TRGO Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

LE COMITÉ PERMANENT DES TRANSPORTS ET DES OPÉRATIONS GOUVERNEMENTALES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, December 13, 2001

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[English]

The Chair (Mr. Ovid Jackson (Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, Lib.)): Ladies and gentlemen, pursuant to Standing Order 108(1)(a), I'd like to call the meeting to order.

Basically, we're here to form a subcommittee under government operations to do with IT and the government and governance. You have the information before you. Hopefully it isn't going to take long.

Just move it and let's go, with not too much talking.

Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.): I move the motion as it sits before you in writing. If you would like me to read it to you, I will read it.

The Chair: No.

Mr. Reg Alcock: And if anybody wants me to speak to it at length, I'm prepared to do it. If you want to just pass it and we can all go home, I'm more than willing to do that.

I want to say one thing: Thank you, everybody. I know it's late in the year, so thank you for taking the time to come.

The Chair: Thank you.

Is it agreed?

Go ahead.

[Translation]

Mr. Ghislain Lebel (Chambly, BQ): Mr. Alcock, I'm somewhat of a neophyte when it comes to communications and anything connected to this field. What do you have in mind? What do you suggest we study? What kind of concerns do you have about the impact of information and communications technology on government and governance?

[English]

Mr. Reg Alcock: Thank you, Mr. Lebel. I am willing to explain it, and willing to take several hours to do so. This is a topic in which I'm intensely interested. I would be more than pleased to meet with you outside of this meeting. However, for the purposes of this meeting, let me give you just a quick bit of history here.

Governments around the world, not just the Canadian government but all democracies around the world, have been struggling to incorporate computers and networks into their operations, and they've all been having trouble with it. Part of the problem is that these technologies challenge us in ways that governments are not familiar with. They make government more transparent in ways people didn't anticipate at first. They allow for interactions with citizens that people didn't anticipate. I argue that part of the reason for the democratic deficit has been that these tools have also changed the broader communication patterns and made it more difficult for citizens to access information about their government. At the same time, these same tools could actually improve that.

The problem is, governments as entities...and I want to be really clear that what I'm talking about here is the “big-thing” government as opposed to the Canadian government or the Quebec government or the U.S. government. It's how democracies function.

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So governments as entities are not very good at taking big steps. They tend to be incremental and slow. They've had a heck of a time. I can give you examples of literally hundreds of projects that have been well thought through in different parts of the world, that have added value to citizens' lives, and that have failed because they fundamentally challenged the way governments work.

My argument here around the House of Commons has been that one of the problems we have as members, forgetting about the parties now, is that we often come in on big issues at the tail end, at the point where there's a bill in front of us and a timeframe, and we have to make decisions about these things. I've argued that the House of Commons as a place needs to get in front of some of these issues and needs to start studying them in a way that builds the understanding of members.

I worked with a bunch of parliamentarians from other countries, including France, and everybody is thinking this through right now. I went to your House leaders and the members from your caucus who had worked with me in the past, and we ran a series of activities to which we invited every single member of the House of Commons and Senate. This has always been done in a non-partisan, wide-open process.

I said to them, look, we need to find a way that members of Parliament can work together to study these big issues. Because the ideological ground, the ground that we might disagree on because of our respective positions.... We aren't even there, because we don't understand what we're talking about. So we need to first build a level of understanding in order for us to understand how we might want to evolve over time.

So the purpose of this, when I went to your House leaders and whips last spring, was to ask whether there would be a willingness to support you, the members, just starting to think about these things, starting to write about them, and starting to study them.

Having a subcommittee allows us to access the resources of the House of Commons research branch. There's a huge community of interest in this all over the country and throughout the world, including in the province of Quebec. I've met with the Government of Quebec on a couple of occasions, and they're doing some very interesting stuff in the areas of privacy and access and issues like that.

The purpose of this, then, is just to enable us as members to get together.

Now, we have to fit into some restrictions. A subcommittee is traditionally nine members. I looked at the design and started talking to your parties about the process with a full committee structure, because I didn't realize the difference. I've been asked to keep it to the subcommittee. But what we're going to do, on everything we do, is invite all members of the House, always, and we're going to operate with a commitment....

Mr. Goldring and I were having a conversation about something that's an additional part of this. For the piece that I'm interested in right now, the commitment is that it takes place by consensus; that there are no votes here in the sense that we're seeking knowledge; and that we report to the House in a way that shares that knowledge with all members of the House and with the public.

We are officially the Sub-committee on Government Operations. The reason for this is that the one department that has a lot of knowledge is the Treasury Board with the Government On-Line initiative. So they will relate to us.

Mr. Goldring has raised the question with me, “Well, there are other issues in government operations that affect other departments, and we may want to look at them, because the bigger committee, with all its work, doesn't have the time”. I have no personal objection to that at all, but I have to be careful; the agreement I have with your House leaders and whips and my own party is around this particular study. And I've had the question the other way around. My House leader has come to me and said “Well, there may be pieces of legislation that affect Treasury Board, or this, that we would like to bring to the committee”. I said, “If that happens, discuss it first with the House leaders”. I don't want to violate my agreement with your House leaders.

So if they want us to do that, if they want us to look...and Mr. Goldring might be interested in looking at the estimates of the Department of Public Works and Government Services.

Is that right, Mr. Goldring?

Mr. Peter Goldring (Edmonton Centre-East, Canadian Alliance): Yes, I have a question.

Mr. Reg Alcock: Personally, I don't have any problem with that, but the set of agreements I have with all the parties is specifically around this process of studying what I think are the most important questions you and I will confront in the next decade.

The Chair: If I may, if you're setting up a subcommittee, that subcommittee may well come up with other ideas, which you'll have to bring back to the committee.

Are you finished, Monsieur Lebel?

[Translation]

Mr. Ghislain Lebel: No. I have another question for Mr. Alcock. I have here a copy of the document Crossing Boundaries. I'm sure it's quite an interesting paper, but it's in English only. Has a French version been published, or is one set to be published?

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[English]

Mr. Reg Alcock: I am sorry, Mr. Lebel. There are French copies of both those documents. I prepared those packages. I got the letter translated, and like an idiot I didn't print off the French. I'll have them in your office later today.

An hon. member: You're not accusing yourself of being an idiot, are you?

Mr. Reg Alcock: I'm accusing myself of being an idiot. I'm accusing myself of being overworked.

An hon member: I object.

An hon. member: Sustained.

Voices: Oh, oh!

The Chair: Mr. St-Julien.

[Translation]

Mr. Guy St-Julien (Abitibi—James Bay—Nunavik, Lib.): I have two comments, Mr. Chairman.,

Generally speaking, I concur with the motion, but I do believe there's an error in the fourth paragraph of the French version. The text reads: "Que le Sous-comité soit autorisé, sauf contrordre..." In my opinion, that's not right. Surely a correction is in order.

The third paragraph notes the following: "That the Sub- Committee report its findings and recommendations to the Committee;". What kind of time frame are we talking about? Six months, a year, maybe two? When must the Sub-Committee report its findings? That's what I'd like to know. Will it have one year, or even two years, to report its findings and recommendations to the main committee?

[English]

The Chair: It's open. It's one of those things where, when you set up a subcommittee of the House, it's subject to the rules of the subcommittees under....

Who wrote this, Beauchesne?

Mr. Reg Alcock: I can speak to that.

The motion was in fact written by the Deputy Clerk of the House. I asked him to give me a motion that conformed with all of the normal forms.

On the open-ended reporting, Mr. St-Julien, because this is not driven by the government or by a particular short-term imperative, we've talked about a variety of ways in which this committee might report.

For example, we've talked about this committee meeting for a longer period of time but less frequently, and reporting after each meeting. We've talked about this meeting exploring new ways of doing consultation on important issues. Instead of us sitting here and having witnesses at the end of the table, we would function more in a true learning and explorative fashion. There's a bunch of things, for the purposes of this study only, I add, not if we get into other more traditional kinds of work. Then we would obviously follow a more traditional format. So it's for this piece of work.

We also want to explore improvements to the way in which the House informs itself about complex issues. That's part of the reason for the open-endedness. Because it functions for this study by consensus, any time anybody doesn't agree with it, then the consensus is broken, and we stop.

[Translation]

Mr. Guy St-Julien: Thank you. I'm satisfied with these explanations.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Goldring.

Mr. Peter Goldring: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm wondering if you could explain whether this procedure will have the ability to track the communication from a public need, to government policy, and back to the public again, and the accountability of the services. Is the intention of it to set up models of what we want to do? If we did that, perhaps we could combine the two things at the same time and pick a subject that's near and dear to my heart, such as affordable housing, and see where the need came to the government and how the government processed that need back to the public, and an accountability trail to it, too.

Mr. Reg Alcock: Mr. Chair, may I respond?

The Chair: Yes, go ahead.

Mr. Reg Alcock: In response to Mr. Goldring, we have passed the motion, have we?

The Chair: No.

Mr. Reg Alcock: Okay. I just don't want to keep people; I tend to get very wordy in my explanations of this. That's my problem.

The Chair: Well, don't be too wordy. You could end up losing the motion.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi (Thunder Bay—Superior North, Lib.): Why don't we pass the motion and then we can discuss it?

The Chair: We don't want to get into the details. Giving us more or less what the committee's going to do is fine, but not too long.

Mr. Peter Goldring: This is just basic framework. To my mind, it's a study that really doesn't have tangible results to it unless you connect it to a model.

The Chair: But isn't that something you do as a committee when you're formed, and you get your mission and all that stuff?

Mr. Reg Alcock: Mr. Chairman, if I may, let me try to pick this apart. I promise you, I'll try to be very quick. I don't want to lose the support of people here.

There's nothing in inherent in what we're doing that prevents an examination of a specific case to build understanding on the process side?

Mr. Peter Goldring: Yes.

Mr. Reg Alcock: Absolutely. What I would be reluctant to do in the focus on the study is to put us back into the normal kind of framework where we start to argue and defend. So to the extent to which we were exploring to gain knowledge collectively, absolutely. To the extent to which we wanted to move back into the more traditional accountability, and I would ask, if your House leader and ours agreed, that we take on a piece of work to do—say, an estimates review of Public Works Canada—then that's fine. I don't have any objection to that. I just don't want to introduce things that make it difficult for us to have an open conversation as members of Parliament as opposed to members of particular parties.

Is that clear enough?

Mr. Peter Goldring: I understand.

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The Chair: Are you ready for the motion to approve formation of the subcommittee?

(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

The Chair: With nobody dissenting.

Mr. Reg Alcock: Thank you very much. I appreciate this deeply.

The Chair: We're adjourned to the call of the chair.