Thank you, Mr. Chair. Although I don’t have the whole history of this program review office, I think that you’ve heard today from Members of the 16th Assembly that the initial
attempts at putting this program review office in and the reasons behind it were not fully met. However, the history that I do have, just after we got elected to this House, was in February of 2012 we had a presentation from the Executive and there was a lot of cost savings, in the amount of, I believe, $17 million. The moment that committee made a
recommendation to government to do anything to this cost savings or even reallocate some of those cost savings into another program, which we start seeing these budgets now and that’s early childhood development, government didn’t want to make those changes and they fought against it. We got it done and now we’re seeing some of these things moving forward.
The history that I have with it, we try to make the recommendations. We’ve even heard that what good is having a program review office if we’re not going to follow up on the recommendations. Well, when we try to do them, government puts a halt to that. We’re not seeing any reports coming out of this program review office. You can see the frustrations that Members of the 16th Assembly
have on this side of the House.
What we see when we go through the main estimates, we see other programs and services that need more support. We have small communities that need a little more support, or we have programs and services right now that do need to be enhanced, while we have a service department out there that isn’t holding up their end of the bargain. Even if we had that report, that kind of information or even yearly updates, that might have a change in here.
In terms of deleting it, I was a little cautious on going that far. I was hoping to give the office another chance. I think we’re at a point now where we’re hearing all this information about fiscal responsibility and we’re hearing things about passive restraint. In fact, I think the departments might be doing a good job in that themselves, looking at ways they can save dollars. In that sense alone, I don’t know why we need the program review office.
We also have the Auditor General. When we give recommendations to the Auditor General from the Government Operations committee, they look at that and move forward with it.
As one of my colleagues said earlier, we did give recommendations from this committee for the program review office to get some areas of interest and I don’t believe we had any correspondence back.
From my little history, I think dollars here could be spent in other areas, especially all the work that we’ve been doing, all the briefings that we’ve getting from Education, Culture and Employment, from Health and Social Services, from all departments. I think that moving forward this is a very strong recommendation toward government and I will be supporting the motion. It’s about making decisions in this House and sometimes they are tough decisions and we have to do what we think is best for the public purse and the people that put us in here and expect us to spend the dollars in the best way possible.
With that, Mr. Chair, I will be supporting the motion. Thank you.