Thread by @SenatorHousakos

Follow my live🧵below as I speak to Bill #C16 (An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023).

Bill #C16 provides funding for what is known as “Interim Supply” which grants spending authority for the government, prior to the approval of the Main Estimates.

As someone who came to this place with a fairly extensive background in the private sector, I can assure you that this process raises red flags for me.

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

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about the Main Estimates in June, any spending approval which is granted through this Interim Supply bill cannot be withdrawn later.

Even though the Senate’s National Finance committee has not yet cracked open a single page of the Main Estimates, this Chamber is required to approve $75 billion of Interim spending & there is no recourse to withdraw any of that spending approval once it has been granted.

If the business of supply were operating properly, this would be an acceptable process. Checks & balances would be in place to ensure that adequate accountability & oversight was in place.

But this is not the case. When it comes to the business of supply, parliamentarians are receiving inadequate information, receiving it late, & are not being provided with a plan to see this rectified.

This is not a new problem. It was pointed out by the PBO in his Nov 2016 report: Considerations for Parliament in Reforming the Business of Supply, where he noted that the “unease among many legislators regarding their ability to provide informed consent of the gov’s ...

proposed financial plans” has been increasing for decades.

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

The mid-1990’s were thirty years ago. And yet these problems persist today.

For a great many of us, perusing the Main Estimates can be like drinking from a firehose. There is simply no way we can be expected to adequately review & digest that amount of financial information in the time frame that’s expected.

The truth is, no parliamentarian can properly scrutinize the gov’s Expenditure Plan & Main Estimates because the information necessary to do so is not made available to us.

In his 2016 report, the Parliamentary Budget Officer noted that there were three core problems with the business of supply:
1-The budget presents new policy initiatives, but the estimates present functional adjustments to the allotments.

2-The problem is that the main estimates do not include new budget measures.
3-The budget & main estimates have a different scope & basis of accounting.

These 3 points underscore the fact that the problems which impact the ability of parliamentarians to give adequate o/s to public spending are well known. No mystery here. But parliamentarians continue to wait 4 the implementation of solutions identified & endorsed 10 y ago.

The PBO repeats the three all-party recommendations made 10 years earlier by the HoC Gov Operations Committee:
1- Parliament should establish a fixed tabling date for the Budget
2- this tabling date should be early enough to ensure that Budget measures can be incorporated...

in the Main Estimates
3-the Departmental Plans should be tabled at the same time as the Main Estimates.

In addition, the PBO repeated 2 recommendations it made earlier this year:

1- the gov should move the publication date of the Public Accounts to no later than September 30th
2- the gov should require the Departmental Results Reports to be published at the same time

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

The truth of the matter is that not only are the problems well known, but the solutions are as well. And with the government’s clear acknowledgement that these problems exist & need to be addressed, you would think that this equates to a clear path forward.

And yet, not only has nothing been done, but this lack of information & #accountability has been progressively getting worse over the tenure of this gov.

Consider the fact that in 2020 we never even received a budget.

And then in 2021 the budget didn’t arrive until the third week of April. Of course, the gov blamed the lost budget in 2020 on #COVID, & the late #budget in 2021 on COVID, & yet even this year the budget will not be tabled in parliament until April 7.

There is no lack of clear action that the gov could be taking to correct the problems which plague our ability to provide proper o/s & #accountability to the expenditure of public funds. Instead of doing so, they continue to make things worse instead of better.

A perfect example of this is found in the Interim Supply bill before us today. As I mentioned earlier, Interim Supply is supposed to provide an advance appropriation of money needed for April, May & June – 3 months.

Yet under this gov, the amount of money included in the Interim Supply bill has sharply increased since they took power from 29% to more than 40% of the total voted appropriations in the Main Estimates.

How high do they plan on allowing that number to go? It’s like they are stuffing as much spending as they can into the Interim Estimates, just to diminish #accountability further.

We desperately need this gov to get its act together & do the right thing. But all the indicators are pointing in the wrong direction: Spending is going up ⬆️ & #accountability is going down⬇️.

Take note that Bill #C16 is for $75.5 B. That is almost as much as the entire voted supply in the 2015-16 Main Estimates when this gov took power. That year, total voted appropriations in the Main Estimates came to $88 B. This year, that # is $190 B. That is a 116% ⬆️in 7 years.

In 2015/16, Interim Supply was $29 B. This year it is 193% higher at $75.5 B. This gov has almost doubled their voted spending requirements in only 7 years.

We need to bear in mind that the Main Estimates do not factor in whatever new spending the gov will announce in their #budget. Nor does it factor in all the spending promises which were made to the NDP to buy their support to prop up this gov.

This is a gov that cares nothing about opening the firehose of gov spending as wide as possible & then printing as much money as necessary to keep spraying the dollars around.

They don’t care that our debt is ballooning; they don’t care that inflation has exploded; they don’t care that last year’s Fiscal Sustainability Report warned that “current fiscal policy in Canada is now not sustainable over the long term”;…

And they don’t care that they have no plan to balance the budget.
They are irresponsible, short-sighted, & dangerously negligent in their stewardship of public finances & they can’t be bothered to make the fundamental changes necessary to ensure proper oversight by parliament.

They have no interest in doing what is right & no qualms about heaping upon future generations all the obligations to pay for their profligate spending habits today.
They are recklessly & unapologetically incompetent.

Please watch my full speech on Bill #C16 HERE: