Roundup: The needed reforms to the Estimates

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Democratic reforms remain the topic of discussion on the Hill, following Dominc LeBlanc’s appearance at the Procedure and House Affairs committee on Thursday, and some of what he’s talking about is necessary – most importantly, reform to the Estimates process. The Liberals had promised during the election that they would reform the process so that the Estimates were a) readable, and b) resembled the Public Accounts, so that the latter could be used to check over the former. There is probably no greater reform that needs to happen than this, because it’s the job of MPs to hold government to account by means of controlling the public purse. The Estimates are how they plan to spend the money, and the Public Accounts are the accounting of how it was spent. When both are reported using different accounting methods, and with the Estimates currently being largely unreadable to the layperson, it makes that accountability nigh impossible to do. It’s no wonder that the process has largely devolved to voting them through at all stages with no actual discussion or scrutiny (as they did in December, only for the Senate to catch their mistakes when they ballsed it up in their haste). It’s also why MPs have been consistently fobbing off that homework to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Auditor General, and increasingly the Senate, while ministerial visits to committee to discuss the Estimates for their departments are spent answering questions on issues of the day rather than the Estimates they were there to talk about. Add to that, there’s the “deemed” rule, whereby Estimates are deemed to be agreed to and passed after a certain date, so MPs couldn’t even hold them up if they wanted to. It’s so entirely broken, which is why the Liberal promise to fix this system is so damned important. Of course, with the good comes the bad – talk of eliminating Friday sittings, possibly with longer days on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to compensate (but what about the “family friendly” elimination of evening sittings so that MPs can have dinner with their families?), and assurances that they wouldn’t actually be getting Fridays off, but working in their constituencies. The problem there is that constituency work is not actually part of an MP’s job – the ombudsman role they play on behalf of their constituents’ interactions with the civil service has grown over the years until it’s metastasised into this beast now where there are stories that the immigration department won’t touch files until they are forwarded by the MP’s office (so far down the slippery slope to corruption it’s alarming), and MPs continue to spend their resources doing this work rather than their actual jobs of scrutinizing the Estimates or legislation. In other words, eliminating Friday sittings makes this problem worse, not better. LeBlanc also did agree that a proposal to ban applause in the Commons may be something else worth considering to help improve decorum, and I would agree that even more than the constant sanctimonious tut-tutting about heckling, applause and scripts are the bigger problems that should be tackled if we want to be serious about making changes to the way our MPs do business.

Good reads:

  • Harjit Sajjan says he’s concerned about making the situation in the Iraq/Syria region worse as many of our actions did in Afghanistan, a mistake he wants to avoid.
  • Justin Trudeau was in La Loche, Saskatchewan, pledging support, but wouldn’t commit to ten years of funding for infrastructure, health, housing and education.
  • Alberta could be eligible for a “fiscal stabilization fund” to help with their economic woes. Meanwhile, the federal government was still in surplus as of November.
  • Chris Alexander insists that he didn’t cherry-pick refugees from certain religious minorities.
  • Environment Canada briefing materials show that GHG emissions still set to increase by 2030, and oilsands emissions set to double under current trends.
  • The government’s pledge to reduce EI wait times to one week could be delayed until 2017 given that it’s more complicated than previously thought.
  • Unreported until now was the fact that someone has been found guilty of threatening Michelle Rempel over Twitter.
  • Adam Radwanski looks at some of Mulcair’s weakness as the party gets ready for its convention.
  • Susan Delacourt tries to apply lessons from the Canadian leftward shift in our election to the presidential election in the States.
  • Tabatha Southey gives a stinging rebuke of the use of “selfie” jokes in Parliament.

Odds and ends:

BuzzFeed imagines what it would be like if Michelle Rempel tweeted like Kanye.

MPs from all parties swim together Thursday mornings.

Here’s a look at the seven who died in the great Centre Block fire, 100 years ago Wednesday.