of the clerk's departments. If he does do not know until three-quarters of the way through the year what budget he has, he cannot have the people in place or the work plans. A committee is no different.
Let us start by finding out what we can do and do well, and then find out what we have to do to get the money to do it. Let us not put the ceiling on and say we only have this much, and then work backward from there. I believe this institution will always under-perform when that situation occurs.
Senator Stratton: While I could agree with you, Senator Kroft, I still think you are talking about the public's money, no matter where it comes from.
Senator Kroft: We are here at the public service.
Senator Stratton: I understand that. You remind me of a mayor who is looking everywhere to find money because he is falling behind on his infrastructure works. That has been the talk of cities for quite a while.
This is not dissimilar in the fact that we have shortfalls and we have to try to adjust them by exploring in other areas. Cities and town and villages are trying to do that. I do not disagree with that premise. I am saying, ``be careful,'' because this is public money, from wherever it comes from.
I think we need to look at it. It becomes a popularity contest. Some committees believe that they could win a debate against another committee and so get the funding that they require. That is the degree to which they have gone. They are prepared to do that. I think that is reprehensible, because that is pitting one against the other. I think we should look at it, and I think we should look at it now.
I am not going to sit here and say, ``Well, let us go and find money wherever we can find it,'' without making sure we are careful with those dollars, wherever they come from.
[Translation]
Senator Robichaud: This is not the first time we have had this discussion, and I am sure it will not be the last. I disagree with Senator Kroft when he says that we should agree to take additional funding from Supplementary Estimates, if necessary. There have been numerous occasions when more money would have been nice, for example, for telecommunications. The reality is that when Supplementary Estimates are presented, the Leader of the Government in the Senate has to defend them. She must deal with the political reality, meaning how and to what extent she can influence the budgetary process. There is more money for some committee requests.
During the last fiscal year, committee requests exceeded our allocation by $1 million. The committee chairs were asked to review their budgets. The vast majority came back with a considerably modified work plan. We were able to distribute, fairly, I think, the funds. Some, however, refuse to listen and ask for a third of the overall budget.
In most cases, people are cooperative and understanding, and they establish a work schedule. They are very ambitious, and so they should be. Not one committee works harder than any other, even those committees that do not travel.
At some point, it might be a good idea to discuss if a committee's effectiveness depends on its relationship with the media, the number of witnesses appearing before it and where it travels. The committees will, at some point, be competing to travel not only around Canada but also around the world. I would not want us to become a travel agency. Everything is fine until someone appears with all kinds of stories that could be considered horror stories. We understand, but everyone interprets them in their own way. It is important to strike a balance. There is more work to be done, obviously. However, I wonder if more funds need to be allocated to the committees.
I will not be Deputy Leader of the Government for much longer, but my successor must deal with the schedule so as to ensure that there are enough senators in Ottawa so the Senate can function, which is our primary responsibility.
Often, you will notice, we barely have quorum in the House. The senators have other things to do. They must do their committee work, and some committees are travelling. We have to take into consideration the overall picture. I believe that we have managed very well up to now. If, at some point, the political situation changes or more funds become available, of course, we must try to obtain these funds, as much as we need to do our jobs well and responsibly.
Senator Gill: It seems to me that the budgetary process is not new. It has always been like this. For those who have never done what we are doing, it has always been like this. We establish our priorities, our programs and all that, and then we make a request for funds. I think that those who make a request for funds do their best to get as much money as possible. Once we have our budget, we have to work within our budget. Imagine, an Indian is saying this: we must work within our budget. I think that this is logical, and if we do not agree with this, I think that there other interests being defended, and they should be put on the table.
What we are doing is totally rational and acceptable. Everyone does his or her best. If there are new programs, they must be discussed during the year, and when it is time to do the budget, requests can be made. If we are allocated a budget, then we work within that budget. That seems logical to me.
However, Senator Gauthier was saying earlier that we could look closely at how we are using the funds. This should be part of regular practice. We must spend as wisely as possible and optimize the means at our disposal. It is standard practice to consider what we are doing and try to do as best we can with what we have.
What we are doing here is not unusual but rather standard practice when it comes to budgets. A budget must be implemented and managed as best possible.
Senator Gauthier: I agree with these remarks. Will there be a follow-up or is this only a discussion?
The Chairman: This is no laughing matter. I would joke about something else, Senator Gauthier. There are four subjects that must be considered by the end of the current session before the summer break, one of which is the budget. We will come back to this, Senator Gauthier.
[English]
Senator Kroft: I do not mean to take too much time, but I would like to respond to two things. In response to Senator Robichaud and the political challenge that the leader has, my first intervention in terms of recasting our budget and trying to find ways of getting capital contributions to our budget I think would be helpful to that process. If the security of this building, the financial side of it, not the administration of it, could be picked up in another budget and not in our budget, then we would have more operating budget without having to go any higher on the amount we ask for.
As Senator Gill said, ``we live within the budget we have.'' What I am trying to do is see if there are ways to expand the amount of budget we have. I am trying to see if there are funds available for us to use in ways that are consistent with our priorities and not things imposed on us that perhaps could be more appropriately covered by some other part of government.
In terms of Senator Stratton reminding me that these are public monies, I do not need to be reminded of that fact. However, I will say that we are often too preoccupied with governing our affairs consistent with the House of Commons. We try to maintain a balance with them when they are too far ahead of us in terms of the money that they have at their disposal. Until we get parity with them in terms of resources, I have no concern with violating any gain so long as we are spending it in a well-disciplined way. I see no reason why this house should be disadvantaged in terms of the relative financial resources that we have. I am not counting what they need in their role as elected officials. We are so far behind on that, that we are imposing a limit in terms of public sensibilities on ourselves that I feel it is not appropriate. That is fundamental to my point.
Senator Robichaud: I agree with Senator Kroft that if we can get Public Works or the Library of Parliament as interpreters it would cut our cost. We do that but the other House is doing the same thing as well. It is not a matter of working just within our own box. The others are faced with the same constraints.
I disagree when you say that the House of Commons is so far ahead. Do you have the figures Madam Chair?
The Chairman: No, I do not have those figures with me.
Senator Robichaud: It is not right to say that we are under funded or not as good. I believe that we are much further ahead on committees than the House is. That is a fact.
The Chairman: Senator Robichaud, I can give you the amount available for committees for us here. We have 16 committees and $137,500 per committee, on average. As far as the House of Commons is concerned, it is allotted $64,285.71, per committee. They have 35 committees, and a $2.2 million in funds available. They have about half of what we have available per committee.
Senator Kroft: They have chosen to have so many committees.
The Chairman: There are more people over there; there are only 105 senators. The numbers speak for themselves.
Senator Gauthier: I am always looking at what we can do to improve things. The House of Commons has expenditures that are covered statutorily. They have certain other expenditures that they play on. It is not true that they have only $2 million or whatever budget a year for committees. I think they have an awful lot more money than that.
We should look at travel and try to improve it. I do not say we should change it; I say we should look at it. There may be some savings there.
We should fight like hell to have the same approach to transcribing the debates for the House of Commons and the Senate. In the Senate, our debates cost about 23 cents translated, transcribed and printed; in the House, the figure comes to about 10 cents more. No one will give you that figure, though. Try and find it. We should be able to get that figure if they want to argue that point. We could save money in translation and reallocate it to other areas. I am not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars; I am talking about millions. If you want to reallocate funds within the budget, there are ways you can do it.
I will remind honourable senators that the Senate lost out on the Restaurant of Parliament when we determined that we would not cover the deficit of the restaurant. The House took over the restaurant and by cutting catering services to members found $750,000.
The cabinet would hold banquets in the Hall of Honour and they would pay a $3 per person catering fee to the restaurant. They cut the catering and saved $750,000. They gave every Member of Parliament an allocation to reimburse his or her expenditure when they are in residence in Ottawa. They were given a $10,000 allocation or whatever it was. The Senate tried to do the same thing after the fact and received a bad reaction. It was the same thing, but it was badly done and badly timed. I am saying: Let us be as smart as they are over there.
The Chairman: Everyone is trying to be smart, but everybody wants more.
Senator Gauthier: I do not like followers; I like leaders.
The Chairman: I never said that we were over funded. I do not think we are, but I think committees also have a job to do as far as their budgets are concerned. Sometimes I feel we are like a travelling agency, distributing travel to everyone from our budgets.
The Legal Committee is doing a great job; they are not travelling and they work hard. I do not want to make comparisons. Some people compare themselves by the number of trips they take. Again, fact-finding missions are different from public hearings. Our people do not have the same protection they have when they conduct public hearings compared to fact-finding missions. They have to realize that if they conduct more fact-finding missions, they will not be protected by their status as parliamentarians. We are seeing more and more fact-finding missions. I will also comment that the fact-finding missions do not respect our two official languages.
Senator Austin: I feel I deserve a little bit of credit for not having participated in the debate so far, but I am about to abuse that right now. I am about to spend some of that credit.
It always bothers us that we do not know how to measure our effectiveness. We sometimes measure our effectiveness by the number of committee meetings that are held, or by the number of committee meetings held outside Ottawa, or by the hours we spend in committee, or by column inches earned in newspapers. All of these criteria have some validity and lack some validity.
I wonder if we should engage ourselves in what is known in the office of the congressional budget as an evaluation of ``measurable results.'' I use the phrase ``measurable results'' because it is a wonderful little phrase, but trying to define it becomes a significant exercise.
We go around the merry-go-round asking ourselves whether we are spending effectively and how do we know if we are spending effectively. That is essentially what Senator Kroft said. Perhaps we should at some time in this committee ask our officials to sit with us and go through an in camera discussion of how we should measure ourselves so we know how much of the public purse we can decently spend.
The second thing I want to say, and I apologize for it in advance and plead the right to say this because I have been here the longest of all the people in this room. We have to step back and see where we are in the cycle of public relevancy. Historically, the Senate started with one-third of the cabinet ministers. It was seen in the Charlottetown papers, in discussions on Confederation, as playing a very significant role in public governance.
I will not take you through the decline curve, although I would love to in another discussion, but two things happened. In that early period the Conservative Party dominated the Senate; they were in office for quite a long time. The Liberal Party, always in the minority, developed a tradition of opposing the Senate. After some time a certain level of American populism came into the Liberal Party, and the argument about democratic representation began to grow.
Mr. King, who was very much in the van of suppressing the Senate because it was a troublesome institution, having too many Conservatives and not representing his particular political philosophy, took advantage of the Beauharnois scandal to change the way the Liberal Party dealt with the Senate.
From that time on, we have had the CCF come in on radical populism, and the media has since joined the parade. We are still dealing with the issue of the Senate not being an emanation of democratic populism, as we imported it from the United States. Then we spent time being the subject of constitutional debates: Mr. Trudeau, the premiers, first ministers' meetings, Mr. Mulroney and so on. We have been on the defensive, as an institution, for roughly 80 years.
Since Charlottetown put the constitutional change game away for a while we have had to ask ourselves how we justify our existence and how we are relevant to the Canadian public interest. We have been acting on it. Instead of apologizing and staying out of sight we feel that we have to be relevant in our society. In order to be relevant, we have to have resources.
We must always remember that the other chamber is a rival chamber in terms of its role and in terms of its own justification. The other place controls the budgetary process because the executive largely sits in that chamber and so adopts the rivalrous attitudes of that chamber in their approach to us.
This is a cultural situation I am describing. You can put all this discussion about budgets and committees and measurable results into an historic process. It is right for us today to say we are an established constitutional fact that is not likely to be changed. If we sit here and provide no valuable or measurable results to the public, we have decided on constitutional change de facto if not constitutionally.
Everyone wants to justify and provide public value for his or her presence here. There is not a senator, I hope, that does not see him or herself as a servant of the public interest that wants to do the best job he or she can. We are getting a positive response from the public for the reports we are doing, for the work we are doing, and, as well, I might add, apart from that, from the work many senators are doing in their provinces and in their areas. I read the media, and you read the media. It is excellent to see our colleagues speaking out in their areas and speaking on public issues, not just on the Senate, and in fact much less about the Senate than about the issues that concerns people.
I have said a lot, and I apologized in advance. I think we should understand that we are about making this the best public interest institution that we can and we are doing a very good job.
It is a doctrine with me that we can employ all the resources we are able to get in playing the bicameral system. I do not think there is any question that we are nowhere near reaching the level where we have to imagine how to use resources for the public interest. We are well below that issue.
I started this perhaps by saying that I think that we can employ any funds that we get in the parliamentary diplomacy account effectively because senators want to play an active role. I say that we should understand that we are well below the ability to effectively use funds. That does not excuse us in any way. The concept is one thing, but we have to apply ourselves in detail to how we use the money, and we have to justify how we use the money. Believe me, more money in this system can be used very well.
Senator Robertson: Further to Senator Austin's comments about the utility of the Senate and the public's perspective of this, there is something else that has gone on in the other chamber that perhaps, senator, you have not observed, or chosen not to mention.
I believe the Senate has increased responsibilities when the opposition in the other chamber is weak. As you watch the profile of the Senate across the country in certainly the last few years, I think the public has greater respect for us. I believe much of that respect has come from the debates we have had in the chamber, recognizing that the opposition in the other chamber is weak. If the strength of the opposition increases, then we will have to be very careful to keep our profile high with our debates and our work in the Senate, but certainly the public sees the Senate with much more grace than it did when I came here in 1984.
Regarding your evaluation comments, I have always been a little bewildered that much of the work of the Senate that I could observe has never been evaluated. I have never worked in another environment where there has been, seemingly, a lack of evaluation of work. That may be something that we want to look at, because you can fill the hours with all kinds of work that is important to the individuals putting forward the proposal, but we need a final evaluation of that work, and that is perhaps where we have a bit of a weakness.
Senator Austin: I thank you for your observations. I did not mention that aspect, the aspect of the function we perform in the political process, because I was looking at the institutional possess. You have laid out the rationale for the Liberal role when Mr. Mulroney received such an overwhelming vote in 1984. On our side, we saw it as needing to balance what would be a relatively ineffective opposition in the House of Commons.
Senator Robichaud: We were quite effective.
Senator Austin: Relatively ineffective in numbers, not quality, Senator Robichaud. It is a legitimate role, but that is a different discussion.
Senator Robertson: Yes, but it also ties in with the valuation of the times.
The Chairman: Thank you for this discussion, senators. I think we will be ready to discuss this further in our last meeting before we leave for the summer recess. We will try to prepare some documents for you so that we can have a continuing discussion.
Senator Bryden and Senator Stratton and the working group on security will report to us; we will have Mr. Zaccardelli on May 29. We will have a report on CPAC before we leave. We will also have a discussion on budgets and what can be done to improve the procedures that we are following, because we have been following what has been done in the past and we can innovate where it is possible to do so.
The committee adjourned.