OGGO Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

Á

1110

The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.))

Mr. Evert Lindquist (Individual Presentation)

Á

1115

Á

1120

Á

1125

Á

1130

Á

1135

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance)

Á

1140

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Á

1145

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ)

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Á

1150

The Chair

Mr. Steve Mahoney (Mississauga West, Lib.)

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Á

1155

The Chair

Mr. Steve Mahoney

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

Mr. Andy Scott (Fredericton, Lib.)

The Chair

Â

1200

Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance)

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Â

1205

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Â

1210

The Chair

Mr. Gilles-A. Perron (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, BQ)

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Â

1215

Mr. Gilles-A. Perron

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

Mr. Gilles-A. Perron

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth

Â

1220

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

The Chair

Mr. Andy Scott

The Chair

Mr. Andy Scott

Â

1225

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Â

1230

The Chair

Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.)

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Â

1235

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Â

1240

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.)

Â

1245

Mr. Evert Lindquist

Mr. Roy Cullen

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Â

1250

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

Â

1255

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

Mr. Evert Lindquist

·

1300

The Chair

Mr. Evert Lindquist

The Chair

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

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NUMBER 006

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Á  (1110)  

[English]

    The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.)): Okay, let's go.

    We are here today to do two things. We are going to hear first from a witness, Professor Evert Lindquist from the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. You've all received a copy of the preliminary document Jack, our researcher, did on this study, which picks up on the conversations we had before we adjourned prior to Christmas. And at the end of this meeting we are going to take a couple of minutes to deal with a motion, which is essentially confirming what we decided in principle at the meeting before Christmas. You have a copy of it in your packages. I thought, out of respect for our witness, rather than having the discussion of that prior to the witness and forcing him to sit here and listen to all that, we'd deal with the subject of his presentation first.

    Professor Lindquist, you will find that we are, for the most part, a friendly group. We'll give you the time to make your presentation, and then we'll get into a round of questions. You've done this before, you know the routine. So over to you.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist (Individual Presentation): First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation to speak to your committee.

    I received a short discussion paper just a couple of days ago, and I've tried to organize my presentation around those themes. What I would propose is that I go through my remarks, but really they're just a point of departure for a discussion.

    I think it's a rare opportunity one gets to appear in front of a committee as a single witness, and I look forward to the dialogue.

    As I understand it, you're trying to reflect on the recent directions taken by public sector reform in Canada and elsewhere in the world and to get a sense of where the new public management is going, what will be the most important directions that reform should be taking over the next five to ten years, and what has worked and what hasn't. For example, has bureaucratic culture changed sufficiently in Canada? It's also clear that you have on your minds an important question: for all the change that has been occurring, does government work better? What seem to be the problems? Where does Canada fit into the scheme of things in comparison to other jurisdictions? How well has information technology been exploited by the government? What might be the future direction we can take?

    Obviously, these are huge questions. You're bringing in lots of different witnesses, and I'm going to be giving you some of my reflections on these questions.

    The bases I'd like to touch on today flow from some of my thinking and research on various issues of public sector reform and management. One area has to do with Parliament and results and whether or not anyone is listening to and working with the performance reports that have been published by the Government of Canada.

    The second topic I would like to deal with is citizen engagement. The question I want to ask is whether consultation is dead. Is this really new? What is different? In the interest of thinking about exploiting new information technologies, are we passing over some of the real fundamental issues that have always challenged consultation?

    A third topic I'd like to touch on is public sector reform more generally. Here, without getting into specific directions on reform, I would like to suggest that one of the most important things we need to do in this country is to take stock and develop a sense of coherence about where we've come before we think carefully about where we need to go next.

    This relates to the fourth area, which is how Canada compares, and I have some suggestions in that area as well.

    Finally, in thinking strategically in the future, one thing this committee and other committees can do is begin to think about the future using scenarios. I'll explore all the implications for this committee.

    In short, the central idea I want to put on the table is this notion of coherence; that is, to get a sense of where we stand without necessarily developing a consensus on what's important and where we need to go.

    Despite the avalanche of performance reports you have to deal with, I think we still need to have better and more contextual information with which to help committees and outsiders interpret that information and properly hold government to account.

    The work of your committee, and a lot of the things we'll be talking about today, is part of a huge work in progress concerned with rebuilding trust and confidence in government, and this is something that's not going to be accomplished in a couple of years. It might take another five or ten years.

Á  (1115)  

    Finally, I would like to suggest that standing committees, with the leadership of this committee, need to build strategic alliances with organizations, including, but not just relying on, the Auditor General of Canada. You need to develop strategic alliances with other organizations that are interested in policy and public sector reform in order to get the kind of information I suggest is needed for you to do your work as well as possible.

    My first topic is “Results in Parliament: is anyone listening?” Several years ago, in 1995, I gave a talk to the Canadian Study of Parliament Group. This led to an article that was published in the Canadian Parliamentary Review called “Information, Parliament and the New Public Management”. This piece was done just after program review and just about the time the Government of Canada, with the leadership of the Treasury Board of Canada, was introducing a results regime. The purpose of that piece was to think about what the implications of performance reporting would be for Parliament. I noted that there were a lot of typical problems with the folks on performance indicators. I don't want to delineate them all, but they give a very partial view of how government agencies are performing. There are lots of problems with measurement. Even though they've been held out as a way to increase the transparency of government, at times they can actually provide a veil on what is going on inside departments. So I noted a lot of the issues that I think many of you are familiar with.

    I also identified the fact that there really was an accountability network of actors involved in thinking carefully about these issues. There are standing committees, Treasury Board Secretariat, the Auditor General of Canada, and other watchers of the entrails of government. But my key concerns at the time were that performance documents ostensibly produced for public consumption were really written for experts, members of this accountability network, the people who are around government, who know the players, know the budgets reasonably well, and know what to look for, and these people bring a kind of base of experience and information that most ordinary Canadians don't have access to.

    My second point with that article was to suggest that there really was a need to develop contextual information on programs and departments that would bridge the gap between the tacit knowledge experts have and what people needed to know in order to interpret these documents as well as possible and engage in constructive debates. By contextual information I means things like understanding the recent history in organization tasks and work-flow of departments, even their geography, how they're rated throughout the country, and some of the tensions and issues departments and programs have to weigh as they think about dealing with new challenges.

    That was a point made in 1996. In 1998 I published a piece on how Ottawa spends called “Getting Results Right: Reforming Ottawa's Estimates”. This came out just after the reporting reform movement really had gathered steam in Ottawa. The performance reports moved out of pilot project phases and were becoming the way departments were going to report to you in the future. But the main purpose of this piece--it reviewed a lot of issues again--was to point to the fact that despite the production of these reports, there was not a whole lot of interest in them, and I think this observation holds true to this day. It's not clear that standing committees are using performance reports in a methodical way. Second, it's not clear at all that the media have any interest in these reports, and therefore there's not a lot of interest on the part of, say, think tanks and citizens.

Á  (1120)  

    So the quality of these reports and the overall reporting regime has largely relied on, I would suggest, the interest and the professionalism of senior public servants and central agencies in Ottawa. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Arguably, those reports have improved over time. I think public servants produced these reports as if you were going to take a strong interest in them and as if the media and citizens would take a strong interest in them.

    In this document I endorsed the recommendation that standing committees ought to receive more resources, so that they can increase their capacity to do research and to review these reports. I also endorsed the suggestion that a standing committee on estimates be formed. So I'm very pleased to see that this committee emerged out of that debate. But I do think the challenge of improving the quality of contextual information remains, and without this contextual information, the challenge of interpreting performance reports is a daunting one.

    It's in this connection--again an idea that flowed out of that paper--given that a committee like this is not likely to get a huge infusion of resources to do its work, I think you need to develop strategic alliances with other interested actors, universities, think tanks, the Auditor General, but also other actors who have a good sense of the history in the evolution of departments and programs and are willing to work with you to produce dispassionate renderings of where departments are generally and how they work before moving on to the performance information. We can come back to that later if you wish.

    The second topic I wanted to address fairly briefly is citizen engagement. The question I pose here is, is consultation dead? It's been fashionable during the last three to four years in Ottawa to talk about citizen engagement as if the Government of Canada has never had experience with doing consultations before. I just look around the room, and I'm familiar with the fact that a number of you have been quite extensively involved in consultations, which would go by the name of citizen engagement nowadays. For example, I look at Mr. Scott, who's quite involved in the social security review consultations and quite involved in some innovative town hall meetings; he worked with HRDC to develop public conferences. There's a whole story there, but when you think about that massive consultative exercise, that was citizen engagement, and there are some very good things about that, some things that perhaps the government might not want to repeat. I take you back to 1994, when the finance minister of the time introduced a number of public conferences, a more open budget process, and so on. This could be repeated across government.

    The question I want to ask is, what is different about citizen engagement? I think, in part, the possibilities afforded by information and communications technology have rekindled an interest in this area. But there are many ideas that have been around for 15 or 20 years, whether we're talking about deliberative polling, citizen juries, dialogue sessions with the public. The key point I want to make here is that the advent of new technologies and employing a new phrase like “citizen engagement” don't remove some of the fundamental tensions involved in consultation, not only involving a government with its own agenda trying to move its ideas forward, but some of the inherent tensions between departments and their officials stewarding consultations in competition with standing committees and members of Parliament. I think this tension, which has expressed itself in a very interesting way during the social security review consultations, exists to this day, and some of these new ideas about how to move forward with consultations as part of the larger public sector reform agenda really haven't addressed those fundamental issues.

Á  (1125)  

    I'm sure you're aware of Kathryn May's article in the Ottawa Citizen a few months ago. I think it's an excellent primer on these issues that you know well.

    So there are questions I would pose here, without giving you solutions. What are the new information technologies and citizen engagement techniques for? What new information are they going to bring to bear on the process of developing new agendas, teasing through alternatives, and thinking about how to implement government policies better?

    Do these new technologies promise to improve the quality of information at the disposal of members of Parliament, citizens, and groups who are engaged in these consultations? Will the capacities of standing committees such as your own be expanded in order to use these new technologies?

    From my standpoint, as director of a school of public administration, our program delivers a lot of our courses online. It's not a cheaper way to deliver that service. I think the same observation could hold true for citizen engagement and using new technologies. It will probably be more expensive, so what advantages will flow from this?

    With these new modalities of citizen engagement, what legitimacy do they actually have? When we have citizen dialogues with a certain group, or regional forums of one kind or another and they tell us certain things, I worry about the quality of information, on the one hand. But I also worry about whether or not these processes can truly be said to represent the views of Canadians. This raises the issue of different mediating processes, such as the work of standing committees, but also the work of ministers.

    So what are the implications of this? First, of course, committees like your own have to be champions of better engagement with citizens and try new techniques, but you have to develop more capacity. If someone's not going to give you more resources, once again I return to the theme of what alliances you can build with other actors to help you move this agenda forward. So I think this is going to require a lot of creativity.

    This may seem like a bit of a throw-away line, but a couple years ago I wrote a piece on how Ottawa spends. It looked at the work of the group in the Privy Council Office that's responsible for agenda management--the deputy secretary of plans and consultation. I felt that the background transition documents for governments ought to be made public. I'm echoing the recommendation of my former colleagues at the University of Toronto, Graham White and David Cameron, who did an in-depth study of the Ontario transition process.

    I suggest this at this juncture because I think it's very important that citizens understand the breadth and complexity of issues that confront government--and you, for that matter. It's important that by understanding that those issues have been registered in a corporate way by government, in a very interesting way they've been listened to and heard. They will see that governments have to make very difficult balancing acts all the time.

    The third topic is on public sector reform. Here you're asking about what priorities the government should have for public sector reform in the future. I've got some general points here. The most important thing on my mind right now--and I think this is being addressed by the government--is that central agencies need to have better capacities to challenge the work of government departments.

    If you leave aside the program review process and some minor exercises that have flowed from its wake, it's quite interesting that the base budget of departments isn't challenged that seriously.

Á  (1130)  

There is a reallocation exercise underway right now, as you probably know. But this has a lot to do with how the Treasury Board Secretariat has been organized, and how it has had to deal with budget pressures in the wake of the program review.

    In contrast to other countries, like Australia and New Zealand, I think there is not a significant challenge to departments. In other words, you don't typically go into the budget process here without the Department of Finance and the Treasury Board Secretariat having very clear views on how they might like to use and reshape budgets. Then it's sort of put to departments to take up this challenge, push back, and suggest why other priorities are more important.

    I do think this is being addressed, but I mention it in part because I think a similar challenge process has to occur within the standing committees as well. There needs to be a central process, but also a good and well-informed process, which is not just focusing on issues that arise, or scandals, or things like that, but which really focus on the challenges confronting departments and how well they are managed.

    My view has long been that for that capacity to be rebuilt in the Treasury Board Secretariat, it would involve a change not only in the secretariat but also a realignment of focus across central agencies. My understanding is that new legislation is about to be introduced to the House, which will focus a lot on the human resource function in government. But I think it will be part of a larger package of rebalancing some of the responsibilities across central agencies and creating a new sense of focus. If I were sitting on your committee, I would certainly be monitoring this and wondering what the implications are for the work of this committee.

    Other priorities, of course, have to do with renewal of the public service; succession planning; developing a flexible learning organization that can deal with new challenges; rethinking how the merit system works, and how careers will unfold in the core public service here, and in the larger public sector as well. We don't have time to get into this, but the main concern I have is that the entire public service is about to go through a period of transition. It will probably move very quickly, and then you're going to have a generation of current 30- and 40-year-olds who will likely be in charge. A lot of them aren't in the public service right now; they'll be coming from other jurisdictions very quickly.

    To me this raises the issue of the attractiveness of public service careers, the reputation of government, and I think the interest of all standing committees in underscoring the importance of work in the public sector while being properly critical in scrutinizing government activities, on the other hand. It's a very interesting balancing act to strike.

    I've already talked about information to Parliament. I just think its part of the larger public sector reform agenda.

    The final point I would like to make on public sector reform is that relatively little thought has been given to what impact this whole area of reform—across all levels of government and all regions of this country—has on given citizens and given communities. I think there's been very little work on this. We do talk about citizen engagement, and we do talk about citizen-oriented service, but we really don't talk about what all of this means in aggregate for a person living, say, in the northern part of B.C. If we do think about it, we tend to think about it only from the standpoint of, “Well, what's the federal government doing in northwestern B.C.?” But we don't think about how government, generally speaking, looks to these citizens.

    How does Canada compare? Usually we ask this question in specific functions. So we ask how the HR regime works, or how Government On-Line works.

Á  (1135)  

I think the main point I'd like to make here is that context is very important. To pick particular initiatives and ideas from different jurisdictions sometimes is to miss the point of how all these things interact together.

    I guess the key question I want to put on the table here, which is related to the last point I made, is that I don't think we have a very strong and clear idea about how much this country has changed over the last ten years. We're thinking about new directions for public sector reform, but I think it's a very risky proposition to move off in new directions without having a very clear sense of what we've accomplished.

    What I would argue is that in contrast to our reluctance to embark on constitutional experimentation, as a nation we've been very willing to countenance dramatic administrative restructuring across all levels of government. Here I'm thinking about aboriginal, local, territorial, provincial, and federal governments. This country has changed dramatically—citizens feel it in their bones. But in my view, governments have recently been incapable of describing the nature of that change to date. Who we are and where we are right now will be very important for thinking about where to go.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Well, let's get at it. We'll go the Alliance, and then to Mr. Lanctôt or somebody from the Bloc immediately after.

    We'll start with Mr. Mahoney on this side.

    Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Lindquist, for your insights. It's great to see you here today to let this committee in Parliament in Ottawa know that we have great people out in British Columbia representing the School of Public Administration, University of Victoria.

    I recall some fond days taking a few courses out there. I went through the British Columbia executive development program that your school ran on behalf of the provincial government. It was a great exercise.

    I was wondering if, for a few moments, you could direct your thoughts to the potential for technology to expand the boundaries of providing service delivery, instead of a central agency looking at cost control by developing call centres, getting government online, and reducing personnel and a hierarchy of bureaucracy, to look at the potential of actually expanding consumer service from that side and permitting a more customer-driven approach in the private sector.

    Of course, if service is not delivered and people are not buying the service, they go elsewhere. The agency, the corporation, or whatever, has to adjust itself to meet the market need. It's typically the problem with a government. It's the customer who has to do all the adjusting to the agency.

    I'll give a case example. I'll think of a volunteer seniors bureau in a remote community. There may be a number of retired people there. The local community may have a non-profit society. In coordination with a food bank and a number of other things, they will have a storefront for seniors. It's mostly run by volunteers and donations.

    They are trying to assist seniors in accessing federal government programs. At income tax time, they may have a variety of volunteers, retired tax accountants or whoever, who come to the seniors bureau to help seniors fill out income tax forms or to make sure they get GST cheques. Increasingly, the forms and the whole process are absolutely incomprehensible.

    They're not computer literate. They can't get access to new tax programs where the computer does income tax returns because the seniors have never turned on a computer. As they're aging, and as the computer stuff is getting more “inside” and you have to be a techie to do it, this whole generation is being left behind. The federal government is increasingly going high tech, yet the people who they're supposed to serve are being left behind.

    I'll use another case example of Canadian veterans trying to understand what might be available to them in veterans benefits. It's a labyrinthine set of polices where they get an A card or a B card in the services, and so on. Most of the veterans are totally disconnected with the department. They will use an agency, like a volunteer bureau of a seniors bureau, as helpers and intermediaries.

    Then I think of high tech. If we have a seniors bureau that is trying to be the intermediary to help the disengaged customer deal with a technical government bureaucracy, there may be a potential for the government to say they're going to partner with some of the volunteer agencies. They're going to give them the latest high-powered computer. They're going to give them not dial-up access, but really strong ADCL access. They're going to give them the computer and pay for the line charges because they're partnering with the volunteers.

    They have a duty to accommodate the consumer who pays the bills, the customer and the voter. They also have a duty to communicate, and to communicate in ways the customer can understand and comprehend. Then it changes the power dynamic a little more to the private sector where the customer or the consumer can drive it.

Á  (1140)  

    I'm wondering about something like veterans benefits and the duty of this agency to accommodate, communicate, and adapt to the needs of the individual receiving the benefit, rather than the agency becoming much more disconnected from the people it is supposed to serve.

    I've rambled on, but I think I've painted a picture to which you could perhaps respond.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: You've painted a really interesting picture. It's a fabulous and very complex set of examples. First of all, it's a good example. These kinds of things are happening across the country right now, in different ways and for better or for worse, so I just go back to my earlier point. One thing we need to show Canadians is that these things indeed are happening—not that they're all working to their full potential, but that lots of federal and provincial and local communities are taking these risks and are trying these new approaches.

    At one level, I think what you're talking about is multichannel or multimodal service delivery. I think most providers of those services will think about maintaining as many channels as possible and having a gravitation strategy that will not exclude key client groups. Also, as groups become more familiar with using technology, they can move more of their business and resources in certain directions.

    My understanding of the sum of the experience in this area is that agencies will often ensure that their staff understand all of the different modes, so that it's easy to redeploy staff as the demands for services along these different channels shift. So on the one hand, I think there needs to be an intelligence in designing and implementing the use of technology. On the other hand, you can think about that as being a set of criteria that standing committees such as this one or anyone who is auditing implementation would bring to bear.

    It also occurs to me that what you're talking about is partnering, which again is very difficult. It requires a lot of ingenuity and flexibility on the ground and is not amenable to central control. It raises huge questions about accountability, as you well know. I also see this linked in a way to the innovation strategy, which doesn't talk about the public-sector side of innovation and what government needs to do. Really, it's the flip side. How does government work with communities in order to best serve them and realize the full potential of communities and individuals? I think we could go on with this example.

    And I just have one other point. I wouldn't confuse using new technologies with the complexity of government reporting and filing of information. It could be that one doesn't use any new technology at all but can make enormous strides just by clarifying the red tape in making it easier for people to fill out forms. That may have nothing to do with an ATM being available.

Á  (1145)  

    The Chair: I'm going to ask questioners and responders to shrink their comments so that we can get more dialogue in.

[Translation]

    Mr. Lanctôt.

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ): Mr. Lindquist, I'd like to have more specifics on how we could improve the things I'm going to mention to you.

    You mentioned the provision of services, and accountability, and you're saying that people have been talking about this new public service management for years. Of course, there aren't only scandals, but one has to start somewhere when one is a member of Parliament and it's through those scandals that we might be able to find what's not working at senior levels. We've been working ten years on this new management thing already and there are scandals like the firearms registration business, human resources and the sponsorship program.

    Is it because this new management is so rotten, that there's so much paperwork than you can't see the forest for the trees and that billions of dollars are being spent for programs that should cost almost nothing? The question I had is this: Is this new management totally beside the track? Do we have to re-centre, as you say?

    What I'm trying to do is not only criticize the department, but also all those central organizations that lead to these problems. What must we do to avoid all that? It's easy to say that we shouldn't just denounce scandals. But you have to denounce them to show that things aren't working and that they're really not working at all. What organization do we have to recreate? Because this new management has started being used, but the more information we get, the more paperwork there is and the more documents we have, the harder it is for civil servants to see that they've totally missed the boat. Something isn't working. We're told that we need new management, that there has to be accountability, but not only is there no more accountability than before, we can actually see that the whole thing isn't working. I know it's a rather complex question, but anyway, we seem to be beside the track.

[English]

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: It's an important question that you ask, and obviously it's one that's animating the committee's projet in this area. The first thing to bear in mind is that the so-called new public management is not just a Canadian invention, and it's not just a federal government invention. All parts of the public sector in Canada have been thinking about these issues.

    The new public management really emerged out of an interest of governments wanting, at the political level, to assert political priorities and not to rely on public servants and bureaucracies to tell them what to do. We often lose sight of that. Another area of this really was to think in terms of performance and to focus on results—and I don't think anyone is uninterested in results. And it also emerged out of an interest in having much more efficient and effective government.

    We have to bear in mind that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, from a fiscal standpoint, most governments were in a lot of trouble in the OECD nations. A lot of what is called new public management reform is in fact about getting the size of government and the growth in government under control, again for better or for worse.

    When one peels back the grants and contributions scandal at HRDC, what one actually sees is a department that was expected to do enormously difficult things. There were labour market agreements. It had to amalgamate from the June 1993 restructuring. It had to introduce new technology. It was rolling out new service models. It was trying to work on the ground in new ways. There were a whole bunch of things going on there, and not all of them worked well.

    I'm not suggesting in any way that your job is not to look at what goes wrong and not to focus in on scandals. But I think one equally has to look at the managerial context and what is expected of public servants. Too often, ministers, sometimes executives, as well as us as citizens and critics of government, expect too much. We really don't create the right incentives for public servants to say we're asking a lot of them and for them to tell us what the risks are in moving these new reforms forward and what the trade-offs are, what some of the things are that are going to be a lower priority as we move forward.

    So I just wonder if, collectively, we create the right environment for these decisions to get made. Should we be surprised at times when some of these scandals emerge? I'm not talking about the misuse-of-funds types of scandals, I'm talking about where services aren't delivered that well.

    I think we have to have a broader, more fulsome view of what we're expecting of government. That doesn't mean we have to agree on the decisions that get made, but we have to be fully aware that, having made those decisions, it involves a certain balancing of priorities and service.

Á  (1150)  

    The Chair: Okay, thank you.

    Mr. Mahoney, you have the floor.

    Mr. Steve Mahoney (Mississauga West, Lib.): Mr. Chairman, I spent the weekend suffering as the Liberal spy, if you will, at the NDP convention in Toronto. One of the suggestions made by one of the candidates--the one who won, actually--was that they should buy a newspaper because they can't get their message out. Not to be overly partisan, but I'm sure their method of acquisition would likely be nationalization, if they had that opportunity.

    I mention this because you talked, Mr. Lindquist, about the HRD “scandal”--I don't use that word for it. What I saw happen with all of the attention on the so-called billion-dollar boondoggle was that the public servants turtled everywhere in the country. People who were delivering good training programs to Canadians, whether to young entrepreneurs or women or natives or whatever, all of a sudden had tremendous difficulty getting answers, getting anyone to even pick up a telephone, because they were so afraid they would wind up in question period the next day if they made the wrong decision.

    So the issue is--and it's not a new one--risk versus reward in the public service. How do you possibly encourage a public service to be proactive and to look for new ways in management when there's so much risk? Of course I come at it from my own personal analysis of that so-called scandal, which is that it was actually a tempest in a teapot, nowhere approaching anything like a billion-dollar boondoggle. The dollar amount was minuscule, the dollars were found, the audit was done, and we don't hear about it any more.

    But how can we ever expect the civil servant who lives in an era of brown envelopes under doors.... And I would be the same if I were in opposition; I'd probably be worse, if you want to know the truth. I was there. It's the politics we face in government in trying to get our message out to the citizens, either as government or as opposition. The civil servants are the meat in the sandwich. They just go running for the hills, and I don't blame them. How do we deal with that?

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: Part of the responsibility does rest with public servants to explain those risks to their executives and political masters. It's a worrisome trend when you get to the point in any private, public, or non-profit sector or organization where the public servants or staff are so worried about their reputations and the consequences of failure that they fail to pass information up the line, or they don't think their advice will be taken seriously. So I want to be clear: some of the responsibility doesn't rest with people outside.

    In response to your question, the best way to handle those kinds of challenges is to have good information that can quickly allow a minister and a deputy minister to put the work of the department in context. What is it the department has been trying to achieve? What are some of the tensions inside the organization? And when a particular issue arises--whether one thinks it's a scandal or not, it shouldn't matter--when it arises, one can have some context there.

    The debates are going to continue; it's politics, as you well know. But I think we can do better than we currently do. I actually think all MPs have a vested interest in this, because one day those MP's are going to be on the opposite side of the aisle, and when you get to the other side, it's not pretty when these sorts of things happen.

Á  (1155)  

    The Chair: Steve, you have time for another very quick one.

    Mr. Steve Mahoney: Quickly, let me deal with the issue you talk about in communicating citizen engagement. I live in a very urban community where the newscast that anyone will watch at any given 11 o'clock news is either going to be from Buffalo or Toronto, neither one of which reflects generally on any local issues in my community.

    I have a newspaper that comes out a couple of times a week, and it's really a delivery mechanism for K-Mart flyers with very little news, certainly nothing controversial. The Toronto media are not interested in the view from the “905s”, if you will, because we're all just a bunch of suburbanites.

    I'm sounding insecure, but I'm not. But how do you communicate? I find that unless something is going on in my citizens' backyard.... I will always hear from a certain group. When the gun registry blows up I will get certain phone calls from people who will say “I told you so”. Whatever the issue is, I will get certain.... Right now there's a big lobby on CBC funding, and it's quite orchestrated and you can see it happening. But that to me is not citizen engagement; that's special interest groups who are simply putting their ox forward to be looked at.

    How do we effectively, in a country as diverse as this, really engage our citizenry?

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: I think that's a very important question. You're getting into the, at least to my mind, whole question of concentration of ownership of newspapers in this country, which is not my particular field of expertise. But I would note that I see a lot of convergence in the content of national, provincial, and big city papers, about 90% convergence of content.

    In my own province I often pick up, say, the Vancouver Province or the Vancouver Sun and I don't find much more provincial material-- and there's certainly very little in the way of local coverage--than I can get in the Globe and Mail or the National Post. There are obviously some economic incentives at play that are pushing most newspaper owners, except for local papers, the very local papers like the ones you talk about, to converge in content. I think there really is a missed opportunity to provide better coverage at the regional level and at the provincial level.

    So if we agree on that, unfortunately the question is who's going to make that investment? It's not going to be government. It has to be entrepreneurs who see that there's an opportunity and then citizens have to go out and buy two newspapers a day rather than one. I don't think there's an easy answer, and I think that's going to be the context for the foreseeable future.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Mr. Scott, do you want to follow up on that?

    Mr. Andy Scott (Fredericton, Lib.): Sure, maybe in a minute.

    The Chair: Do you want me to go over to the other side?

    Andy's just recovering from a rather serious illness.

    Mr. Epp, are you ready to go on?

  (1200)  

    Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance): Yes, I'm ready.

    I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about actual ongoing money management in a large organization of which government is the prime example. How do you possibly keep all of the accountabilities in the chain without any of the links being broken? I'm thinking of what we call the “boondoggles”. Steve Mahoney thought that it turned out really to be nothing. There's a lot of money that goes through HRDC grants, an awful lot. There is no single individual in the world who could keep track of all of the little $3,000 and $5,000 contributions to whoever, so you have to set up a structure of some sort where there's an accountability tree, as I see it, where this person is accountable for maybe 500 of those files but accounts for all of them in one report to his or her boss who has another 15 people like that who account to them and so on and you get a hierarchical tree going. I think that's one model. Is there any other model, and is there any other way we can do this?

    One model that came to mind using technology was that every expenditure of government should have some sort of an ID tag put on it. The ID tag would make it possible to identify which department, which subgroup, and so on. In other words, you have an ID and then finally a serial number on the individual expenditure, and then you'd have a computer system whereby you could actually at a moment's notice--and this could be done online by any citizen who could access it as a read-only file--find out how much money was put in Alberta on HRDC grants last year. Is that a possibility? Have you studied that at all?

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: I haven't studied it in the fine-grain detail that you suggest, and I don't claim to be an expert on financial management nor on the kinds of database management systems you would need in order to do what you're describing. However, I would suggest, first of all, that I think federal government departments are pretty far down along that path. I'm sure you experience this here in the House of Commons in terms of making travel claims and this sort of thing. The hierarchy of control, the chain of command, the signing authorities up the line, that's all there. If it's not there we all should be very worried.

    Usually the problem is that there's too much of that control, so that when you're doing what your colleague is suggesting out there on the front lines of a rural community trying to make something work, a really good idea that doesn't require a whole lot of money, it still needs signing authority up the line. We have these important values that are in conflict: flexibility and entrepreneurialism versus traditional bureaucratic hierarchy and signing authority.

    The idea of having immediate access to financial documentation is a really interesting one. You can get access to a surprising amount of information at a very fine grain of detail through the public accounts. I don't know at this point if they've made those systems searchable. In fact, I'm pretty sure that they're more searchable than they were ten years ago. The question is, how quickly is that information available to the public? Does it take a year for all that to be rolled up? Can those timelines be shortened?

    Then I think the other thing we do have to think about is just like encouraging freedom of information. Indeed, it is freedom of information. The more information that's available the more requests you'll get from the public, the more raising of issues, and this also means--and here's another trade-off--that more ministerial time and more bureaucratic time will be spent responding to questions, as opposed to delivering innovative services. So transparency has its own costs and prices. Again, it's another balance that needs to be struck.

  (1205)  

    Mr. Ken Epp: I have a question with respect to accountability in the highest level of government. Again, I don't know whether you have an opinion of this, but we have this tradition in the House of Commons here that a minister is presumably responsible for all of the expenditures in his or her department. We have the tradition also that the minister must appear before the respective committee in order to defend the estimates, although some members fail to come.

    For example, I was on the finance committee for a number of years, and I think if any minister would like to come to the committee to defend the expenditures of the finance department it should be the finance minister. I think he appeared only when he had an economic statement to make, and never did come to the committee, as I recall, to actually defend the expenditures in the department itself. He was too busy for that. Even Parliament can't get access to this information.

    Then we have the other really strange tradition or convention that says that a minister cannot be held responsible for things that didn't happen on his or her watch. So if a minister is replaced on April 1, then anything prior to April 1 is now no longer accountable. You cannot ask the present minister and the convention says you can't ask the former minister about a department for which he is no longer in charge. So the door is closed to us. What's your comment on that?

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: There are some colleagues in this country who can go on at great length about the issue of accountability. I'll be very brief.

    Ministers are accountable for their portfolio and for what goes on in their department. They may not necessarily be responsible unless they are personally and directly implicated in those decisions. The fact that a minister steps down or is moved along to a new portfolio doesn't mean that when an issue arises later, that new minister is not accountable for what happened before. So the responsibility for being held to account still remains with the minister. It's just that it's a little more difficult if you believe the minister ought to resign. You can't really force that minister to resign. But the key thing here is accountability and securing as much transparency as possible.

    The second point I would make is that in many ways deputy ministers are responsible for the management of their department, and they exercise a lot of the authorities. For example, we spoke earlier of financial management systems. That's usually not something you'd hold the minister to account for. That's something you'd want to chat with the deputy minister about. That's to whom those authorities are delegated.

    I realize that it is a very complicated issue and that for MPs it's often an unsatisfying one. I think that often you do a good job of holding government to account. I think the fact that there are ministers there answering questions is the most important thing. We can have a big debate about whether or not people should resign over whatever the issue is. Personally, I don't think that always asking for resignation ought to be the goal. It's really to get good information back about why things happened the way they did and whether or not things can be improved.

    Mr. Ken Epp: One of the things that has really frustrated me is that whether or not you ask a minister to resign, whether or not he or she resigns, and whether or not the Prime Minister accepts a resignation seem to be irrelevant to the final resolution of where did the money go. That answer is never forthcoming. We don't know.

    You look at these contracts for advertising that were given in Quebec. Evidence says that some of those contracts entailed no work whatsoever except to sign the cheque and cash it. That was the only work done. Of course, we made a big kerfuffle about it. The minister under whose watch this happened is now in Denmark. But what happened to the money? There seems to be nobody going back there to say we want it back. It was an unfair expenditure of taxpayers' money, and nothing happens.

    I don't think the Canadian people ought to be satisfied with that. I'm certainly not satisfied with it, and I'm surprised that the government of the day is satisfied with it. But they seem to be. Of course, the Canadian people elect them again and again. So be it. It's frustrating.

    The Chair: In their wisdom.

    Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: I have just one brief comment on that. I've not been following that too closely, but it's my understanding that certainly the department initiated reviews following that. There were clear breakdowns in normal financial management accountability and reporting systems. The Auditor General launched a review, and I'm sure that the Treasury Board Secretariat did as well. My sense is that most public servants were deeply concerned about that, and a number of the various players in the system actually did initiate reviews. Whether or not they brought the money back is a different question. But I don't think the lesson is that there has been inattention to the matter.

  (1210)  

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Lindquist and Mr. Epp.

    Mr. Perron.

[Translation]

    Mr. Gilles-A. Perron (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, BQ): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. Lindquist, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.

    This morning, we didn't say a word about the new way of managing the affairs of State. We talked about the creation of foundations and agencies. We all remember the Canadian Wheat Board. I don't know how it works, but it doesn't seem all that hot. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency doesn't seem to be working all that well. NAV CANADA is a total mess. That's also the case for the agencies managing the airports and we won't even mention foundations.

    Should the public service manage those things or should it withdraw? I'd like to have your thoughts on that.

[English]

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: Do you want that in one line?

  (1215)  

    Mr. Gilles-A. Perron: You can take the morning if you like. You can take the day if you like.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: What you've described is the counterpart.... The new public management has moved forward hand in hand with the notion of alternative service delivery, which is what I gather you're pointing to. In my view, alternative service delivery is inherently experimental. These are not small experiments; sometimes they're big experiments.

    It's worth noting that if you look at the history of government in Canada, all provincial and federal governments have always had to make decisions about what legal and bureaucratic structures to put in place to accomplish policy objectives. So you can look at the creation of lots of crown corporations. You can think about the partnerships that built the trans-Canada railway. These were all alternative ways of delivering on government priorities.

    Trends come and go and favoured instruments come and go, when they've lost their purpose and their resonance or they don't appear to be that efficient of effective. So on alternative service delivery, a lot of this most recent wave was put in place during the 1990s, and it's only now that we're beginning to see how well they've performed.

    I think it's very interesting that in the wake of the collapse of the towers in New York City, the Government of Canada quickly reviewed whether or not security services at airports were being delivered as stringently and effectively as they felt they ought to be, and they were pulled back in. One can see that the same thing will happen in other parts of government, as we learn from experience over time.

    One of the crucial issues for a committee like your own to think about--and this has been raised by some colleagues--is when you look at institutions like NavCan, which is a service agency, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Parks Canada, or even some of these independent foundations, there is the issue of securing access to information so you can actually make judgments about how well those things are working. So I realize there is a lot of interest in that right now.

    On face value, I don't have a firm view about whether or not any alternative service delivery mechanism is a good thing, in principle. The real questions are is it well-designed; does it work; does it have the proper reporting and accountability mechanisms? If we think it's doing a reasonably good job of providing those services and no one can find a better way to do it, then we should continue on that path.

    This is another example of the need for coherence. It is very difficult to describe to Canadians the range and diversity of these agencies. It shows that in many ways governments in Canada--not just the federal government--have been enormously creative in trying to develop new ways to deliver services, sometimes to secure investments, do partnership arrangements, and so forth. Regardless of how well that all performs, it is a really interesting and wonderful story to tell to Canadians. We are a creative, innovative nation. Not everything is going to work, and we should be able to have a good dialogue on how well these things are working, but this is not a stodgy country that we have.

    The Chair: Gilles.

[Translation]

    Mr. Gilles-A. Perron: I understand your point of view when you tell us it's creative and nice, but let's take the Mirabel Airport dossier for example. When, as a member of Parliament, I rise and ask the Minister of Transport what's going on he answers that it's not his problem, it's the problem of the agency managing the Mirabel Airport and that agency is going to decide whether or not Mirabel should be closed down. He's totally washing his hands of the whole thing. He's not accountable and doesn't want to hear anything about it. Nothing is happening.

    The people from the Canadian Alliance have questions on the Canadian Wheat Board. The Minister of Agriculture just washes his hands of it and says that he's entrusted this agency to intelligent and brilliant people who will manage the problems.

    There's a total lack of accountability. You can't make the minister accountable for the problems because there's an agency. It's not because of the Liberal Party. That's done everywhere agencies are set up. We know that the are little independent companies that are free to work as they will. It's frustrating for the member who sees that there are scandals or poor administration and who'd like to see corrective action taken.

[English]

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: The example of the local airport authorities is a quite interesting one. First of all, it's a very good example of alternative service delivery having been applied in the Transport Canada portfolio. The question then would be whether or not there are ways to secure the information that you want other than through the Minister of Transport. Are local airport authorities required to report and respond to these kinds of questions? As I mentioned earlier, I think this kind of concern is being expressed by MPs about a number of ASD mechanisms.

    Without wanting to predict the future, one way we can think about this is by looking at financial and governance reporting in the private sector in the wake of the Enron affair. There may be a wholesale interest in this on the public sector side, so that the Government of Canada does think about improving the requirements for reporting to the public on these kinds of management and policy issues. Whether or not that necessarily will require reporting through a minister is an open question, I think, but we might all agree that good reporting ought to be done to the public so that a person such as you can get answers and can also be able to comment on performance.

    The Chair: I'm going to break in for one second here, with a matter I wanted to ask members about.

    As you know, you have in your packages a motion that is simply a reflection of the decisions we made earlier. Everybody has seen this and everybody has discussed it. I've talked to everybody about it, and I know there's a consensus about it. If people are prepared to entertain this motion without debate, I'd like to move it and get it done, because I'm worried about losing quorum. We need a quorum to do it.

    Do I have your agreement to do that? If so, I'd ask Mr. Forseth if he would care to move it.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Yes, I'll make a motion that, pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(g), the committee undertake a broad study of modern public management, including issues surrounding the use of new information and communications technologies by government, as according to the schedule that we have outlined on this paper before me, subject to the availability of witnesses and at the discretion of the chair. I so move.

  (1220)  

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Mr. Lanctôt, are you prepared to second that motion?

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Yes.

[English]

    The Chair: Thank you.

    (Motion agreed to)

    The Chair: Thank you very much. I'm sorry about that, but I'm pleased we got that done.

    I'll now go to Mr. Scott and Mr. Shepherd, and then I'm going to have at it at some point along here.

    Mr. Andy Scott: Thank you for being here. Thank you for mentioning citizens' engagement as a part of this debate. I'll tell you what the question is going to be, and then I'll have a few words about it.

    The question is this: Has there been any real improvement, increase, or whatever, in citizens' engagement as citizens in the last ten years? I think we have become somewhat sophisticated in the context of engaging representatives of citizens, but I would wonder whether or not the citizens who live in my constituency feel their interests are being represented when those organizations speak for them.

    I go back to the Charlottetown Accord and the fact that, in New Brunswick at least, almost all of the organizations of various types endorsed the accord. The three political parties that operate in New Brunswick and all of these organizations all endorsed the accord, but the public, for all intents and purposes, distanced itself from all those organizations when they decided they didn't like the accord. That caused me to wonder about the extent to which the system that we engage, both at the provincial level and at the federal level, actually engages people through their representative organizations, actually carries with it much legitimacy to the citizens themselves. I'm an active member of many NGOs. I always have been. This really isn't to detract from them, but rather the citizens' perception of them.

    I want to address the questions you put. You mentioned in your opening remarks the fact that we have to be careful that we recognize that there are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed that perhaps might be washed over. Let's say we do IT and we decide how we're going to use information technology to do consultations. I would suggest there are some fundamental issues and that the IT debate might in fact cause us not to get to the real, root problem, and maybe this is one of those issues. Mr. Mahoney mentioned the fact that he also perceives that the public doesn't feel necessarily represented by that.

    Having said that, I would argue that the only way in which we're going to engage citizens in Canada is if the members of Parliament have the opportunity to do that. At the end of the day, very few public servants in my constituency engage citizens at that level. In fact, they're quite scared to, frankly, particularly on a question about whether a policy is a good policy or a bad policy. The only person in my constituency who is doing that kind of consultation is me. From time to time, a parliamentary committee might travel through Fredericton and the population might have a chance, but it happens very infrequently. That means I'm responsible for that, and I accept that responsibility. However, at some level, our involvement in some fundamental issues is deemed to be not legitimate by virtue of the fact that we are driven by a political agenda that somehow is inconsistent with public policy or the public interest. I challenge that, but I know a lot of people feel that way.

    You mentioned the social security review, Mr. Lindquist. Mr. Alcock participated in that process as well. I think we were written off in Victoria by the public service in the context of our inputting—

    The Chair: On day three.

    Mr. Andy Scott: Yes, on day three, and given the subsequent meetings, I would have liked to have known. I could have avoided an ice cube in my head.

    The point is that the only way we're going to engage citizens, I believe, is if we do it. And while we are doing it, as you mentioned in your opening—it happens—I'm not sure our participation in the public policy discussion at the riding level—I think we're well engaged at this level—is not part of the institution that is here. I'm seen to be participating here, but when I go home and meet with a bunch of people....

    The reason it's critically important is that it goes to the other issue that you raised: how do we compete with the public service in the agenda? That's the original issue that prompted much of this debate to start with, as you've said. I would agree that's what caused this debate to begin. How do we take charge of the agenda, as parliamentarians, rather than...? The expertise in the public service exceeds our expertise and our backgrounds, but I have people in my riding who, if I can engage them in this discussion, can assist me in competing with the expertise of the public service.

  (1225)  

    I don't say that in any adversarial way. It's simply the way in which I think the government is evolving. I have people who can inform me so that I can, in fact, be an independent agent in this process.

    Having said all of that about my original question, has citizen engagement at the citizen level evolved much in the last ten years?

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: That's a big question, but it's in a long line of big questions that have been asked.

    My sense is that, compared to twenty years ago, the federal government departments consult as a matter of course. Whether or not they are involved in big citizen consultations, in the sense of MP town halls that would be MP-driven, public conferences, or rolling dialogue groups, is a somewhat different question.

    I think if you were to go to the consultation folks at PCO and get them to do a roll-up, they could show you that there is a heck of a lot of consultation that occurs. They have a group there, if you don't already know, that monitors all the consultations that are occurring,

    An important issue for government officials, aside from adhering to the directions of their political masters, is whether there is added value in doing more consultation beyond a certain point. I leave it there. It's a very different observation from asking if it is a good thing for MPs to do consultation.

    Let me go in a slightly different direction. One way to break this out is to think about the policy cycle. You need to think about the stage of agenda-setting, identifying what's on the minds of citizens and communities, versus the stage where governments have broad platforms to put in place. They're trying to consult the stakeholders and citizens about what ought to have a higher priority than others, versus a stage where government has a clear direction to consult and think about what an implementation plan looks like. Then there is the implementation phase: How well are things working? Should we be adjusting this?

    Each one of the phases suggests that there might be a different role for engaging citizens directly, and for MPs, as well as the kinds of consultation instruments a government department might employ. It also depends on the policy issue. It depends on whether it's technical, a broad question of principle, or something like the Constitution.

    My sense is that there was a lot of experimentation with direct citizen engagement in the early days of the first Chrétien government and in the dying days of the Mulroney government. You think about Charlottetown and the constitutional process. You think about the social security review and the finance consultations. There was a lot of use, not only in the SSR, where there were the town halls. There were forums across the country. They were done in consultation with partners in each province. There were expert forums. There were also standing committee hearings, different rounds of standing committee hearings, and so forth.

    Arguably, the overall process was a little flawed. I think the minister at the time was a little out in front of where the cabinet was in terms of resource allocation issues. That was going down the chute into program review. It was a wonderful process of citizen engagement.

    I think that even though a lot of people have a negative view of the consultation exercise, the range and quality of information the government had at its disposal caused it to really reassess where it was going. It quickly learned that it didn't need to have a lot of good information to table in order to have really good, high-quality discussions. It affected its whole sequencing reform on the social policy front for the rest of the mandate, and arguably for the next mandate as well.

    I think the government was well served by those ambitious consultations, but they can't be judged solely in terms of the immediate impact they had on public policy.

    Let me take another cut at this. I beg your indulgence.

    There are other groups out there that are now doing citizen engagement. As you well know, the Canadian Policy Research Network has a dialogue process it applies to a number of issues it looks at. A number of other think tanks, rather than commission research studies, will actually go out to survey citizens or engage in a dialogue about how they are thinking about trade-offs, and so forth. The Romanow commission did this as well. There is actually competition outside of government to engage citizens as well.

  (1230)  

    I think there's a role for MPs to be engaging citizens in their home communities through town hall meetings. That has to be done in parallel with the standing committee work. The most important thing is that citizens actually need to see that their ideas are getting to people. And they need to know that people listen, even if they don't act along the way. I think it's tough to figure out how to do that, but I would urge you to expend some energy to try to find out how to do it, because that's the most important thing.

    The Chair: I want to interject with a comment here because we're on this role of citizen engagement. I think the other part of Andy's comments is that it's a locus for engagement in the policy process during its formative stages. You had mentioned before about whether you are engaging because the decision's made and now you're just nickel-and-diming the detail or whether you're truly engaging in that outreach and initial policy development agenda-setting.

    I think it would be fair to say that the House, whether it's the individual MP or whether it's the committee, has been completely moved out of that process. We come into the agenda after those. One of the questions that sits here is this. Is it possible for the House, whether it's through individual MPs or it's through committees, to get further out in front of the policy agenda and become a focus for policy development rather than simply a responder to policy development that occurs elsewhere?

    I'll comment more directly on the process of citizen engagement when I come back, but it strikes me that there's an issue there that it's more the locus for citizen input, as opposed to the mechanics of it.

    I'm going to go to Mr. Shepherd, to Mr. Lanctôt, then to Mr. Cullen. Then, unless somebody else stops me, I'm going to ask a couple of questions.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.): Mr. Lindquist, perhaps to back up a little, you talked about how this country has changed in the last ten years. Perhaps in view of that, I sense that in spite of some of the other comments around the table, people's attitudes towards government have shifted dramatically. I know it may be not that much in favour of some of the debate we're having here today, in the sense that people are questioning the importance of government in their lives more profoundly now than ever before. I think a lot of people are coming to some kind of realization that governments have limitations that perhaps another generation of Canadians didn't think about, or possibly another generation of Canadians didn't believe that governments could have these impacts on their lives.

    I look at the demographics of this country, at the way it's changing. I suspect that if I sat down with my son and his friends, they would really question what utility governments have in their lives at all.

    So I'd be interested in that comment, because everything we do is predicated on the belief that people feel there's an importance to government. Obviously, we can't have citizen engagement if people don't believe there's any importance to it.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: Well, there is another small question. Look, government is important, and we all know this. We may not agree with everything it does or with what particular governments do.

    I also agree that the point-and-click generation is coming of age at a time when there is great cynicism and lack of trust in government. So it's not surprising they think it's unimportant.

    But I've been struck, when I taught at the University of Toronto and at the University of Victoria, that when you're dealing with first- and second-year students who think the way you describe it, the moment you start telling them about some of the issues confronting Canada or other jurisdictions, they immediately get turned on to governments. They see why it's important.

    The lack of a positive image of government should not be construed with a lack of engagement in public issues. A lot of people begin their interest in public things nowadays through social movements. They don't think of it as government. They think they're helping out in a community, or getting food to a particular group, or helping someone in another country.

    We have a lot of students who come into our program because they've done this for a while. Then they put two and two together and they realize that in order to make a difference they have to affect public policy, they have to reshape institutions, and they have to get better at it.

    So I think people have a different way into, or coming around to, the notion that government is important. When they start to do anything, even if it just means setting up a business, they have to defend intellectual property and have to worry about how well their companies are regulated. In the end, they begin to see all roads are linked to government. I don't mind them seeing the limitations of government.

    One point I wanted to make earlier comes to the point you made first. I helped edit a volume on alternative service delivery and cooperatives with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. I didn't know too much about cooperatives, but one of the really interesting things about cooperatives and the variety of partnership arrangements is they really redefine what is public. We've had this notion that public goods always get delivered by governments, or perhaps in partnership with other governments. But nowadays, I think if you have a bottom-up community-based view, you would see that public goods can often be delivered by the private sector or the non-profit sector in a variety of very different ways.

    So what we've been doing—in part because of the enabling of information technology developments—is being able to think more creatively about how we deliver public goods.

  (1235)  

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: To go to another area—performance reporting—many parliamentarians bemoan the status of performance reports today, as you have enunciated, including their ineffectiveness and the fact that they seem to give the individual departments pats on the back, which in fact they probably don't deserve.

    I would assume a very good performance report would be one that almost dovetails with some of the Auditor General's orientation--that is, value-for-money audits. So if a performance report took on the concept of value-for-money audits, auditing within their own department, and presumably then dovetailing with some of the other things we're talking about—measurement tools, customer satisfaction, and so forth—how do you square this with the obvious thing that you essentially would have departments sitting in criticism of themselves? I'm sure corporations do this. But it's not open to pubic scrutiny. There lies the big dilemma. How do you evolve the performance reporting concept within government?

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: Well, I realize that one implication of the suggestions I made earlier is that more information would get tabled than less.

    An important thing to remind ourselves about performance reports is that they look at one constituency, like yourselves, and say you're very busy people and you don't have a whole lot of time. Your interest and citizens' interest is on how well government agencies are performing. Therefore you're interested in results. So the whole focus of these reports is actually moving in the direction of parsimony.

    My argument is that's fine for performance reports, but being able to utilize those reports only works if you have a good sense of context. So whether it's an issue that has arrived, a scandal of some kind, or a value-for-money audit from the Auditor General, I think there has to be this level of context that's there. But that means it's more expensive to produce that kind of documentation. I think this is just one of the real trade-offs here.

    Let me get to a more fundamental level, which is what really are the incentives for you as MPs to use these reports and actually to challenge them? Should you spend a lot of time mastering these reports, developing the context in departments, and is there a reward system that gives you credit for that hard work? My argument would be that there isn't.

  (1240)  

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: On the issue of performance, the linkage with members of Parliament would be a screwed-up program delivery system. We have the obvious one, the gun registry system. It seems to me what was missing in that whole program delivery system was some kind of concept of a pilot project that would put in measurement devices to see that this could be implemented on a national basis. In fact, the program went forward on a national basis with not a lot of profound concept of how to implement the program, and now members of Parliament are aware of that.

    So I guess, backing up with a performance reporting system, if we had constant performance reporting, it might give us a better idea of how to implement the program delivery system more efficiently and more effectively in the future.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: I think a healthy system would not only have central agencies reviewing the whole scope of departmental activities, but also in standing committees you'd be aware of the 15 or 20 different major files in a department and be checking in on how these things are going. But I don't think a lot of standing committee time is reserved for that purpose, and there are other incentives at play.

    The Chair: Yes. I think the question of incentives is a critical one. Members aren't stupid. Neither are citizens when it comes to citizen engagement. People aren't going to invest their time and energy if they don't think that investment produces any kind of result. I think that's a classic problem with this place right now.

    Mr. Cullen, Mr. Lanctôt, and then moi. So you guys be brief.

    Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.): Thank you. I will be, Mr. Chairman.

    Professor Lindquist, it's nice to see someone from my alma mater in Victoria.

    I have a question. It's a question I put to Minister Dion recently in his capacity as head of the Privy Council Office. I'm not going to tell you how he answered, but I'd be curious about your answer.

    If you look at some of these mismanagement projects or initiatives, or debacles, or whatever--I want to avoid some of the language--the HRDC job-creation programs, where clearly some cheques were cut without proper due diligence, and if you look at the firearms registry, where there were clearly some problems with estimating and reporting costs, and so on, and then the government contracting on the sponsorship file, where clearly some stuff really got off the rails.... I'm not trying to suggest that there's no political responsibility here, because clearly there is, but it looks like some really serious mismanagement.

    It sort of leads me to wonder if there's something more fundamental going on or not that we should be concerned about. Is it that we've lost some management talent?

    In some of the stuff that you see, this is Management 101 in terms of project management. Are we spread too thin in the bureaucracy? Is there too much that they're faced with and they can't keep up with everything, or is there too much political interference or maybe too little political attention?

    I know it's a general question, but I'd appreciate your general reaction. Is there something more fundamental going on, or is it just natural for this sort of thing to happen?

  (1245)  

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: I think it's worth making the distinction between departments and officials who have executed the wishes of political masters and departments where officials are designing policy and doing whatever they want to. I don't think we're in that zone. Depending on the case, one's going to be able to suggest that's it's a little bit more or a little bit less of some of those things.

    What I would like to focus on and return to is, when a government, sometimes responding to our demands as citizens or groups, asks a department to do the next thing, are there incentives in the system for executives to push back and say, it's not possible, or that there really are some risks here? In the great parliamentary and responsible government tradition, we've given you our best advice, but here are the risks. Are we going to make those risks known? Sometimes in government departments there are enormously rich debates about the directions policy ought to go, but the way our system of government works, when we produce our planning documents, we remove all the alternatives and all the scenarios that might occur, because the public expects us to have a clear sense of direction.

    I wonder about how all these incentives and expectations work together in different circumstances to perhaps remove some very important information along the way. These jobs at the executive level, as you well know, are very demanding. We haven't had much time to discuss renewal today, but I can assure you that there are a lot of people my age who are being asked to go into director general and ADM ranks in government, and they won't do it. They're good people, and they won't do it because the risks are too high, the extra pay is not enough, and the environment in which they work is often untenable.

    I would not want to generalize from those examples about whether or not there's mismanagement across government. I must also say that I've met so many excellent public servants that it would be very difficult for me to make that assertion.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: Thank you for that. You need to look at every case individually, I suspect, but it seems to me that senior civil servants, if they haven't got it by now, should understand that there's a risk of not delivering certain policy objectives for your minister, but there are also risks of getting into these kinds of botch-ups. It seems to me that ministers and their staff should be as attuned to that now, but we're getting a stream of them, and that's why I'm wondering if there's something more fundamental going on that we're all missing.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Cullen.

    I'm going to Mr. Lanctôt for one very petite question.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: It is a short question divided into two shorter parts. It sort of goes back to what was said before about the performance report and consultations. I will start with consultations.

    It is a bit strange to say that the population might be far away and that they do not quite feel consulted. We have a good example right now, the one about the consultation on the readjustment of electoral boundaries. I will only talk about Quebec, because I do not know exactly how things happen outside of Quebec. In this case, it is almost unanimous. I can even tell you that in the Montérégie, the members of the Liberal Party, the Bloc Québécois, ordinary people, the towns, the MRCs are all unanimous. There were resolutions, there were people, there were petitions, and all that was tabled before the commission. The unanimous result of that consultation was that the status quo should remain, but just wait to see what comes of it. I am almost sure that even if the whole Montérégie region is unanimous, the change that was ordered will happen.

    It is always easy to say that you will start at the grassroots and that you will hold a consultation. Consultations are held, but they are fake because the order has come from on high that things have to be done in such or such a way.

    So, yes, there are consultations, but to what end? It is hard for people to understand that. It is even hard for us, the representatives, who go to those hearings where people tell us that they will see what is in the report, but they already know what is going to happen because an order has come from on high. Who is giving the orders? It seems to me decisions should flow from consultations that represent the grassroots of the population, from what people want.

    As for the performance report—yes, I know it is brief—I have read it and it is very difficult. Actually, the deputy minister was here and I told him to make it a lot easier to read, not just for the MPs but for everyone. Everyone should be able to read a performance report on what has been done. I do not know if you have read it—surely yes—but it is not easy either to read or understand. I think it was written by experts for experts. Does the standing committee have sufficient resources to fully understand the results that are in it? I do not know how many members here understand exactly or 100% of what is in that report but I for one cannot make much sense of it.

  (1250)  

[English]

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: On the first matter, these things happen. Sometimes governments wish to move forward with initiatives that citizenry haven't risen up and demanded in certain policy areas, and in British Columbia right now we're certainly confronted with that. So I think that happens, and I can't comment on this specific case.

    Second, I think we agree on the last point you made, that those documents can be very difficult to make sense of, and then to figure out so as to use them.

    The Chair: I'd like to ask a couple of quick questions, because we're running out of time.

    You have before you a committee of members who have exceptional experience and are actually interested in this, actually spend time and are getting focused on this issue of how you make government work a little better. But part of the problem with the public service is that you are in space that's risky all the time and you're subject to attack in various forms, and so you build systems of check and counterbalance and things to protect you from that. As soon as you begin to talk about problems in public management, the system has an instinctive response to protect itself, as it develops those mechanisms because it lives in a space that is under attack a great deal of the time. So it's difficult to have an open discussion about a problem.

    I'm reminded of Dr. Deming, the godfather of quality management. He used to say there are no bad people, there are just bad structures, bad organizations. Increasingly, my sense is that we built a certain way of doing business in public space: we have a problem over here, so we add something here; we have a problem over there, we add something over there. We've created this elephantine organizational structure at a time when the community and those around us are living in a world that is moving faster, securing information more quickly, putting enormous pressure on themselves and on us to respond quickly. We have not adapted some of the information tools. With the reports, you can see the surface, but the report is not the surface of a greater mass of data, it is the total, because the other elements are not interlinked in any way, and those are things that could be solved.

    But there are other structural problems. Who does one go to to get a decision here? We have Treasury Board--and really what I want you to respond to is one of these structural questions--which has a certain set of responsibilities. We have PCO, which has a set of central agency responsibilities--and I would say there's not necessarily a love relationship most of the time. We have an element within Justice; if it has anything to do with any kind of legal aspect, they have a responsibility for dealing with it that may be in conflict with the desires of the department trying to deliver the service. And we have Finance, which also has a sign-off on what departments do. We're a large organization, it's true, but with the 900-plus people who work at PCO and the 1200 people who work at Treasury Board, is this not a recipe for inaction? Is anybody working on some of these structural questions? Is it that we just keep on looking at solving the next incremental problem, or is it time to step back and say, wait a second. You talked a bit about this rebalancing: can you open some of that up for us?

  (1255)  

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: Let me begin by saying that if you go to other countries, like New Zealand or Australia, the U.K., France, all kinds of central structures exist. Arguably, Canada has had more central agency capabilities, such as the Canadian Centre for Management Development, Policy Research.... There's a whole slew of things, little organizations, hovering around the centre.

    But however they're organized, I think you would find things like this in almost any jurisdiction you go to. So the real question is, how well do they work together? Are they more or less aligned? Do they act in concert at the right time, in a way that's helpful to departments when they need help? Do they act in concert in such a way that when something goes wrong, they can really make sure things get put right?

    I think we're at a moment when the government is interested in these issues. That's part of this legislation that will be introduced next week or the week after, I believe. There may be some other developments implied by some of those legislative changes. I think it will be very interesting to see that.

    The question of coherence among the central agencies has been an issue that almost any operational deputy in Ottawa has worried about for some time. More coherence has been looked for. Certainly, central agencies are aware of this. The question is whether or not the government has sufficient time and interest to expend political capital and legislative time to put it right.

    Even then it's always going to be a temporary solution. You know, all these things that have been mentioned today about accountability, improving service to citizens, thinking about horizontal policy development and management, these all require central agency attention. I'm pretty confident the central agencies are attentive to this issue. The question is whether or not, given the other demands on their time, they have the wherewithal to make big strides forward without political assistance. Otherwise they're like everyone else, trapped in a world of never-ending streams of transactions, dealing with the unexpected, dealing with new pressures, such as September 11. It takes a lot.

    Oh, and I might also add that the sensibility in Ottawa since the June 1993 restructuring has been “We shall not restructure in a comprehensive way because we've expended too much energy in making those big wholesale changes”. Therefore there is considerable incentive to focus in on particular matters, rather than dealing with these things on a comprehensive basis.

    The Chair: I note that the hour is up. I will simply close with this.

    It's passing strange to me that the consequence of program review was a consolidation of federal government resources into the national capital region. While capacity went down outside of the national capital region, in fact in the area I'm interested in, science and technology, the number of staff employed went up. It strikes me that there's a level of interest here within the club that is problematic. When you move outside of this area--which is hot, there's lots of political activity and oversight and action around the actions of the federal government--and get out into the communities, I'm not certain that it works as seamlessly as one might feel.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: One problem with the program review was basically it was a stovepipe process. I'm sure most of you are aware of this. Individual departments went in with their targeted reductions given to them by the Department of Finance, but it was up to them to decide how they were going to handle the difficult choices they had to make. They knew at the time that there were going to be things that fell through the cracks between departments and horizontal issues that would emerge later on. So I think that since the first round of program review, from 1996 on, there's been a gradual awareness of what many of these issues are, and secondly, of how they manifest themselves in particular sectors and in communities.

    The B.C. government certainly learned from the program review experience. It had squads of officials thinking about what the impacts of the overall restructuring would be region by region. It didn't lessen the pain, but at least people were actually thinking about it in the upstream.

    If I may, I would suggest that you invite Donald Savoie to speak, if you haven't already.

·  (1300)  

    The Chair: He's appearing.

    Mr. Evert Lindquist: He has an excellent manuscript in press that speaks to a number of these issues.

    Also, Peter Aucoin, who has a paper in press on the independent foundations, which is also an excellent piece of work....

    The Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Peter is not well right now--

    Mr. Evert Linguist: Yes.

    The Chair: --and we're hoping that he will be feeling better and able to come. Donald will appear, and we've had discussions with him, and we'd be interested in your opinion on others.

    This is the start of a process, as you point out, and this is going to go on for some time, and hopefully it will set in place a process that will go on throughout the life of many governments as we try to bring focus as to how the beast works. So thank you for your time, and I trust you'll be back.

    Now, members, just pay attention to one thing. We are not going to have a meeting on Thursday. And pay attention to your inboxes; it will call the next meeting of the committee likely but not certainly for 11 o'clock Monday morning.

    Thank you very much.

    The meeting is adjourned.