:
Colleagues, I would like to call the meeting to order.
Welcome, Mr. Gladu.
Mr. André Gladu was the previous deputy minister of the department of regional economic development for the province of Quebec during the Place Victoria issue, which we have under investigation. We did have one or two hearings on this. It was decided by the committee to call in Mr. Gladu, as he was the deputy at the time.
This meeting has changed a little bit. We had originally scheduled it for longer. What I'd like to do is allocate up to an hour for this--we may not need an hour, but if we do--with Mr. Gladu. Then Dr. Ned Franks will give a presentation. As everyone is aware, Dr. Franks has been working with us for approximately six months now on the protocol. That is in its final stages, so we'll invite Dr. Franks to the table at 4:30.
I do want to remind committee members that the bells will be ringing at, I understand, 5:15. The meeting will adjourn then, or shortly after that.
Mr. Gladu, I certainly want to welcome you to the committee. I want to thank you very much for coming. I understand you're retired and are not part of the department right now.
Do you have an opening statement or anything you want to say prior to receiving questions from the committee members?
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Gladu.
Merci beaucoup. What I'm going to do, colleagues, is have one round of six minutes each, in this order: Liberal, Bloc Québécois, Conservative, New Democratic Party, Liberal, and Conservative. We might have another five minutes at the end, and we might not.
For the Liberals, who is going to start? Mr. Rodriguez, please.
:
Well, what basically happened was this: the Economic Development Agency of Canada and all the departments that came before it, and which had responsibility at the federal level for economic development, have always had offices at Place Victoria, which is also called the Stock Exchange Tower. I believe employees have been working there for more than 30 years.
Every time that a lease is ending and there is talk of a move, it's important to realize that the prospect of moving does not always please the staff. I think that reality has to be considered here.
In December 2000 or January 2001, in accordance with established procedures, we began discussions with Public Works to see whether there was office space that could be meet our requirements at the end of our lease, which was up on March 31, 2003. That is how the whole tendering process began. As you know and heard through previous testimony, the least costly building that could meet our needs was Place Bonaventure.
As administrator and Deputy Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada, I was quite comfortable with the idea of moving to Place Bonaventure, even though I knew for a fact that it could be difficult to manage for the reason I mentioned earlier, which is that employees had been working there for more than 30 years and did not necessarily want to move. However, at the time, we believed that Place Bonaventure could fully meet our requirements, because we were beginning to need more space.
In the course of that whole process, we also had to determine whether we would keep employees working at the office on the Island of Montreal—for example, the ones who look after SMEs on the Island of Montreal—in the same office space. We therefore informed Public Works in September of 2001 that it was possible employees working at the Economic Development Agency's regional office on the Island of Montreal would not move.
:
Originally, we needed more space because we had been given additional responsibilities. As well, some employees who were in charge of the first infrastructure program were housed in another building. So, we needed extra space to repatriate those employees.
I don't want to go into too much technical and administrative detail, but as Deputy Minister, when I received my annual budget, there was some flexibility there in terms of the way I could use it. Because we had a very significant volume of work, we had already decided to increase our human resources and lower other types of expenditures. We were talking about 30 employees at most. In fact, when the move was to occur, more than 20 had already been hired and appointed to their positions.
I just want to quickly remind you of one fact. In September of 2001, Public Works was informed of the possibility that employees on the Island of Montreal might not move. On February 5, 2002, we officially informed Public Works that we did not want to move the Island of Montreal office and that we preferred it to be located on the actual Island of Montreal, and specifically in the eastern part of the city.
:
Good afternoon, Mr. Gladu.
We held a meeting on January 31. Prior to the meeting, we had received a great deal of documentation from Public Works and from the Economic Development Agency of Canada. A document dated April 26, 2002 which was forwarded to Mr. Séguin by Mr. Patrick Dolan, of Public Works Canada, states that there were negotiations with the owners of Place Victoria. It says that the latter confirmed on Thursday by telephone that the gross rate of $308 a square meter included upgrading of all base buildings.
In another document, which is actually a memo to the Minister of Public Works, Mr. Goodale, signed on June 18, 2002, it talks about a rate of $308 a square meter excluding renovations. What exactly happened between the time a rate including improvements—which was therefore advantageous to the government—was successfully negotiated and the time when the Minister was advised to sign an agreement providing for a rate of $308 a square meter excluding renovations?
Thank you very much for your attendance today, sir.
I want to end up at the same place as the previous questioner, but I want to get this straight in my own mind. Let's go back through this. There was originally a need to move, primarily because there wasn't enough space to meet the current need, let alone the anticipated expansion of the department. That was the original desire for this to be done.
Then, this is where it gets complicated: talking about process. I keep coming back to these e-mails around June and July 2001. They refer to the staff doing the tender being advised by the minister's office that they should hold this project; that's in June, and it's repeated again in July, asking about this being held.
The best I can figure is that we have a situation where the agency said they had this need and put out the tender call. The office of the minister advised the staff in June that they had an interest and they ought to hold on this, that it's not necessarily going through. What I can't find is the paperwork that says to go ahead again. But then it restarts again, and the whole thing goes through, the minister's office having already once put it on hold.
Then it goes ahead, and then we find out that two weeks after the deal is signed—two weeks after—somebody.... This is what Pierre's trying to get to: who made that decision? At some point, two weeks after this deal is signed, there's a decision taken that this isn't the way we're going to go, and now we're out $4.5 million.
I'm not understanding at all who got involved when, and who put a hold on, and what that means. At the end of day, who was the individual—it's a fair question—who said that even though we as a government have entered into this agreement, we're not going to go that way? Who made that decision two weeks later, and why did they reverse themselves, having already interjected themselves into the process beforehand to say hold off?
:
So where would you suggest we go to get these answers? You clearly do not feel you have the answers we need. Where do we get these answers?
Chair, I'm not satisfied. I realize we're going to end this meeting very shortly, and we don't have the answers. But that's the problem: we still don't have the answers. Unless I'm missing something, there was a major intervention at some point within those two weeks that for some reason caused the elected people to order the staff to not follow through with the sign-off two weeks later.
This makes no sense, Chair. Somebody has to be held accountable for why a decision was made to change a decision two weeks after, when it's a process that takes months and months. It's not like saying, oh gee, I hadn't thought of that; I'd better quickly—
:
Until the Secretary of State, Mr. Claude Drouin, forwarded a letter, I was perfectly in agreement with the idea of moving to Place Bonaventure. Indeed, I had confirmed that in writing to my colleague from the Department of Public Works and Government Services in Montreal, Mr. Normand Couture.
The April 15 letter from Mr. Claude Drouin came as a complete surprise. I did not know he had intended to send this kind of letter to his counterpart at Public Works and Government Services. I was only made aware that this letter had been sent a few days later. To be perfectly honest, I don't recall who told me. But, if memory serves me, it was someone from the Department of Public Works and Government Services.
As to what occurred between the office of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services and officials in Montreal, I cannot say. All I can say is that I knew they had been given a mandate to begin discussions with people at Place Victoria to see whether they could secure a considerable reduction in the price proposed during the tendering process.
After being made aware of Mr. Drouin's letter, I met him at a regular meeting. I told him that, in my opinion, it was a mistake to have sent that letter, because this was an administrative matter and he simply should not have got involved.
His answer was—and you will be able to relate this back to my initial comment—that because I had told him it would be difficult to manage—I'm talking about the move now—he wanted to ensure that we would have the option of staying there at a much lower cost and thereby mitigating the impact on staff.
And you know the rest of the story. Public Works and Government Services Canada started negotiations and decided at one point that we could stay at Place Bonaventure. They believed they could rent out the space they had leased at Place Bonaventure.
When they told me we could stay at Place Bonaventure, we revised our administrative plans. In late July, I told my counterpart at Public Works and Government Services Canada that we agreed to stay where we were.
So, that is the story.
:
Yes, and all I'm going to do, Chair, is read something into the record that we've dealt with before. I want it on the record for others to hear and think about too.
This is from Mario Arès, who was here. He's the regional director. He had that interesting e-mail of May 3, 2002, to Suzanne Cloutier. I quote:
It is not my intention to write a memorandum to the minister on this matter. Ever since we approved the lease of Place Victoria on April 2, 2002, for 5,790 square metres, the decisions on this file have been taken at the corporate level and are in opposition to our regional recommendations. The following points support my position.
Then there are five paragraphs. I will not read them, but there are two lines I would like to put on the record. One is:
It seems clear enough that the insistence on staying at Place Victoria in this case serves interests other than the sound management of public funds.
And last, there is another issue. Maybe we need to get a written response to this, but it seems pretty darn important:
Place Victoria never complied with our accessibility requirements for disabled persons and never showed any interest in doing so, and this won't change, which goes against our internal compliance policies.
I would like to know whether that still remains an outstanding issue vis-à-vis that public building, since it was identified earlier and would have been one of the reasons they moved.
With that, I'll say thanks, Chair.
:
I'll point to something that Mr. Christopherson mentioned, which is the letter of May 3 from Mr. Arès, who was the project director, in which he said that the decision to stay at Place Victoria was “difficult to justify” and that it seemed clear that it served “interests other than the sound management of public funds”.
You said you would have preferred to move and not to stay in Place Victoria. You have also said there has been inappropriate interference from a political level, referring to Mr. Drouin's letter.
It seems to me that all the bureaucracy was of one mind on this and there was a desire to honour the competitive process, protect taxpayers, and move to the more affordable location, but only days after Mr. Arès made his warnings--the ones I just cited-- intervened to sign off on the lease award to a more expensive location, a decision of Mr. Goodale that we have now learned has wasted $4.6 million for Canadian taxpayers, according to the Auditor General.
This story gets more confusing when you look back further, because I have some documents here that seem to indicate that originally there was a decision not to move ahead with staying at Place Victoria. That was in 2001. But then that decision was reversed again to move forward, and then pulled back a third time. And that is where the additional costs came from, because the government decided to sign on with Place Bonaventure and, after having signed on, then aborted the move, which is why we ended up having to pay rent for Place Bonaventure without any need for that facility.
Why did that happen?
I have to say I don't really know where else to go in terms of questions here. I still have questions, but this is not the place where I'm going to get the answers, so I'll be seeking some kind of support from the committee that we take a next step. I don't want this to drag out forever, Chair, but the answers still aren't here, and we're left with a $4.5 million goof-up that has to be accounted for by somebody.
With all due respect, sir, thank you for your time today. You've answered thoroughly and completely, but I have no more questions for you, sir.
I'm done, Chair. Thanks.
Colleagues, we're going to move on. The next item I'd like to deal with before calling Dr. Franks, if I may, is the minutes of the subcommittee that have been circulated. There are only two paragraphs, the two items.
One item is that the subcommittee agreed to have the Library of Parliament examine the possibility of a study on statutory and delegated responsibilities and contracts that are made under statutory responsibilities. This will come back to the committee once we get it a little further along. We're going to get the Library of Parliament to probe the market, and then they'll come back to the committee.
Second, we also approved the draft schedule for the next five or six weeks. Of course we have the public corrections ombudsman issue next Monday, we have the RCMP issue next Wednesday, and then we go on a two-week break.
Mr. Williams.
I have a problem with three-hour meetings, Mr. Chairman. Sometimes there will be votes after the meetings, and sometimes there won't be votes, so we can't plan a three-hour meeting. Two hours have been adequate for years and years. Every other committee gets by with two, normally. These ad hoc meetings that are sometimes three and sometimes two give the members and give me some concern, because I can't plan my day. Therefore, I would like to see us just get back to regular two-hour meetings. Perhaps there may be a rationale for having the odd three-hour meeting to deal with reports, although I don't know when that's coming along.
I'd just rather have more regularity in my life, Mr. Chairman, than be governed by the chair.
:
I'm now going to invite to the table Dr. Ned Franks, and we're going to talk about the protocol that this committee has been working on for the last four or five months.
Just by way of background, colleagues, there has been a development recently that I find a little disconcerting. Dr. Franks can speak to it better than I can, but when we started this, we attempted to develop a joint protocol for working with Treasury Board Secretariat, because we have very similar roles. Over the last two or three months, we've attempted to get some dialogue going with Treasury Board Secretariat. You people were all here when I questioned Mr. Wouters on this issue and just pleaded with him to talk to us.
We did finally get a response last week that Mr. Wouters is not interested in pursuing the joint protocol at all. In fact, what they've done is post on their website their own protocol—this would be the protocol from the executive—as to the appearance of accounting officers before them.
Their protocol actually deals with all committees, not only this committee. In my humble consideration, it falls far short of my understanding of the provisions of the Federal Accountability Act. The issue is not personal to the accountability issues involving previous accounting officers. In this case, as you know, in most of the instances this committee deals with, we're talking about the previous accounting officer, because of the way they switch deputies in Ottawa.
Colleagues, we're down to a classic fight between the executive arm of government and Parliament. In my view, it's up to us, as a committee of Parliament, to develop our own protocol. However, we have to be very careful that we do not have in our protocol anything that's contrary to the law, anything that's contrary to the Financial Administration Act—or any other law, for that matter—so we've had the staff working very carefully over the last number of weeks.
Dr. Franks can comment much better and with much more wisdom on the executive protocol, and he can comment on his own protocol, for which I want to thank him very much for putting so much time and effort and energy into doing. That has been circulated to members.
Without having to say anything further, I turn the floor over to Dr. Franks, and I want to thank him for being here today.
As far as I know, the protocol, which is now on the PCO website, was not put there until late last Friday, and I did not have it to comment on until then. My great regret in doing the protocol is that I did not have the cooperation of Treasury Board, and it would be a better product if I had. I made every effort, as the committee did, to invite them to cooperate and collaborate, and they showed no interest whatsoever. So I have to live with the best job I could do, which is what I did for you.
I found the Privy Council Office's “Accounting Officers: Guidance on Roles, Responsibilities and Appearances Before Parliamentary Committees, 2007”--the document they posted late last week--to be disturbing because it seemed to me to fail to recognize what the statutes involved dictate.
The intention of the accounting officer approach as proposed by the public accounts committee, the Gomery commission, academics, and the Conservative Party and now embodied in the Financial Administration Act is, first, to identify the sphere of management that deputy ministers and heads of agencies--the accounting officers--hold in their own right; and second, to establish the principle that as accounting officers these very senior public servants are accountable before parliamentary committees, and particularly the public accounts committee, for their stewardship of their management responsibilities.
The Privy Council Office's document construes the accounting officer provisions of the Financial Administration Act so narrowly as to trivialize the very real and important management responsibilities of accounting officers and to deny that they are accountable in their own right.
The document also dictates a role for parliamentary committees in the accountability processes so limited as to make it doubtful whether, if the public accounts committee were to adhere to it, the committee could effectively hold the government to account for its stewardship of the public purse.
The Privy Council Office's document correctly states that the accounting officer provisions do not create new management responsibilities, but it is incorrect in stating that the accounting officers appear before the public accounts committee only in support of the minister's accountability to Parliament. Accounting officers cannot possibly appear in support of their ministers when they, as accounting officers and not the minister, hold the responsibility.
Responsibility means the authority to act. Accountability means being held to account for the use of that authority. Where ministers do not have the power to act, they cannot be accountable. Where accounting officers hold the power to act, they are the responsible and accountable officials. Accounting officers hold formidable management responsibilities in their own right. Powers delegated to them under the Public Service Employment Act and the Financial Administration Act give them, not ministers, most responsibilities for human resources management.
The Financial Administration Act assigns powers both directly and by delegation to deputy heads, the accounting officers. Neither act permits powers to be delegated to ministers, only to deputy heads. Parliament has assigned these powers to non-partisan public servants in order to maintain the neutrality of the public service and to protect the public purse from abuse by politicians.
The Financial Administration Act gives deputy heads, and deputy heads alone, statutory responsibility for ensuring that payments under contracts meet standards of compliance and propriety.
The Treasury Board's contracting policy demands that public servants who have been delegated authority to negotiate and conclude contractual arrangements on behalf of the Crown must exercise this authority with prudence and probity. The accounting officer is responsible for ensuring that these activities meet these standards, unless his or her advice has been overruled by the Secretary of the Treasury Board or the board itself. Failure of the Deputy Minister of Public Works to meet his statutory obligations and ensure that his department adhered to these standards allowed the problems in the sponsorship affair to occur.
The Privy Council Office's accounting officer document acknowledges that ministers may not give specific direction to accounting officers if they have been assigned management responsibilities or authorities by statute. But it maintains that the accounting officer is still accountable to the minister for the exercise of these authorities. The PCO misses the point here. Parliament has assigned the responsibility to accounting officers, not to ministers. The accounting officers, not the ministers, are accountable. The accounting officers appear before parliamentary committees to explain and defend their use of powers they hold in their own right. They do not appear to support the accountability of their ministers.
The Privy Council Office claims that the accounting officer is not accounting to the committee for his or her personal performance. This is not what the laws say. The provision of the relevant statutes makes it clear that the accounting officer is accountable before the committee for his or her personal performance. Where accounting officers hold the responsibility, they are responsible and accountable.
The Privy Council Office argues that former office holders should not appear before the public accounts committee because they cannot appear to commit to action. But a parliamentary committee cannot demand action of any official, minister, or accounting officer. Half the corps of deputy ministers were appointed to their current office since March 2006. If the committee were to do as the Privy Council Office instructs and only hear testimony from current office holders, much of the time it would not hear from the official who actually made the decisions under investigation. The committee would not be able to demand accountability from the officials whose actions they are examining.
Like all parliamentary committees, the public accounts committee cannot discipline or direct officials, whether those be ministers or public servants. The committee's powers are limited to hearing the testimony of witnesses, investigating issues and producing reports. The committee's work begins after something has gone wrong and has been reported on by the Auditor General. The committee's only real power is the power to examine and report. Its power is that essential component of parliamentary government to identify and expose, to enforce the deterrent effect of bad publicity. Responsible parliamentary government's great strength is that it clearly identifies who has responsibility and then holds them accountable.
Over the centuries, Parliament, against opposition by the Crown and government, insisted that it and it alone had the right to determine who was accountable before it, and how they should be held accountable for their use of the powers Parliament grants to officials. Parliament won. It still has this right. The Privy Council Office appears to have forgotten this fundamental constitutional principle.
Thank you.
:
You can also draw more blood if you succeed. That's on the first hand. That's a natural tendency.
On the other hand, as I have tried to emphasize, there's a statutory framework that gives responsibility to deputy ministers. Now we call them accounting officers because of their managerial responsibilities. They have recourse under the Financial Administration Act, as amended by the Federal Accountability Act. If they are given an improper instruction, they can appeal to the Secretary of the Treasury Board, and the Treasury Board secretary can issue an opinion. If that answer is, “No, Minister”, the minister can appeal to the Treasury Board itself, and the Treasury Board can give an opinion.
There is also an avenue of recourse of a deputy minister to the Clerk of the Privy Council, and that, as I understand, is used once or twice a year by deputy ministers. Now, there are areas in which there could be a profound disagreement not within the managerial responsibilities of an accounting officer, and presumably that would be used there.
:
With the sponsorship issue, a huge number of the problems that came up were payments that were made under contracts when they shouldn't have been. That is clearly the statutory responsibility of the deputy minister, and the only thing you can say about that is that the deputy minister failed in his duty. I think the public accounts committee's entitled to say that sort of thing in a report, which is not something the Privy Council Office agrees with.
If you get to the issue you've been looking at more recently of the contract for space in Montreal, the contract is actually the responsibility of the minister. The minister can delegate contracting responsibilities, but the contract is the responsibility of the minister. Under the contracting policy of the Treasury Board, the deputy head, the deputy minister, now the accounting officer, has the responsibility to inform the minister when a contract does not meet the standards of prudence and probity.
Under the accounting officer approach, it is the duty of the deputy head, the accounting officer, to do that. If the minister still disregards it, the deputy minister could presumably appeal to the Secretary of the Treasury Board.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. It's good to have you back, Dr. Franks.
I worry that if we don't have agreement between the executive and this committee on what constitutes an accounting officer, then when the executive meets with the committee, nothing will be accomplished because no one will agree on what the meeting actually constitutes. If the accounting officer is instructed by the executive branch to represent only the accountability of the minister, but the committee believes that the accounting officer operates within his or her own sphere, then the expectations that the committee has in its questions will not be fulfilled in the accounting officer's answers.
It is my belief that we have to continue to work to find some sort of consensus on what constitutes an accounting officer for the purposes of this committee, or this entire undertaking will have been a colossal waste of time.
I have to say, as a member of the government--
An hon. member: The governing party.
Mr. Pierre Poilievre: Of the governing party, that's right. I would be thrilled to see many of the accountabilities passed down to the top public servant in every department. In fact, for a minister it makes life easier. He has less explaining to do, and it becomes the public servant's job to do the explaining and to take the blame for him.
Let me just state that as a political party that's in power, we have an interest in supporting your interpretation, but as a government that wants to adhere to sound practices of public administration, we do not. If you separate the sphere of responsibility and isolate it around the accounting officer, you undermine the centuries-old tradition of ministerial responsibility. In numerous matters we have faced before this committee, we have learned that the problem has not been a lack of accountability by the senior bureaucracy, but a lack of accountability by the minister.
I believe this proposal you put forward risks exacerbating that problem by extending more responsibilities for the function of government to the bureaucracy, and taking that responsibility away from the minister. It gives the minister a great scapegoat when he comes before this committee. He can simply say he's not responsible anymore, because the protocol says it's actually the bureaucrat who's to blame here.
I'm wondering how you reconcile those two principles: ministerial responsibility with this new interpretation of the accounting officer.
The first answer is that as I emphasized in the protocol and in my remarks today--and as the Privy Council Office does, this being one of those things we agree on--the accounting officer provisions of the Financial Administration Act give no new powers to deputy ministers. This protocol, working within the existing statutes, attempts to establish a means of holding accountable the heads of departments and heads of agencies, the accounting officers, for responsibilities that they already have and that ministers do not have. And I emphasize that; there's no point in pretending that ministers have them, because they don't, and if this is something that affects question period, then question period is going to have to get changed.
For instance, there's a perfectly straightforward answer for a minister if a decision is clearly the responsibility of the accounting officer. He can give information, and then, if the question comes up again--if it's something being investigated by, say, the public accounts committee--the minister can say, I have given an answer to this and it is now the responsibility of the public accounts committee.
An answer in Parliament has to meet two criteria. One, it has to be in parliamentary language, and two, it has to be relevant to the question. No answer meets those criteria, and that has been used in the past very effectively by ministers when they were not responsible for an issue. There are many ways of handling that problem.
On the second problem, to use the omelette analogy again, can you disentangle the whites from the yolks in the mixture of functions of minister and deputy minister? The answer is yes. I was talking to one lawyer about what we were doing here, and his response was that it's not really an omelette, it's a soft-boiled egg; it's gooey, but you can still distinguish the white from the yolk.
To go back in history, the British Parliament in 1862 established a public accounts committee. In 1865 the comptroller and auditor general act was passed. By 1867 the British public accounts committee was wrestling with the question of who it should hold accountable, the ministers or the permanent heads, that being the deputy ministers. It decided to hold the deputy ministers accountable, not the ministers. Britain has followed that path since then.
All I'm saying is let's carry that one step further. The British North America Act--the Constitution Act, 1867, as it's now called--says that Canada shall have a constitution like the British. The British Constitution in 1867 contained in it the possibility, and the beginning of the reality, of a division of powers between ministers and accounting officers. So it's perfectly legitimate, within our Constitution, to create something that was already existing in the British Constitution in 1867. Simply because it's taken us 140 years longer than the Brits to get there doesn't mean it isn't something worth doing. And the provisions of the accounting act are an effort to do it.
I have very little sympathy with the complaint or the feeling that this is a problem because this is only one side. I was the person who produced the protocol, and I consulted with a great many people. The ones I wanted to consult with, the government, refused to consult. Even when the last invitation was offered, after my last attendance before the committee in February, the government did not make any effort to consult. It simply produced its own document. I don't consider that a serious, honest effort on their part to cooperate with the committee.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you again, Dr. Franks.
This situation, Chair, cannot stand. This is impossible, to have this situation where we are.
Let's remember how we got here. In large part, Mr. Williams pushed this as one of his priorities as the chair, but it flowed from the sponsorship scandal. I mean, it has been going on forever. I experienced it at Queen's Park, trying to get answers.
The simple matter is that with the sponsorship scandal, which is the one everybody knows, deputy ministers or ministers rolled in, they were asked questions, and they said, “I can't answer that because it wasn't my responsibility. The deputy did it.” That was the answer over and over again, on all kinds of questions. Then the deputy was brought in--as if that was going to solve things--and said, “I can't answer that. The minister runs the ministry and makes all those decisions. I can tell you what we did and I can produce the documents, but in terms of why we did it and anything to do behind that, you have to see the minister. I can only speak to what the minister speaks to and support that.”
There you are chasing your tail, and who do you call? The whole point of this exercise was to say, “No, Deputy, you are now personally in that role and you are responsible for all the actions you take on behalf of the minister, the government, and the department. You personally have to account for why things were done this way.” There's no deferring to a minister or to anybody else. That person is on the hook.
I disagree entirely with Mr. Poilievre in terms of his concern that we're pushing too much away from the ministers. Not at all. I liked his earlier comment that it makes more sense for a minister.... Ms. Sgro has been one, and there may be others. I have been a provincial minister. From a government point of view, I like the idea that you roll in, you're asked a question about the policy behind why you spent money, why contracts were let, and you answer, as the minister, that the policy of our government is blah, blah, blah, and we did this--blah, blah, blah.
In terms of whether there were problems with that contract--did the process not go the right way, are there questionable activities taking place?--that's not the minister's responsibility; that is the deputy's responsibility. Ultimately the minister becomes responsible for their deputy if they're inept, incompetent, or they're not doing their job.
Anyway, I like it. I think it would be better for a minister. I think it makes things crystal clear. More than anything, without it, this committee and Parliament can't work the way they're supposed to.
I think all of us are open as to where we go, but I think the important thing here.... Certainly I am very comfortable with where Dr. Franks is suggesting we are, policy-wise. I've read the document carefully twice now; I'm very comfortable with that. On the politics of the PCO telling us...I don't know how the point could be better made than what Dr. Franks has in his last paragraph.
I mean, it's not unlike some of the battles they're going through in the States with executive privilege, where Bush is saying, “I can do this and I'll do it alone.” The rest of Congress is saying, “Well, wait a minute, we've got a role here.” This speaks very much to who is in control of things.
I don't want to be unfair, but I think it really matters to this committee what Mr. Williams thinks.
I don't mean to put you on the spot. You obviously don't have to speak if you don't choose to, but in large part your leadership got us to this point. Chair Murphy is doing an excellent job of keeping it moving, but the weight of your opinion would matter on this, Mr. Williams. I will respect you if you choose not to say a word, but there's certainly a vacuum for that word to be placed.
Thanks, Chair.
I've been here for almost 14 years and I consider myself a parliamentarian, first and foremost--a democrat, in the fact that I believe in democracy and the power of Parliament to hold the government accountable. That's where I come from. Most of the time I was on the other side of the table while acting in your position, Mr. Chair, and it was important that Parliament held government accountable. That's the fundamental thing about democracy.
I was a little bit taken aback by the Treasury Board response here--or maybe it's PCO that wrote it. Two examples really stand out when they talk about--under V.8, former accounting officers--questions predating tenure, and they basically say that we can only ask the current incumbent a question regarding administration of the department.
Now, everybody around this table and many others know that we can ask any question of any Canadian that we feel appropriate, period, with no limitations of any kind; and if they don't want to come and answer the question, we can subpoena them, as we did; and if they don't want to answer before the committee, we can hold them in contempt of Parliament. So for the Treasury Board or the PCO to tell us that for the government that we are supposed to collectively hold accountable, we are precluded from talking to people who may have made the mess-up because they've now been promoted or transferred to somewhere else and are therefore off limits, I think, is an insult to this institution. It shouldn't be this way.
Then continuing on, under V.9, they actually try to tell parliamentarians how to behave themselves and that they should act nicely to the witnesses who are before them to try to explain why they messed up in their department. It's your responsibility, Mr. Chair, to keep us in order. It's not for the PCO or the Treasury Board to tell us how we're going to behave around this table. This patronizing attitude by the government to the institution of Parliament really bothers me a lot. Seriously, it does bother me a lot.
As you may know, I chair an organization called the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption, GOPAC, for short. Fundamentally, Mr. Chairman, that organization says let's educate parliamentarians so they can understand their constitutional responsibility in order that they may hold government accountable. If we are to capitulate to this document by the government saying we can only hold them accountable on their terms, we're doing a serious disservice to the people who elected every one of us.
:
If I may respond, this has been going on for several months, and I think we have to bear in mind that this document could be a work in progress. I would like to move forward with it, and it might be that, on further reflection, we decide we want to change it.
We can meet with them, but you were here when I talked to Mr. Wouters. I've pleaded with him. I've asked for meetings myself, and he won't meet with me. We've written him letters. Dr. Franks has attempted on many occasions to meet with him, and last week we got a response. So I honestly think we should just.... Mr. Williams is quite correct, it's up to Parliament to define and set the parameters of the range of accountability within the legislative confines of the Federal Accountability Act and other legal instruments.
I'm in the hands of the committee, of course, but I would like to either do it now or reserve 15 minutes at one of the meetings next week and put the question to a vote as to this particular document.
But I have a couple of questions for Dr. Franks, and I want to get it clearly on the record--
:
If we don't resolve this, then clearly we're going to adopt this document, or something very close to it, and then we'll invite a deputy in here; the deputy will come in and follow the PCO rules, and we'll be asking questions based on our protocol, and then we'll be at loggerheads.
So first, is that going to happen? Second, in any attempt to avoid this, we need to kick it out of the staff arena and get it totally into the political arena. That's why I would support it, notwithstanding that I think you're right, Chair, that it may not get us anywhere and we might lose a bit of time. But if we get into a constitutional gridlock here at the end of the table, it's going to be pretty big.
The first thing the rest of the House will want to know is what procedures we followed. Did we make every effort to try to come to a resolution, particularly in a minority government? We need to have solid answers to that. This would provide us with that. At no point have you, on our behalf, talked to the political people, who would be the ministers in this case.
Secondly, I would just feel more comfortable, if we're going to start getting into any kind of situation like this, let's do it between politicians and politicians, not politicians and staff. That's always problematic.
So that's another good reason for sending the letter. It kicks it out of the staff level and puts it into the political arena. Then we can deal with it in a political way--nice-nice at first, and then if we don't get the cooperation we need, believe me, it's going to be hard-ass all the way.
A voice: How do you translate that?
Mr. Christopherson: I don't know. I can barely get it out in English.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We can't ask Dr. Franks to go to the Treasury Board or the PCO and negotiate and come back. We cannot do that.
We cannot do that, because he is an academic with first class credentials, and for him to come back and say, “I stand, and they agree with everything I say”...or if he capitulates and changes, then what happens to his credibility as an intellectual academic presenting a report to Parliament? Therefore, to put him in this totally impossible situation cannot be.
He has presented his best work to us. We accept that or we don't accept that. We listen to the Treasury Board, and it's up to us to make our decision. It is not for us to ask Dr. Franks to go and negotiate, and massage, and do whatever it is with the government.