SCYR Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH AT RISK OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

SOUS-COMITÉ SUR LES ENFANTS ET JEUNES À RISQUE DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DES RESOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, March 23, 1999

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.)): Contrary to our custom, we'll begin on time, because I see enough people to make it a street legal meeting.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ): Mr. Chairman, do we have the brief from the Institute of Public Administration of Canada?

The Chairman: No, but isn't there any background documentation? Do you have the briefing notes in French?

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: No.

The Chairman: We have copies. There.

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: But I don't think either of our guests has submitted a text in advance, so they're going to be talking to us from their own notes.

I want to welcome both of you here to what will be this subcommittee's second formal meeting with witnesses. It's most appropriate that we hear from you today, because last week we began the difficult work of trying to understand as best we could the state of children in Canada.

We had people talking to us last week about the state of Canada's children, and Madame Gagnon and Ms. Davies asked really excellent questions to the effect of, how do we know what works? I think some people went away saying, there is so much we do not know about children that it's hard to know what has worked in the past and what might work in the future.

So today we're delighted to welcome two visitors who can start to put some ideas out for us to test. The focus of this committee in the coming months is really going to be on better understanding outcomes of policy we have undertaken or might undertake, and then from that, some way of being accountable to Canadians based on those outcomes.

I'm going to say how delighted we are to have both Don Lenihan from the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, who has been focusing recently in his work on horizontal issues—issues that cut across departments of government and indeed orders of government—and Tom Kent, who is a...I hate to use the phrase “living legend”, but I'm going to use it. He is a man who has been so much a part of social policy development in this half of the 20th century.

It's just an absolute delight to welcome both of you to our meeting.

I'm going to ask Don Lenihan to begin and then Tom Kent, and then we'll open it up for questions. We understand Tom Kent has to catch the last train to Kingston and must be at the doorstep at 5 o'clock, so that's our drop-dead time.

Welcome, both.

Don.

Mr. Don Lenihan (Research Director, Institute of Public Administration of Canada): Thank you very much, John.

First of all, let me take a moment to thank you all for a chance to present before this committee. I was asked to come and say a few words—I will try to keep it to about 10 minutes or thereabouts, hopefully not very long—about the theory of results-based approaches or results-based management. I don't mean that in any really intimidating sense. It won't get really abstract, or no more abstract than I have to make it. I'll also say something about what that might mean for the changing role of parliamentary committees.

Let me say very briefly that this comes out of a lot of work that IPAC, my organization—the Institute of Public Administration of Canada—has done over the last four years, working with federal, provincial, and municipal governments, third-sector organizations, and private-sector organizations, looking at changes in the way government does things.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert on child policy, but however we come at these questions, the way governments have changed, reorganized, and reoriented themselves in terms of management and policy-making cuts across all of those different policy areas. So I'm not here to say much about the issue of children, but more about how governments are thinking about management and how they've changed.

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Let me break this into two quite short pieces, one on the ideas behind so-called results-based management, and the other on what this may mean for committee business.

First of all, just very generally, what is results-based management and reporting? Over the last 10 years governments have begun to shift, or at least there's a claim that they've shifted, away from what's been called.... I don't know. Rather than looking for a term, let's just say governments have focused largely in the past on how they were doing things, how many resources they had, how they allocated resources, etc. Much of the management reporting was around those sorts of questions: how resources are to be allocated.

In the last five or 10 years there's been a shift towards what's been called a focus on results. People in government have said to themselves, we've concentrated a lot on the processes of developing policy and of delivering programs, on the operations and machinery of government, but what does this really mean in terms of whether or not these policies and programs achieve the objectives we have set for ourselves? Have we even been clear about the objectives we've set for ourselves? And how do we know if we're actually getting results?

Results-based management is an attempt to put much more focus on getting there, on knowing when we've actually achieved the results, and on getting the results on all the processes that lead to it.

It would be unfair, and it would probably be wrong, to draw some really sharp distinction between so-called process and outcomes or results. It's more like a continuum. There's a shift in emphasis in management practice away from how we do things to what we actually do and what the outcomes or results of those processes are.

To put it in the simplest form, governments have supposedly taken to, or have committed themselves to, a much more clear articulation of the goals and objectives of various programs, policies, and departments at all kinds of different levels. They've committed themselves to what are supposed to be clear indicators or measures of the degree of success to which the policies or programs really achieve those outcomes.

The basic idea is a pretty simple one and indeed a pretty commonsense one. If you have a policy or program, you should have some clear idea of what it is you're trying to achieve, and that should be stated somewhere—your objectives—and some clear idea of how you know whether it actually achieves the goal.

So in brief, the whole task of results-based reporting and management is to get much clearer on what we're trying to achieve and know what and how we've achieved it.

As governments have moved towards an attempt to state more clearly what their objectives are, or the outcomes they're trying to achieve, one of the things that emerges very quickly is you find out that a lot of the outcomes that governments care about, the results they want, are what we call—excuse the word—horizontal. That is to say, they actually don't fall very neatly into so-called departmental stovepipes, or even lots of times into policy zones.

Take for example the fact that now there's much talk about redeveloping the health system around the concept of wellness. Traditionally health policy and health programming tended to focus, perhaps not so consciously, on the idea of essentially curing illness, which is a kind of reaction to things that happen out there. The idea is, when somebody is sick, you fix them. More recently people have begun to say in a much broader way, what we need is a more proactive, preventive, and educated approach to health care, towards the idea of focusing on wellness.

Once you start talking about wellness, you're not just reacting to disease; you're actually trying to prevent it. You're trying to encourage people to engage in activities, exercise, dietary regimes, and so on that will promote wellness. So the idea is that wellness cuts across a whole bunch of different areas, not just curing of illness, but probably environmental questions, questions of education, and so on and so forth.

Once we start to focus on these big outcomes we want to achieve, we start to find out that many of the things we really care about don't fit very neatly into the traditional departmental structures or policy areas. Indeed, not only do they not fit well into those areas; they tend to cut across even jurisdictional domains. So we find that federal, provincial, and municipal governments all have a hand in, say, environmental outcomes. Indeed it spills over into the private sector and the third sector.

All sorts of policies, programs, and activities are going on at all kinds of levels, and all of them, or lots of them, contribute in different and complex ways to the outcome we call wellness, or maybe the outcome we call an unemployment rate, or all sorts of other things.

Once we decide this is what we care about, the whole task then is to begin to manage, as we say, horizontally. If this is a policy or a program that we're thinking about, maybe something to do with children or some specific aspect of children, how do we know if it actually contributes in some useful way to that big outcome of wellness or whatever it's going to be? What does it mean to actually manage horizontally, once we start thinking that we care about these larger horizontal issues?

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There's no simple answer to this question, but two really important strategies or techniques, if you like—I'm not sure what we should call them—are implied by a so-called results-based approach as to how we should think about horizontal issues.

The first one is to say something like this. Let's just take governments and departments. Suppose a whole bunch of governments and departments commit themselves to the same objective—for example, sustainable development. If they all agree upon sustainable development and they all agree that all their programs and policies should promote sustainable development, that's the first step, but it's still not enough to ensure that we're going to get some sort of coordination across all of these different departments and jurisdictions.

What ensures that there will be some coordination? This is where the second part comes in, and that's the idea of so-called performance indicators or performance measures or whatever it may be. If you're aiming towards a certain outcome and everybody shares that outcome and everybody has the same performance indicators or performance measures or whatever you want to call them, assuming that they're a tight fit and they're well disciplined, that will force governments and others to choose policies and programs that move towards that outcome. It begins to weed out the ones that conflict with it.

So if you have two different levels of government that agree upon the outcome and agree upon the performance indicators, in theory what should happen is, automatically, no matter what programs and policies they choose—they're free to choose whatever ones they want, as long as these conform to the indicators they've set for themselves—this begins to push them towards the same goal. It begins to work towards some level of coordination and harmonization across those boundaries.

So that's the first way a so-called results-based approach begins to achieve horizontal management, or if you like, begins to work towards horizontal goals.

The second one—and this is a more substantive or a more coordinated approach—is what we call collaborative partnerships. What are collaborative partnerships? Think about this again. If governments care about results or outcomes and less about process, it puts them in a position to get into different kinds of partnerships from what they have been in in the past.

In the past, when government got into a partnership, it tended to be what we now call contracting out, a kind of contractual model. That meant they would contract with another partner—it could be a private-sector organization, it might be another government, or it could be a third-sector organization—to do something, to achieve some goal, but then they would also set out all the terms and conditions under which that was to be achieved.

Essentially the so-called partnership is really a contract in which the government's task in managing that partnership is to ensure compliance with the terms and obligations of the contract. So you negotiate all the things the person is to do and you make sure they do it. The person, the contractor, has very little role in actually making decisions; they just carry out and fulfil the terms of the contract. And that's fine. Lots of things maybe should be contracted out.

But once you start caring largely about results and less about process, a different kind of partnering becomes increasingly possible, and that's a partnering where you contract for results as opposed to for process. You say, what we really care about is lowering the unemployment rate, or maybe what we really care about is some particular goal, and we actually don't care much about how we achieve that. That's up to you. So we partner with you to achieve those goals. I don't want to say you can do it any way you want, but you start to have the possibility or the option of making choices. You can make choices about program design, the kind of program you want. You can make some choices about how you deliver that program.

How far we're going to go in this direction of course is up to governments to decide, but the point here is that once you begin to partner on that basis, you begin to get involved in a sharing of decision-making authority between government and the partner. You're not just telling the partner what to do and then paying them to do it. You're actually giving them the opportunity to share some of the decision-making authority with government. That can involve you in joint planning and so on, which we'll talk about shortly.

In a nutshell, it's the other way governments can go about beginning to manage horizontally. They can look for other partners who have an interest or a stake in the same outcome, and they can begin to partner with them in ways that orient them towards the achievement of those goals.

The way they manage that partnership is again by the performance indicators. By and large, they say the way we're going to assess whether or not the partnership is working is by the extent to which you actually have achieved the goals by those indicators we've set for you.

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Let me move on to the next part. Once we accept that we want to achieve these horizontal outcomes, there are really two ways of doing it. One is to get people to agree upon outcomes and performance indicators. The second is to go a step further and get them to actually partner in cooperative relationships toward achieving those results.

The next thing you notice is there are really three different levels at which we can do this. If we want to take a results-based approach to new relationships, we can do what I call the citizen-state relationship. What that means is government can partner with non-governmental organizations or private-sector organizations and share its decision-making authority with them. That's one level.

The second level at which they can do it is between other levels of government. They can do it at the intergovernmental level. Think about things such as the social union agreement, the environmental framework accord, and the child tax benefit. All of these have more of an outcome-based approach, where governments have gotten together and begun to collaborate or work together on achieving certain outcomes. That's what they're trying to do: manage horizontally across jurisdictional boundaries.

Thirdly—and maybe this is not terribly important for this committee, or maybe it is—you can also do it within a single government across departments. In so far as there are the so-called silos, you can begin to coordinate across departmental structures by again concentrating on outcomes, agreeing to certain kinds of performance indicators that discipline your choices of policies and programs, and beginning to move in the same direction.

I'll close off by asking what this sort of approach might mean for the role of committees such as this one. I'm mildly optimistic that moving towards performance-based management and performance reporting creates new opportunities for parliamentary committees, and obviously other committees, for two reasons.

The first one is this. In so far as we've moved to this kind of approach, governments have committed themselves not only to results-based management but to reporting. They have to report on what they're actually doing. Do they achieve the outcomes they've set for themselves? What that means is they have to state as clearly as they can, or you can hold them to account, what they're trying to achieve with a policy and a program, not only at one level, but we're going to find out that there are a number of different levels of outcomes—not to make this too abstract.

Let's go back to the wellness example. Wellness is a very diffuse, very broad outcome. It just won't be enough to say we want to achieve wellness. If you want to be serious about this, you're going to find that you have to cascade the levels of outcomes a couple of times down. There are more precise ones than, say, wellness or sustainable development. That cuts across a whole bunch of departments.

If you're the health department or the education department, you have to ask, “What does this actually mean for us? What's a more precise set of objectives one level down that we in our department actually have to achieve to get to that end?”

And there's another level down: the program level. When you're designing and delivering programs, you have to ask, what are the measures and the outcomes at this level that feed back into that one and back into that one?

What this means is that in performance reporting, governments have to give you a clear picture, or are supposed to give you a clear picture, not only of what they're trying to achieve, but of how it fits into the larger picture of what they're trying to achieve at the higher level and indeed at the broadest level.

This begins to tell us something about the trade-offs between different big objectives, what priorities government has set for itself, where it's consistent and where it's inconsistent, how this cuts across a bunch of policy domains, etc.

My own view is this creates a very real opportunity for parliamentary committees to feed back into the policy process in what I call a bottom-up way. If the minister and the cabinet are setting the big objectives and working down with the bureaucracy or the public servants, it seems to be a natural counterpoint to that for committees to review that, and not only review it, but begin to ask what is the logic behind all this stuff? Is there a bigger picture here? Do these performance indicators really discipline the choice of policies and programs? Are they consistent at different levels? Are they mixing up different levels of objectives?

These are not small questions. These are the questions that begin to frame in the policy framework, the objectives, and the priorities that governments hold. And they're there, or presumably they're there. If they're not, you can hold them to account.

So committees such as this, at a minimum presumably, should be able to get back into the policy game in a bigger way, because government is supposed to be forced in this way to put its cards on the table, to say what it's doing and how it's doing it, and then to be held to account for that.

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There's another way that committees such as this can use this approach or use performance reporting to get back into the game in an important way. A big task in the future, I think over the next five or 10 years, if we continue to go down this road, will be not just reviewing the objectives the government and the departments have set for themselves, but beginning to look across jurisdictions, which is really horizontal, and ask, are they setting the same outcomes? Are they setting the same performance indicators? Are these performance indicators across the board? Are they tight enough to really provide some direction and some discipline?

My sense is that this is early in the game, and lots of them are not. Whether we'll ever get that far or how far we'll get, I don't know. But it means there's lots of opportunity for both formal and informal contact with other committees and other bodies across the country that will have input into what provincial governments are doing. It seems to me that a good way for committees to think about managing horizontally is to begin to trade ideas about best practices, common objectives, etc., and how their governments might feed those into their own planning processes in a similar way.

Let me close by saying this may sound a bit Pollyannaish, and indeed I'm sure my esteemed colleague here will have probably much more sophisticated views on this than I do, but I want to say there's a theory here. How far can we go along this path? I don't know. I'm not sure. All I know is that most governments across the country are committed to this kind of process. Most of them are trying to use performance measures, performance indicators, and outcomes. They have put a lot of time and resources into it.

My own view is, if there's to be success here at all, the first thing is we have to be realistic about what kind of success we can expect, and I think we can expect some. The second thing—and it's my reason for being here today—is that in my view, this will only carry over the long term if it has serious political buy-in, if it helps the political side of decision-making, and if something can be seen in it for politicians as well as public servants.

This shouldn't be something that rests totally with the public service. It will get lost. Choosing these priorities, defining the outcomes, and the stuff we're talking about are really high-level policy questions, and it seems to me that's a place where politicians should be involved.

Let me stop there.

The Chairman: Thank you. I must say I congratulate you and the translator. It was a bit of a race to the finish there. Well done.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: I'm finding it a little hard to follow the interpreter because he is not getting everything.

The Chairman: Yes, but I'm sure he is doing his best.

[English]

Tom Kent.

Mr. Tom Kent (Individual Presentation): Thank you. Let me say it's a privilege and a pleasure to be here and meet with such an important committee.

I'm going to stick my neck out and make three related suggestions for programs that I think should be at the centre of federal government policy. They all start from what's now the standard proposition of economists: that the most important thing for government to do to promote the efficiency, growth, and prosperity of the country's economy is to invest in human capital. That's the economists' rather abstruse phrase. I'll put it rather more bluntly with a quotation from a recent issue of The Economist:

The need for governments to double and redouble their efforts to sharpen young minds has become a matter of survival.

It's essential to the progress of a modern economy.

However, the reason isn't economic alone. What we do for children is also crucial to the kind of society we want.

Whether we want it or not, we're going to have an increasingly high-tech economy. Left to itself, that means increasingly a polarized society. In a high-tech economy, you do well or you don't. Again I'm going to quote The Economist:

For the highly skilled, and the lucky, the good times continue to roll; for the rest, forget it.

That doesn't apply only to today's adults. There's an intergenerational transfer of advantages and disadvantages. Whether you're fortunate is chiefly a matter of who your parents were. If you grew up in a middle-class or better income level with fairly educated parents, if your home and the homes of your friends have the gadgets of modern technology, then you don't have to be particularly able or particularly inclined to work hard in order to do nicely at school and go on to a good start in working life.

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If you don't have those advantages, the path is very much harder. Of course very exceptional abilities will always triumph over anything, but for most people growing up in disadvantaged circumstances, it's all too likely, and increasingly likely now, that you'll never get much chance at a skilled job or at a reasonably affluent income.

We're building up, in other words, an entrenched enclave of underprivileged people from generation to generation. That is the whole nature of a high-tech economy unless we do something about it.

Of course advances in neuroscience have diagnosed the roots of the problem and made precise what really has always been apparent to common sense, which is that learning begins early. The wiring of the brain is determined by the stimuli it receives in early childhood. That doesn't apply just to cognitive skills; it applies to confidence and emotional development, to social understanding and competence. The personality is pretty well set by the age of six, and that of course is before society takes any major responsibility for sharpening young minds.

What I would suggest is that in our present institutional structure, what is most deficient is early childhood education, effectively education in the preschool years as they are now. Of course that joins with the mounting demand for day care, arising from the great growth in the number of families with two working parents or with only a lone parent. But affordable day care, if it's available at all, for the most part isn't much more than babysitting. It's not educational. There's a gap to be bridged.

I'd like to try to bridge it by talking about developmental child care, but that doesn't hide the fact of jurisdiction. Education is a provincial responsibility, but the need, I must emphasize, is national. It's national because the economy is national. The sharpening of young minds is the most important thing for the federal government to do. It's a matter, I repeat, of survival in a globalized economy.

The federal government must see that this sharpening of young minds, whatever you want to call it, is done. It's essential for the economy and for the society. Indeed I would go so far as to say, if it's not done, one can raise the question, what's the point of a federal government anyway?

But how can it be done and be done soon? How can we have nationwide early childhood education? The conventional answer to that sort of question of course has been cost-sharing of provincial programs. There's no need to tell politicians that won't work. Both politically and bureaucratically, cost-sharing of provincial programs is in bad odour, and that's reflected of course in the social union framework document. It doesn't prohibit cost-sharing of provincial programs, but it hedges it around with conditions that would ensure that cost-sharing of the old kind would not be attractive to any federal government now.

I must say in fairness that of course Ottawa is largely to blame for that situation, because since 1977, successive federal governments have reneged on the promises that were made about cost-sharing. Cost-sharing as it has been has proved to be untrustworthy.

So there has to be another way. It does exist. The social union framework does not restrict the federal spending power for payments to individuals. It does require that there should be three months' notice to the provinces and an opportunity for consultation. Millennium scholarships can no longer be announced out of the blue, so to speak. But subject to three months, the federal spending power is unimpaired by the social union framework.

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The federal government does of course at present help to finance child care. There's a deduction from taxable income, up to a maximum, in the case of preschool children, of $7,000 a year. That's a very reasonable sum. It's a fair measure of the cost per child of developmental child care of high quality. But of course, like any such measure, it's regressive. It's fine if you have a lot of income tax to be saved. It's no use to you if you don't pay income tax or pay very little.

So my proposal is to cancel for preschoolers the present child tax deduction and to replace it by a refundable tax credit—and I emphasize refundable. I mean the full amount, the $7,000, would be payable, subject to a clawback for higher incomes. And it would be universally available. It wouldn't be dependent on the work status of the parents. It would be universally available to all parents who choose that their children should take advantage of it.

Incidentally, that would remove from this area the charge of discrimination against stay-at-home mothers that's recently been alleged rather vigorously. The situation would be that the service is there to be taken advantage of if you choose to do so. If you don't, then it's like somebody who, despite the tax financing of public schooling, chooses to send their child to a private school. It's entirely a personal decision. It is in no sense a discrimination against the stay-at-home mother.

However, the main point of a proposal of this kind has nothing to do with whether or not parents work. The point is the benefit to the child, whether the mother stays at home or not—or, for that matter, whether the dad stays at home or not.

With that scale of financial empowerment—the availability of up to $7,000 for parents who wish to take advantage of it—there would be a response in the development of high-quality child care, primarily, I would think, by community groups. Certainly the parents want it. The demand would be there. They would be financially empowered. There would be a very considerable growth.

I make the point incidentally that this would be particularly valuable in dealing with a specialized problem, namely the aboriginal problem, because it could be a powerful empowerment of aboriginal organizations, both on reserves and in cities such as Regina, Winnipeg, and so on, to organize early childhood education for their people.

However, that arrangement—the financial empowerment and the response from the volunteer sector—would not be the ideal outcome. It wouldn't be ideal, because of course it would inevitably be uneven—slow in some parts, not at all perhaps in some—and of course the federal government, although it was producing the money, would not have any monitoring or regulatory authority. There would only be the gossip of parents to establish whether or not value for money was being provided by the community organizations.

So we could do better. The way we could do better is that the federal government, having announced its willingness to make the financial commitment to developmental child care accessible to all through the replacement of the tax deduction by a refundable credit—an allowance, in effect—could then invite the provinces to opt in. That's to say, if a province, given that financial funding available, chose to set up an early childhood education system that was universally available, then the federal government would contribute to it what the refundable credit would cost the federal government for children who take advantage of the program.

Obviously that would require complex negotiations in the collaborative spirit of the social union framework. But to me, there's little doubt that the provinces—or certainly at least nine provinces—would want to opt in. I feel less qualified to predict what the Quebec government might do, but I would point out that it would certainly be sympathetic to the purpose. Quebec is ahead of the rest of the country, well ahead at present, in child care. Therefore the provincial Government of Quebec would have more to gain financially from participating in the program than would others. It would have more to say about the current expenditures.

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It seems to me quite possible that with reasonable flexibility on both sides, a deal could be made. Many more difficult deals have been made in the past. I hope profoundly that that optimism will be justified.

In any case, certainly for most of the country, early childhood education of high quality could be achieved by this method. It is, if you like, a roundabout method, but that's the nature of our federalism.

I also should point out that it would be more expensive to the federal government than old-fashioned cost-sharing would be, but the unavailability of old-fashioned cost-sharing is, if you like, the price of past sins. The program I'm suggesting would have the great advantage over cost-sharing, the very political advantage, of giving the federal government much more visibility than arises from a cost-shared program.

However, as I said, it would be more expensive. A reasonable estimate is that when fully developed, it would cost perhaps $8 billion a year. It would take quite a long time to mount to that level.

That's the main one of my three proposals, and it is the novel one. I've spent most of my time on it. Very briefly, the other two are much more routine.

Providing early childhood education is all very fine provided the kids are able to take advantage of it, provided they go there reasonably fed and clothed and so on. Just as now at school, a hungry child doesn't get as much out of it as other children, and a child with a poor background doesn't, that would be equally true of early childhood education.

Therefore it's essential that we press further the federal child benefit, which is an excellent program in principle, but unfortunately the amount is, as you all know, pretty small: $1,625 maximum. My second suggestion is that we must quickly raise that to the $4,000 a year that represents about the minimum cost of feeding and clothing a child reasonably.

Again, obviously we'd continue to approach that in step. The proposals I'm making are not proposals for next year's budget. They're proposals for what could be done in steps over a few years.

The eventual extra cost of those two programs would be in the order of $13 billion eventually, which is a lot of money. It is 1.5% of our national income. I would argue that 1.5% of our national income is a very small investment to make in the future of the country—an investment indeed that we just cannot afford not to make.

My third proposal—and I'm not going to talk about it, because I'm sure I've taken enough of your time by this stage—is this. We need to fill the great present deficiency, which is early childhood education. I think we have to leave it to the provinces to deal with primary and secondary education. That's not an area in which it would make sense for the federal government to get involved. It doesn't need to. But just as there is a need for a nationwide program in early childhood education to fill that deficiency, there is a need for nationwide action, as has been recognized in the past, in the field of post-secondary education.

In my view, that cannot be effectively done by throwing more money at the university institutions. The role of the federal government is to finance true access to university education, which doesn't exist at the moment. This could be achieved by a student loan program, provided that it is a loan program not based on repayment through a conventional loan schedule, but through income-contingent repayment by means of a surtax.

I'm sure I've talked long enough. As some of you know, I have set out these ideas in a recent Caledon paper. Also, I'd be very happy to try to talk about them in more detail if that is wished.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you both. Obviously you have very rich ideas.

I want to move right along.

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[Translation]

Would you like to go first, Ms. Gagnon?

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: Thank you for your presentations. You made some suggestions which made me react, especially when you talked about national standards.

Mr. Kent, you said that education was a provincial jurisdiction. In the longitudinal study we were presented with, many suggestions were made, but they all related directly to provincial jurisdiction.

We know that various federal governments, be they conservative or liberal, made deep cuts to shared-cost programs and in every area of social policy, including employment insurance. We all know how devastating that was. The billions of dollars in cutbacks had a direct impact on the public. If you have poor children, it's because you have poor parents.

You talked about a $7,000 non-refundable tax credit. Quebec, for instance, has a child care policy. Most families in Quebec will not benefit from this credit because they only pay $5 in child care fees and they won't have any expenses beyond.... If you're paying $5 a day per child, that doesn't add up to much in a year. Most low-income families are very happy with this program because it helps them. They have more money in their pockets because they don't have to pay as much in child care expenses.

How should the Government of Quebec live with a non-refundable tax credit policy when it has its own child-welfare policy? Perhaps the federal government wants to maintain a higher profile and this is its strategy to.... We know how to help children and families. Solutions are out there, but the federal government does not want to apply them.

I personally would have a problem with an increase in non-refundable tax credits, maybe not for the rest of Canada, but for Quebec. Couldn't we come up with other measures, such as paying daycare givers better salaries? These women have a huge responsibility: to educate our children. It is often the case that children from under-privileged areas fare better in daycare, which would lead them to do better in school as well.

Quebec needs financial support in the form of tax points to better implement the policies which are already in place. We know what the Government of Quebec wants, and I don't understand why the federal government keeps on denying Quebec, that kind of federal help which it needs to better develop its own policies. Do you think it's possible to satisfy Quebec with regard to its historical demands of the federal government?

• 1615

[English]

Mr. Tom Kent: Well, I think what I'm proposing would meet Quebec halfway. I'm saying the federal government should make quite clear its commitment to early childhood care, developmental care, the sharpening of young minds, by being prepared to spend federal money, to the extent of $7,000 a year maximum, for that purpose. But rather than do it by giving the money to individual parents, it would attempt to negotiate with each province, meeting the conditions in each province, the setting up of an extensive early childhood educational system by the province—systems that don't now exist, systems that as you've pointed out would do much more than the present child care, even in Quebec—which would pay the salaries of educators rather than babysitters. The federal government would provide that financial empowerment to the province, to each province.

How the details of the program were worked out would depend entirely on each province, but what would happen, which would not happen if you gave tax points or something, is there would be an assurance that in each province that opted into the program, an early childhood educational system would be set up. I am arguing that that is absolutely fundamental, absolutely critical, to the future of the country. That would be achieved by this kind of program. It would not be achieved by tax points or something.

I have no objection to tax points. I once negotiated a large increase in tax points for the Quebec government; I negotiated it with Jean Lesage. But they are not sufficient to achieve certain national purposes, and this national purpose, in my view, is so fundamentally crucial that we must have a program directed specifically to it.

The Chairman: Mr. Lenihan, do you want to add something there?

Mr. Don Lenihan: I do, very briefly.

To return to this idea of a results-based approach, one of the interesting things about it is that it does offer us a slightly different way of thinking about the old “national standards, provincial responsibility” issue.

Again, take an obvious example such as sustainable development. Say governments get involved in their own internal planning processes and they're doing their strategic planning, and it turns out that they all independently say they believe in sustainable development and they believe it should be promoted, and they believe their policies and programs should be consistent with the objective of sustainable development.

The first thing is, nobody is twisting anybody else's arm to adopt that objective. They all agree that that's part of what a good government will do. If you can get them to agree, or if on their own they arrive at similar ways of disciplining their policies and programs to get there, with performance indicators or types of performance indicators that are the same across the jurisdictions, then each province and each government is still free to choose whatever policies and programs it wants. That's the asymmetrical part of it; it can do whatever it wants in its own domain. But you have the advantage that it can only choose policies and programs that will actually achieve that goal and start to get some harmonization across the jurisdictional divide.

With some of these issues, if they are genuinely horizontal, somehow we have to recognize that.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: In terms of social assistance, it's very well to have national standards, but if there is no funding, provinces are still stuck with national standards. The government has national standards in social policy, but we all know that there were cutbacks. When the federal government decides to withdraw its support from a certain area, and when a need has been identified, how can you continue to provide that service to the public? The service was offered in the past and the need is still there, but the government is playing a game of financial yo-yo. This is what happened with the Canadian Health and Social Transfer and with the funding of community networks. The government proceeded on a case-by-case basis, it abolished funding and the provinces had to.... But then, it is the Government of Quebec which is criticized for not maintaining the standards expected by the public.

• 1620

[English]

The Chairman: Is Quebec, to your knowledge, particularly advanced in its thinking about this horizontal management issue?

Mr. Don Lenihan: Sure. Quebec as much as any other government has involved itself in the business planning process and is very much in favour of and using strategic planning, outcome measures, and all these things. It's very much a part of that.

I was going to say in reply to at least part of that question that if we talk about using this approach as a way of achieving some coordination across jurisdictions, that should apply to the federal government as much as to provincial governments. What that means is if there's an agreement for managing horizontally this way, then part of the task of the federal government may well be to ensure that its performance measures ensure that it provides the adequate funding for provinces to achieve the objectives they both want to achieve. If it turns out there is some way of doing that, some way of assessing what the federal government's contribution should be in that case, then if it falls below that level, it's not doing its part.

The Chairman: That's exactly part of what the social union was trying to get at.

Mr. Don Lenihan: I think it is.

Mr. Tom Kent: Could I add to that, just very briefly?

The Chairman: Yes, go ahead.

Mr. Tom Kent: I have to agree with you entirely. Indeed I think I've perhaps done it myself, with some of the criticisms of the arbitrary and uncertain nature of federal policies in relation to joint programs, and indeed in relation to the provinces generally. But for all its vagueness, the social union framework does represent a genuine attempt to promise to be better in future on both sides. There's some considerable weight behind that, and I think we can begin to hope for a more collaborative atmosphere.

The Chairman: Madame St-Jacques.

[Translation]

Ms. Diane St-Jacques (Shefford, PC): I will follow up on what Ms. Gagnon said about national standards. We know what the problem is regarding the Child Tax Benefit. There was a framework agreement according to which the provinces should reinvest the money and the national benefit should now go directly to families, but only New Brunswick and Newfoundland continued to give money; the other provinces took it away from people on welfare. So those people now have less money to survive on.

I think it's a good idea to implement a tax system to help families raise their children and to reinvest money towards that goal. However, despite the fact that this will benefit most people, there will always be a social class which will be harder to reach. I don't think money is enough to help these people. I don't know what can be done, because we have not yet been able to break the cycle of poverty. It's a deep-rooted problem, and even if we add more money, I don't know how far it will go to help children. These children need support. They often don't receive any support at home because their parents have all kinds of problems, such as those related to drugs or alcohol. These young people lose any hope for the future. They are not motivated in school and they don't see how they can get out of their situation. It's a vicious circle: uneducated parents raise uneducated children and so on. They can't break the vicious circle of poverty. Wouldn't it be better to invest in the community? I don't know how this would be achieved, but all the stakeholders should get together and try to help these families break out of their poverty.

Money is a solution, but it is not the ultimate solution. How can we convince young people to stay in school so they can get good jobs and finally break the vicious circle?

We have established a committee to consult with people about poverty. What we have concluded is that there is no coordination between existing programs at various levels, and that they are not flexible either. So the programs don't necessarily help the people who need them.

Do you understand my question?

[English]

Mr. Tom Kent: I entirely accept most of what you've said, but surely a great deal of the problem of children not staying at school and so on lies in the years before school. The evidence that's been produced on that point is very strong indeed. That's why I am putting the emphasis I do on the early childhood, preschool stage. It's there that we are above all deficient.

• 1625

I have suggested, for example, accepting your point about community action, that one of the advantages of creating what I call a developmental child centre in the community is that it could become a focal point for broader community programs to help children, particularly children in poverty, through the years.

But you have to choose your priorities, and I would suggest that if we are to do really effective good, if we are to meet performance standards and so on, it is very clear that we have to begin where we at the moment do least: at the beginning, in the early years of the child's life. That's not to disagree with the rest of what we need to do, but we can't do everything at once, and it's there that we need to put our first priority.

The Chairman: We now have Bonnie Brown.

Ms. Bonnie Brown (Oakville, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for these presentations. They come together rather well and raise a number of questions.

Going back to Mr. Lenihan's presentation, it's of course easy for all of us to understand contracting out, which prevailed for a number of years, and I think of it in terms of the old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” If we move to this system of more horizontal management and base our agreements, let's just say federal-provincial agreements, upon agreed-upon outcomes, I run into a problem there.

Using an example, suppose the agreed-upon outcome is a lower unemployment rate, and that's really the one and only outcome we agree upon. The processes for getting to that are left to the individual provinces, say with training money that we give them. And suppose the province agrees to use its money to lower the unemployment rate but decides to target that money at only those people under 40, and by so doing expresses a value that is in conflict with the value of the government that is giving them the money to do it.

Then we get into the triangle. The electorate elects a government to the federal House, which supposedly reflects their values best. The federal government then hands money for an agreed-upon outcome to a provincial government that has a totally different set of values. They maybe reach the agreed-upon goal, but the process or the criteria they employ to reach the goal flies in the face of the set of values that has elected the government that has the money. I find a problem with that.

Mr. Don Lenihan: It seems to me this is exactly what you should be saying.

My first answer is that if the government simply were to partner on the basis of an outcome called a low unemployment rate, that would be a woefully inadequate agreement. I would be inclined to say that's where committees such as this should be doing a lot of work and saying wait a minute, how many things out there actually contribute to the unemployment rate? I don't know. The fact that I ordered pizza tonight probably contributes to it.

That's not to say it should get so complicated that we can't do anything. It's to say that that's probably reason for.... What we see right away is that all kinds of political choices go into deciding how many outcomes there are, what sorts of indicators to use, and how we layer them. What we need to do there—and this should be the work of committees and staff, or at least they should have an important role there—is to review this stuff and start asking, does this actually tell us what we want to know? Does this actually achieve the objectives?

Madame St-Jacques, when you were speaking earlier, that seemed to me again a very results-based question. Part of your whole question is, how do we know we're actually doing what we want? I'd say yes, exactly. Exactly. It's not enough to have experts come before us and testify—not that we shouldn't, but in the end, we need enough confidence that we're spending our money wisely and we have the right programs.

I don't know what the policies are here—that's for Mr. Kent and others to decide—but there should be something about choosing the right ones.

• 1630

Ms. Bonnie Brown: You're asking, are we spending our money wisely? Are we choosing our policies wisely? Well, “wisely” to you and to me might not be “wisely” to these people. You can't use value-loaded words in this kind of scenario.

I would also posit to you that, as to the description of the goal that the various horizontal groups are supposed to agree upon, the more detailed the description of the goal gets, the harder it is to get agreement. That's why I picked a simple goal: lower unemployment.

It's easy to get people to sign on to a simple goal and give them all kinds of freedom about how to reach it, but that's when you get into this value conflict. What is difficult is to sit down and get a goal that has sufficient details attached to it where you're pretty sure the funders' values are going to be reflected. That's what Christiane is against when she's talking about national standards, and that's why we've moved to this social union.

I still don't think the new framework.... I like to idea of opting in, because it seems to me if a province or a municipal government does not like the goal of the funder, they can decide not to opt in.

I know you also admitted that this whole thing is only a theory, but what I'm trying to figure out is whether this theory is workable and how far you can go in designing these outcomes without starting to infringe upon each other's value sets.

Mr. Don Lenihan: Well, there are a couple of things here. First of all, let's distinguish between effectiveness and values. All the performance measures and this approach won't tell you what outcome you should choose. Presumably, if it's good, all it will tell you is that you're getting there. But the choice of the objectives you want to set for yourselves is absolutely a value question. It's about politics.

That's why this shouldn't be a public service exercise. The public service should not be sitting back deciding what all the objectives of the programs and policies are going to be. These are big political questions. Committees such as this ought to be involved—I think they ought to be breaking down the doors to get involved—in that sort of process, precisely because it is about values, it is about political decisions, it is about how we allocate our resources, etc. What the other stuff should be telling us is how effectively we're actually getting there.

The second thing is, with respect to particular benefits across levels of government or even departments, there are going to be conflicts over values. That's why we have liberal politics. We do tend to disagree on a lot of this stuff. How closely can we get together? Again, I guess I'd say in the end that's probably a political question. Sometimes we'll do a better job, sometimes we'll do a worse job, and at some point we have to decide how much of an indeterminate or vague set of objectives we can live with.

My own view is that lowering the unemployment rate is just too big. I'd be included to say that's a bad agreement. On the other hand, I'm a fan of the social union. I think it actually does do some pretty good work. It actually does make some significant headway. The labour market agreements I think make some significant headway here.

How far can we go? I don't know. I'm not sure.

The Chairman: Do you want to weigh in on this, Tom, or do you want to hold off?

Mr. Tom Kent: If I may, I'd make just one brief comment.

While I agree entirely with the theory, what does worry me is that if we wait to see, if we put too much insistence on seeing whether things are working, we will never try anything new that has a chance of working. You do not know in advance what are the ways you are going to reduce child poverty or whatever. You can see some ways that have a good chance of working. You have to try them before you can begin your evaluation. I get worried that the evaluators so often seem to want to do their evaluation before we've even tried.

The Chairman: Dr. Pagtakhan.

Mr. Rey D. Pagtakhan (Winnipeg North—St. Paul, Lib.): I had a question, but Mr. Kent read my question. It will take some time to see the results. Meanwhile you'll be spending money. So in light of the concern of Mr. Kent that you have to try, how do we ensure...? Is there a mechanism you can put in place such that you can have a trial, like a pilot? Because we will not get the results unless we undertake a pilot. What period of time would you allow to make meaningful a pilot project?

Mr. Don Lenihan: First of all, in at least five departments, I think, there are pilot projects right now under federal Treasury Board. HRDC is in fact one, as are Defence and Agriculture.

Maybe a better way to come at this is, how focused of a pilot project does one want? Within departments there are sub-policy areas and so on where more or less experimentation has gone on, and it's the same thing in the provinces and other parts of the world.

• 1635

I couldn't agree more with what Tom said. It seems to me what we need to think about here is a long process of transformation, within government and politics, toward the idea of more of a learning culture. We can make errors and mistakes—we have to make errors and mistakes—and it shouldn't be the death of a minister or a policy or program if it's not perfect.

We can't wait until we have a perfect solution to make a decision. We have to forge ahead. In the meantime, we should try to find some good pilots where we can improve our skills, we should try some bigger things and smaller things, and we should just try to get better at it. It's not going to happen overnight.

Mr. Rey Pagtakhan: You spoke of five or six departments working now on a pilot project. What structure ensures that interdepartmental cooperation indeed works and is not just a fly-by-night committee?

Mr. Don Lenihan: One would have to look at this case by case, but there are tonnes and tonnes of interdepartmental and intergovernmental activity going on all over the place. Indeed, if I were a politician, I would to some extent worry about this.

Take for example the social union agreement. As we move down a level to applying this in different areas of social policy—children, disability, etc.—presumably what's going to happen is this. Inside government, already committees are being set up all over the place, federal-provincial committees. More bureaucrats will be talking, and not only talking, but working together. This is part of the collaborative spirit.

In one sense that's as it should be, but if it turns out that committees such as this are still detached from their provincial and other counterparts and are thinking inside the departmental box, by the time you make a recommendation to the department, the department is already plugged into a whole bunch of other stuff that's going on at the provincial level and maybe has made all sorts of obligations and commitments. That just makes it very hard for the minister to respond to a committee.

Mr. Rey Pagtakhan: So what structure do you recommend specifically?

Mr. Don Lenihan: I touched on this in my presentation only briefly. There are two levels at which committees such as this should be thinking about it. One—and I take it this is your question, Bonnie—what sorts of objectives are they setting? How clearly are they giving us a picture of what they're doing? What kinds of indicators are they giving us? How effective are these? Do they really achieve what we want? That's reviewing internally and maybe internally within the federal government.

Secondly, there should be efforts here to reach across the jurisdictional boundaries and find out what counterparts in other levels of government are thinking at the political level and how they're imagining their own business planning process. For example, is there really a tremendous clash of values? Maybe. Maybe some of the stuff is irresolvable. Maybe not.

Mr. Rey Pagtakhan: My last question is for Mr. Kent.

You were there when the Department of Health was with the Department of Welfare. Now we have Human Resources Development Canada. Is that a change for the good, or should we go back to what it was?

Mr. Tom Kent: The mixture of health and welfare was never a success. They operated as two separate departments for all practical purposes, with separate deputy ministers and with very little collaboration. So certainly I would not say go back to National Health and Welfare.

On the other hand, I would say the present Department of Human Resources Development is appallingly large, and to give it the responsibility not only for employment, training, and employment-related issues but also for social policy in effect is trying to do too much under one cover.

Therefore, without recreating Health and Welfare, I'd keep health separate, but personally I would go back to a new department. I wouldn't call it welfare nowadays, any more than we would call human resources development “manpower”, which you remember it was when it began. Nobody objected at the time to the word “manpower”. I did suggest we should call it “people power”, but nobody took that very seriously.

Certainly, yes, we should have a department of social, whatever you want to call it, separate from employment and immigration, as it used to be. On the other hand, I would say don't worry too much about government organizational structures. In my experience, with almost all reorganization in government and indeed in the private sector, you reorganize when you don't know what to do.

Voices: Oh, oh!

• 1640

Mr. Rey Pagtakhan: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Chairman: Thank you, Dr. Pagtakhan.

We'll go to Dr. Bennett for a second opinion.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.): Thank you. I have a sister who used to always reorganize her desk when it was time to study.

On the health and welfare question, as somebody who's very keen about the determinants of health and moving to a prevention model, I'd like to ask this. Where do things such as interdepartmental structure...? I have huge sympathy and did participate in one of the round-tables at Treasury Board in terms of the horizontal cross-cutting issues, whether that is child poverty or homelessness or the environment. They don't fit well in the silos the way they are now.

As the chair of the new subcommittee on persons with disabilities and having been at these meetings of John's, it seems to me.... We've had the opportunity at the committee on persons with disabilities to start to bring in all of the ministers who have anything to do with persons with disabilities, which has been very educational.

Do you think there would be a place for the parliamentary committees to deal with issues that cut across departments, so that there would actually be leadership and management? Leadership is supposed to be vision and values. Do you think there's a place for involving parliamentary committees in setting the vision and the values and doing what the social union said in terms of consulting with Canadians on social priorities? Parliamentary committees are a great place to consult with Canadians. Is there a way we can get interdepartmental cross-collaboration in some way, other than bureaucratically? How do we involve Parliament in a more useful way in these issues that cut across departments?

Mr. Tom Kent: May I offer the view that, after all, this subcommittee and others like it are an example of progress in this direction. It used to be—I keep on displaying my age—that parliamentary committees were essentially committees related to particular departments. A parliamentary committee was set up in order to deal with a particular department. Clearly that is an example of how you do not come to grips effectively with policy issues.

The setting up of committees and subcommittees that are taking issues such as disability problems, the problems of this subcommittee, and so on is a very considerable step forward, I would have thought, in involving the value and vision level in the discussion of these sorts of policies.

I would think too an impetus is bound to come from what is happening at the ground level. For example, in health care—and I say this cautiously, because I'm sure many people here know more about the details of this than I do—surely there has developed in the last few years a very strong consensus that if we're to have effective health programs concerned with health, not just with treating sickness, then we have to have decentralized management of the whole set of programs at the area level, rather than a series of government departments, each with its little concern, or its major concern in the case of a health department, and so on.

This fits entirely with what Don was saying about coordination and integration for the sake of particular objectives, such as health in the broadest sense. And sometimes they do have to be pretty broad objectives. Health objectives served by area managements of a comprehensive kind are the sorts of things we're going to have to go to in terms of the fulfilment of policy and the delivery of services. One could hope that that spirit at the ground level will help to feed back into what is, I do assure you, compared to one time, a considerable improvement at this level.

• 1645

The Chairman: Don, did you want to pick on that?

Mr. Don Lenihan: Yes, I'd say a couple of brief things.

First of all, I agree with everything Tom said. It does seem to me that in some ways the creation of committees such as this is quite encouraging. My own view, as I've already said, is that the shift to results-based management and performance reporting provides a tool for getting committees more involved.

At the risk of being provocative here, it seems to me the only thing that stands in the way is the culture of Parliament. I don't see why committees can't play a much more significant role in the bottom-up policy part. I really don't.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: The next step of the social union is supposed to be now putting some meat on the bones by having sectoral agreements that do set some objectives, whether they have to do with child poverty or homelessness or persons with disabilities. In terms of a sectoral agreement, one of the problems we have in collaborative partnerships is that some might say that some of the partners we're stuck with aren't all that trustworthy. You don't always get to pick your partners.

An hon. member: Like a family.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Yes, I guess.

How do you see this next step of the social union, and how could Canadians become involved in what's being called a sectoral agreement? How do we make sure that sentence in the social union says Canadians will be consulted on social priorities? Are you optimistic about this next step of the social union? How do we open up the process?

Mr. Don Lenihan: In some ways I would almost repeat what I just said. Certainly at the level of the department and on the public service side, there's lots of room for processes for citizen engagement, collaborative partnerships in service delivery, etc. A fair bit of experimenting is going on, particularly in HRDC, on that level.

I guess what I'd add to that is I completely agree with what you said before. Committees such as this seem to me a very good place, another forum, in which citizens can be engaged, express their views, and get into being a part of that process—the policy process, the evaluative process, and other things.

I don't know if that's almost a banal answer, but I think that's absolutely right. It seems to me they should be feeding into the process through committees such as this.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Things such as Mr. Kent's early childhood intervention could become an objective that is set.

Mr. Don Lenihan: Sure. Well, let's just put it this way. As we move into these sectoral agreements, part of the task is going to be to define the objectives. Why shouldn't a big part of that happen in this committee?

The Chairman: We have to remember the last train for Kingston, so we want perhaps a short answer from Tom Kent to the last intervention, and then I know the chairman has a question to ask, I think Bonnie Brown does,

[Translation]

as well as Christiane Gagnon. You only have 12 minutes.

[English]

Did you have an intervention on this point, Tom?

Mr. Tom Kent: Yes, very briefly.

Don't forget the role of political parties. I must say I have a somewhat skeptical view of the role of government departments and bureaucrats as consulting the public. Surely the great consultation, the important consultation, is that the political parties should be actively involved in thinking about policy and talking to the public, to people—to their members, but to the public generally—about it. There's been a great depreciation of politics in the last 30 years. It needs to be rebuilt.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Thank you.

The Chairman: May I, with the chairman's prerogative, just make a couple of observations?

First, I was very interested in Madame Gagnon's reaction to the proposal about the $7,000-a-year refundable tax credit. If I read the social union agreement properly, were Quebec to come to a deal with the federal government, there would be recognition of the pioneering work Quebec had done, and money would be freed up for other related objectives. So there would not be a disincentive but indeed an incentive for more money to go for children's purposes as they would see fit. I think that's the way it works.

Second, I would very much like to invite

[Translation]

Ms. Gagnon to be the link with the government of Quebec. Perhaps we could have a joint session, as Mr. Lenihan suggested. I think it's a very promising idea.

• 1650

[English]

That would be quite a session. We'd get a lot out of that.

My third comment is to Mr. Lenihan.

I hope you're going to, through IPAC, give us a hand in studying this horizontal issue over the next couple of months. We need your thinking on it.

My final observation is that we need both the experience of Tom Kent and the theory of Don Lenihan in dealing generally with horizontal issues. The observation Tom made at the end—don't reorganize government for the nth time—is very useful. But I would also like to be inspired by examples from the past—other than World War II possibly, which is the ultimate horizontal issue, I suppose you might say—where we've actually been able to pull ourselves together to focus on these great national projects.

I saw Tom wishing to react to a couple of these points.

Mr. Tom Kent: I just wanted to say first that yes indeed, Quebec would be an enormous financial gainer from opting in to the sort of proposal I'm making. I don't suggest that would be the main motive, because there is in Quebec a very strong concern about these issues, stronger than it has hitherto been in the rest of the country. But incidentally, certainly, the provincial Government of Quebec would have everything to gain financially by opting in.

On the other point.... Well, no. Time is short and we've talked enough.

The Chairman: Bonnie.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: I'm really lifted by the optimism you've expressed about the role of committees and subcommittees. This being a subcommittee of a standing committee, and the standing committee being attached to a department, these committees are not free-floating just because they've picked a policy issue. They are substantially attached to the standing committee and then to the department and the minister.

But what I'm more concerned about is this whole thing about cross-jurisdictions, not even so much cross-departments, because I have little experience with that. We have more experience living with federal-provincial relations.

While we're developing policy around children, the bureaucrats are now meeting from the various levels of government trying to put the flesh on the bones without political input, and then the ministers will meet at the Council of Ministers to decide if they can agree with what the public servants have agreed to agree about. My fear is it will be watered down, because of this conflict of values that the various governments in Canada now represent at the provincial level.

I'll give you an example. I do not want to give money to the Province of Ontario to build more boot camps for young offenders. That to me is a very clear-cut value clash, and I think the opposition would agree with me on that. So if in fact we're trying to have these federal-provincial arrangements around children and young people, which include offenders, what do you do when you get to the point where there is such a complete, black-and-white separation of values?

The other example is the attitude that money should go to help poor children, but by the way, don't give it to parents on welfare. I disagree with that strongly, and I do not want to tell my taxpayers at home, who pay taxes into the consolidated revenue fund and premiums into the employment insurance fund, that their money is being designated to go to some worthy people who aren't on welfare but not to go to some other unworthy people who are.

Those are the kinds of things I'm tossing out as my worries about how this is going to work.

My second underlying worry is how the political views can be put forward before those ministers get together and sign some kind of deal that essentially has been worked out by watering down everybody's values to the point where no strong principles are being enunciated in the agreement that we all become bound to and that the taxpayers' money funds.

The Chairman: I'm going to ask you to hold your reaction to that

[Translation]

so that Ms. Gagnon may put her final question.

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: I think you're being very optimistic when you say that a committee carries some weight with ministers and the government. It's obvious you're not involved in politics.

• 1655

The discussions surrounding the millennium scholarships, for instance, were very difficult. All the witnesses we heard from Quebec told us that the government's objective did not meet Quebec's expectations, but we did not get a lot of support.

When witnesses from Quebec explained the uniqueness of Quebec's culture, for example, it often happened that members took off their ear pieces, read their paper or chose to ignore what was being said. It's as if Quebec witnesses had no credibility. We're told that Quebec is performing well and that it has implemented a really good family policy, but when we try to tell this committee what Quebec has done and when we criticize the federal government for its lack of financial support, well, we're being sent packing. When we stand to speak, we're told by Minister Pettigrew that we want to keep our unemployed out of the workforce. That kind of answer is irresponsible. I wouldn't even dare to think of answering in such a way; I'd be afraid that people would laugh at me.

[English]

The Chairman: On that note, I will ask for a brief final comment from either, if anyone wishes to respond.

Mr. Don Lenihan: I'd make a couple of quick comments.

One, I want to echo what Bonnie said earlier. The federal-provincial thing and finding committees marginalized even further as a result of lots of integration at the bureaucratic level is a serious thing that ought to be pondered by committees such as this, at a number of levels.

The other thing I want to say is that a lot of the problems we're trying to think about are a more explicit and transparent attempt to state objectives. However, there are always political objectives surrounding these things that don't get stated, and I don't know how to deal with that. That's always going to be tough, and that will make it difficult.

Finally, I don't want to come across as too optimistic here. I'm not, after all, a Pollyanna. I don't know how well this will work or won't work. I just think we don't have a whole lot else to do, so let's give it a try.

The Chairman: The last word goes to Tom Kent.

Mr. Tom Kent: Thank you.

I would like to make this point. Politicians have less influence in relation to the bureaucratic process and so on. They have much too little influence; the bureaucrats have too much. But bureaucrats can only fill vacuums in policy. It's up to the politicians to be right in there and to keep the bureaucrats in their place. If that happens, then you can be optimistic about what politicians and the work of committees such as this may achieve.

The Chairman: What a wonderful coda. On that note, thank you. The meeting is adjourned.