Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to thank Mr. Dolynny for bringing this motion forward. Had it been a motion to delete the program review office I would have supported it. I will support this one, though, which is an interim measure, I guess, to look at what the program review office actually does.
I also was part of the Regular Members’ committee who sat down at the beginning of the 16th Assembly
and thought there must be some areas where we could improve on the efficiency, eliminate redundancy and duplication. We thought there were places to find money in the system. That was the intent behind the program review office. We thought of all kinds of ideas. We had a big, long list of them. But the legacy of the program review office is a $40 million office building in downtown Yellowknife, at a time when this government espouses and says they’re going to look at decentralization. There are private buildings that have been built as well. I think of another one downtown that as soon as it was built it was filled up. It’s like build it and they will come.
Anyway, I’m not just unhappy about that. I’m just unhappy with… I don’t see the program review office actually looking in the government departments.
When somebody said they’ve set up frameworks within the departments to measure outcomes, hey, that’s bureaucratic stuff. I don’t know about that. I don’t know about that kind of stuff. I mean, that’s not where I live. Where I live is things like we suggested like how many NorthwesTel phone lines and fax lines are in the walls of government offices and cubicles that have been rearranged and we’re still paying a monthly fee. Well, that was one small thing, but I was predicting it would result in tens of thousands of savings. I don’t know what the actual outcome of that was. But I thought they would be proactive. I thought the program review office would follow the instructions of the political will of the day and actually look proactively for areas that we could…
We don’t have that opportunity as Regular Members. We’re kind of on the outside looking in. We approve a budget, but some of it is in very, very large amounts, very large line items, very large categories of money that we’re voting. We don’t
actually get to see what’s going on a lot of time at the levels of the bureaucracy. I thought that was what the program review office was about. I supported it and I haven’t seen a lot of that.
I think that the PTR recommendations could have been done in house by Education. I think that there’s lots of capacity in departments themselves, that if we were to get that specific and say, okay, look at this or look at that, I think departments could handle that themselves, so one wonders why there is a separate shop for a program review office at this time.
Now, do I think there are positions in the government that if we knew about every single one of them we might wonder about, that we might question that we’re spending money on? Yes, probably, but this is actually a visible group. This is actually a visible shop that we can see this is how much it costs; this is how many employees are working in this area.
I’m sure there are other places that there could be money saved, as well, but this is obviously not the shop that’s going to be telling us about that. They’re not going to be coming forward and telling us, so I don’t know what our actual window into some of these areas where there may be savings, I don’t know what it is for us on this side of the House. Maybe some of the passive restraint direction that’s going to be given by the Finance Minister to departments, maybe that is some area where they will find ways to save money in the departments; I don’t know. But I think as an interim, at the very least, if we’re not going to delete the program review office, I’m saying let’s give it a chance, let’s review it, let’s hear the case for having it, for its existence for the investment that we make in it and then I will be all ears, listening to what that case is.
So, I think this is what this motion is about here today, it’s kind of a softened we’re open to hear, maybe there needs to be some more direction provided. I don’t know if the program review office is out there on their own without maybe the kind of specific direction that they had initially that they may still need. I will be listening. I will genuinely be listening to hear what it is they do, but I do support this motion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.