Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill C-16, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.

This bill provides for funding what we call interim supply, which gives the government the authority to spend before the Main Estimates are approved.

The publication House of Commons Procedure and Practice by Marleau and Montpetit explains it this way:

Since the fiscal year begins on April 1 and the normal Supply cycle only provides for the House to decide on Main Estimates in June, the government would appear to be without funds for the interim three months. For this reason, the House authorizes an advance on the funds requested in the Main Estimates to cover the needs of the public service from the start of the new fiscal year to the date on which the Appropriation Act based on the Main Estimates of that year is passed.

Colleagues, as someone who came to this place with a fairly extensive background in the private sector, I can assure you that this process raises flags for me and it should for all of you.

We are being asked to provide approval for the government to spend about one quarter of its voted expenditure plan prior to a detailed examination of those expenditures and prior to the approval of the Main Estimates, which won’t happen until sometime in June.

Furthermore, it is important to realize that, regardless of what Parliament decides about the Main Estimates in June, any spending approval which is granted through this interim supply bill cannot be withdrawn later.

As stated in the House of Commons Procedure and Practice:

. . . during the examination of the main estimates, neither the House nor its committees can reduce a vote to an amount less than the amount already granted in interim supply.

This applies to the Senate as well. Even though the Senate’s National Finance Committee has not yet cracked open a single page of the Main Estimates, this chamber is required to approve $75 billion of interim spending and there is no recourse to withdraw any of that spending approval once it has been granted.

If the business of supply were operating properly, this would be an acceptable process. Checks and balances would be in place to ensure that adequate accountability and oversight was in place. But this is not the case. When it comes to the business of supply, parliamentarians are receiving inadequate information, receiving it late and are not being provided with a plan to see this rectified.

We always complain about it, but it is the same, ugly cycle. I want to be clear, colleagues. This is not a new problem. It has occurred many, many times. We rip our shirts in indignation when it occurs.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer brought up this problem in the report he released in November entitled Considerations for Parliament in Reforming the Business of Supply. He noted that there was, and I quote, “increasing unease among many legislators regarding their ability to provide informed consent of the government’s proposed financial plans.”

He goes on to say the following, and I quote:

This wariness is most palpable in the number of parliamentary standing committee reports issued since the mid-1990s offering recommendations to improve legislative scrutiny of the Business of Supply.

The mid-1990s, esteemed colleagues. That was 30 years ago, and this is still going on.

Colleagues, I think I can safely speak for most of us when I say that when the Main Estimates arrive, you open them up to take a look and almost immediately feel overwhelmed and exhausted, as stated by many of our colleagues. No doubt there are a couple of exceptions to this, perhaps Senator Marshall and Senator Loffreda, but I’m sure that for a great many of us perusing the Main Estimates can be like drinking from a fire hose. There is simply no way we can be expected to adequately review and digest that amount of financial information in the time frame that’s expected.

In the end, I wonder how many of us slap the estimates shut and are more thankful than ever for Senators Marshall and Loffreda, and others who more readily consume all that information and are able to drill down on it, because, colleagues, it represents an awful lot of money that is going out the door in an awfully quick fashion.

But the truth is no parliamentarian has the ability to properly scrutinize the government’s expenditure plan and Main Estimates because the information necessary to do so is not made readily available. And my raising the red flag on this isn’t just partisan rhetoric; this is a widely acknowledged problem which has been left unaddressed for a long time.

In his 2016 report — six years ago — the Parliamentary Budget Officer noted that there were three core problems with the business of supply: one, the budget presents new policy initiatives but the estimates present functional adjustments to the allotments. Why does this even matter? Well, because, as stated in the PBO report:

Parliament does not have control over new policy initiatives, allowing money to be transferred between policy initiatives without parliamentary approval.

The second problem is that the Main Estimates do not include new budget measures:

Parliament spends its time scrutinizing a spending plan in the main estimates that does not reflect the current reality presented in the budget.

Third, the budget and Main Estimates have a different scope and basis of accounting. As noted by the PBO, this means that:

Parliament is asked to vote on a spending plan in the main estimates that cannot be easily reconciled with overall spending.

Colleagues, I mention these three points to emphasize that the problems that affect parliamentarians’ ability to provide effective oversight of public spending are well known. There is no mystery there.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer’s 2016 report summarized the findings of a House of Commons committee report published in 2012 entitled Strengthening Parliamentary Scrutiny of Estimates and Supply.

That report, which was supported by all parties, not only identified some of the problems at the time, but also proposed practical and meaningful measures to address them.

That was 10 years ago, and parliamentarians are still waiting for the proposed solutions to be implemented.

To its credit, this government did not simply ignore the proposals. It admitted the system is broken and that it needed to be fixed.

In November 2016 — again, six years ago — the government published a document entitled Empowering parliamentarians through better information, the government’s vision for estimates reform. The very first paragraph in the document, which is available online, reads as follows:

The inability of Parliament to play a meaningful role in reviewing the Government’s spending plans is a frequent source of frustration. It stems from an incoherent Estimates process, where Budget items are not included in the Main Estimates, spending plans are difficult to understand and reconcile, and departmental reports are neither meaningful nor informative.

Honourable senators, those were the government’s own words in 2016. That statement was made in a document published by the President of the Treasury Board at the time, none other than the Honourable Scott Brison.

Now, on the one hand, perhaps we can take some comfort in the fact that the government has acknowledged there is a problem and that it needs to be addressed. But on the other hand, that acknowledgment was made five and a half years ago and nothing has substantively changed since then; absolutely nothing.

In this year’s report on the Main Estimates, the Parliamentary Budget Officer again sounded the alarm. He wrote the following, and I quote:

As noted by the PBO in previous reports, while there is a fixed tabling date for the Main Estimates (no later than March 1st), no such guarantee exists for the other supporting information (notably the Departmental Plans and the Departmental Results Reports). While this discretion provides greater flexibility to the Government, it does create the risk of misalignment between the money parliamentarians are asked to approve and when details of the planned (and actual) spending are available. This undermines the ability of parliamentarians to meaningfully scrutinize proposed spending.

There was more. The PBO went on to say:

While the Government refers to the Main Estimates as the “Government’s Expenditure Plan”, they generally fail to include any measures in the corresponding Budget, nor do the Departmental Plans, and therefore present an incomplete picture of government spending. Tabling the Main Estimates prior to the release of the budget has allowed for more detailed Treasury Board scrutiny of budget measures prior to their consideration by Parliament in the Supplementary Estimates. However, this results in asking parliamentarians to approve funding through the Main Estimates that were incomplete as they do not represent an accurate picture of the Government’s planned spending.

The PBO goes on:

As previously admitted by the Government, this lack of cohesion between two of the Government’s primary fiscal documents engenders confusion. As such, it hinders the ability of parliamentarians and Canadians to understand the overall federal spending strategy, track new policy measures announced in the Budget, or identify the expected results of new Budget measures.

The PBO then repeats the three all-party recommendations made ten years earlier by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates:

Parliament should establish a fixed tabling date for the budget;

This tabling date should be early enough to ensure that Budget measures can be incorporated in the Main Estimates; and

The Departmental Plans should be tabled at the same time as the Main Estimates.

In addition, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or PBO, repeated two recommendations he made earlier this year:

. . . Move the publication date of the Public Accounts to no later than September 30th; and

Require the Departmental Results Reports to be published at the same time.

According to the PBO, these five changes “ . . . would create a cohesive, intuitive and (critically) transparent financial decision‑making process for legislators.”

Honourable senators, the truth of the matter is that not only are the problems well known, but the solutions are equally well known. The government’s clear acknowledgment that these problems exist needs to be addressed. You would think this equates to a clear and simple path forward.

Yet, not only has nothing been done, but this lack of information and accountability has also progressively been getting worse over the tenure of this government. Consider the fact that in 2020 we never even received a budget. Then, in 2021, the budget didn’t arrive until the third week of April. Of course, the government blamed the lost budget in 2020 and the late budget in 2021 on COVID. Yet, even this year, the budget will not be tabled in Parliament until April 7.

The Financial Administration Act requires that the public accounts are tabled in Parliament before December 31 of each year, but by convention, they are usually tabled in October. Last year, they were not tabled until November 30. The year before that, they were tabled December 12. This year, the public accounts were not tabled until December 14, 2021, which, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer pointed out, was the latest publication date since 1993-94.

In his January report entitled Economic and Fiscal Update 2021: Issues for Parliamentarians, the Parliamentary Budget Officer stated, and I quote:

Comparatively, Canada was among the last of the G7 countries to publish their financial accounts for the 2020‑21 fiscal year.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer added the following:

The federal public accounts are published later than most provincial and territorial public accounts, with nearly half of the provinces and territories publishing their respective public accounts within six months.

The government’s tardy publication of the Departmental Results Reports is further evidence of its inability to provide information in a timely fashion.

These reports outline the government’s actual performance by department for the most recent fiscal year and enable parliamentarians to review what was actually accomplished through all that money being spent. Yet, this year, these reports were not published until February 2022, which was 10 months after the end of the fiscal year. This is no small thing.

As noted by the PBO:

The lack of timely, comprehensive results data makes scrutinizing proposed spending more difficult. It is important that parliamentarians can understand the results organizations expect to achieve, how they will be measured and how these compare to previous years in order to make informed decisions.

Colleagues, there is no lack of clear action that the government could be taking in order to correct the problems that plague our ability to provide proper oversight and accountability to the expenditures of public funds, which is our fundamental role in this place. Instead of doing so, they continue to make things worse instead of better. A perfect example of this is found in the interim supply bill before us today. As I mentioned earlier, interim supply is supposed to provide an advanced appropriation of money needed for three months: April, May, and June.

Yet, under this government, the amount of money included in the interim supply bill has sharply increased since they took power from 29% to more than 40% of total voted appropriations in the Main Estimates. How high do they plan on allowing that number to go? It’s like they are stuffing as much spending as they can into an interim estimate just to diminish accountability even further — 29% to 40%. It’s unacceptable.

Colleagues, we desperately need this government to get its act together and to do the right thing, but all the indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. Spending is going up, while accountability is going down. Disregard for the role of Parliament has become what we all know it to be. Even those that deny it sense it and see it.

Take note that this interim supply bill is for $75.5 billion. That is almost as much as the entire voted supply in the 2015-16 Main Estimates when this government took power. That year, total voted appropriations in the Main Estimates came to $88 billion. This year, that number is $190 billion. That is a 116% increase in only seven years.

In 2015-16, interim supply was $29 billion. This year, it is 193% higher at $75.5 billion. This government has almost doubled their voted spending requirements in only seven years.

Colleagues, don’t forget that the Main Estimates do not take into account any of the new spending the government will announce in its budget or any of the spending promises it had to make to buy the NDP’s support to save the government.

This government will not hesitate to open the floodgates of public spending and print as much money as necessary so it can keep sprinkling it all over the place.

They don’t care that our debt is ballooning. They don’t care that the inflation rate has exploded. They don’t care that last year’s fiscal sustainability report warned that current fiscal policy in Canada is not sustainable over the long term and they don’t care that they have no plan to balance the budget.

The truth is, colleagues, they have no fiscal anchor. They are irresponsible. They are short-sighted and dangerously negligent in their stewardship of public finances, and they can’t be bothered to make the fundamental changes necessary to ensure proper oversight by Parliament. It is our obligation to make sure they do.

At the end of the day, I want to remind colleagues that the way this democracy is supposed to work is not the way it’s working. It’s not the Prime Minister at the top with his cabinet under him, and his MPs under him and his senators under him. It is supposed to be the other way around. It’s supposed to be Parliament at the top. Under Parliament, it should be ministers, and under the ministers, at the bottom of the totem pole, it should be the Prime Minister. That’s where the word “prime minister” comes from, servant of the people. That’s where the word “ministers” comes from. The word means servants of the people. Somewhere along the line, we have lost track of that reality. We think that our Parliament, our bureaucracy and our ministers are all accountable to the Prime Minister’s office.

It has to stop at some point if we want to defend fiscal responsibility and we want to defend democracy in the true spirit that we’re supposed to be practising it in. This government has no interest in doing what is right and no qualms about heaping all the obligations to pay for their profligate spending habits on future generations. Clearly, we are seeing a debt right now that generations will be saddled with for decades to come. This government has been reckless and unapologetically incompetent.

Honourable senators, today, I suspect in all likelihood this Senate will pass this bill. We the opposition, the Conservative Party, will continue to call for transparency, for accountability and for fiscal responsibility in our governance. We will redouble our efforts to ensure that after the next general election Canadians will once again have a responsible and competent government that works to ensure the future rather than the present and that takes into consideration that decisions we make today will have a huge impact on future generations of Canadians. Thank you.