QUESTION PERIOD — National Finance
Business of the Committee
December 4, 2024
My question is for the Chair of the National Finance Committee, Senator Carignan.
To date, I understand the committee has held three meetings on the practice of including non-financial matters in budget implementation bills. This is a study that the Senate asked the Finance Committee to look at because of some problems well known to all of us with respect to governments increasingly putting non-financial items in budget packages.
The study order of reference expires on December 31, 2024. Are you looking to bring forward a motion to extend that? If so, what would be the new date?
Thank you for the question, Senator Tannas.
We’ve begun studying your motion, which is extremely interesting. We’ve had the opportunity to hear from a number of witnesses, including the former Clerk of the Senate and representatives from Australia, including an Australian senator who chairs their finance committee. They have a whole process for studying this type of bill, and it’s very interesting.
That will take a little more time, and we will probably need to hear from more witnesses. There are some interesting insights to consider. I’m going to ask the steering committee of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance to move a motion to extend the deadline for this study. We will discuss it, but given the very busy schedule of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, it probably won’t happen before June 2025.
Thank you very much, Senator Carignan.
Do you anticipate, whatever the extension is, that we might be able to get a report from the committee in time for — assuming we ever get one — a budget implementation act that would come, presumably, this spring?
I don’t know. It’s hard to know what the government intends to do when it comes to finances. The fall economic statement still hasn’t been presented, and it’s almost Christmas. I’m not sure what kind of bill it will be.
However, we do have an interesting option for doing a preliminary study that involves assigning different aspects to the various committees, and this is very helpful to the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance.
