Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the ability to bring this motion forward. It should be no surprise to the Cabinet or the Premier that I’m doing that. I brought this issue up, and so have many other Members over the years, and I actually brought it up last week in the House.
The program review office has been considered important just as of late, and I’ll get to that in a second. In fact, I just want to backtrack a little bit here. In the Finance Minister’s opening budget address, I went back and looked through every line and not one line in there mentions the words program review office. It’s one of those things that is just embedded in the, I guess, moral fabric of what happens behind government closed doors and somehow Members are supposed to somehow understand that things are going on and at some point in time, I guess Members of this committee will be notified.
Ironically, in the last couple days and even mentioned in the Finance Minister’s opening address to the Department of Finance, the program review office is not mentioned one time, two times, but five times, so now all of a sudden it’s an important element of the overall functioning of Finance. All the while, I think it’s because I think the department is aware that the committee has raised some serious concerns and questions in the last couple days.
This office was established in 2008-2009, and it was specifically done for the government of the day to target program review. It had a very clear mandate. It was to determine effectiveness, make recommendations, eliminate, reduce and improve. These are values I stand by and I don’t think anyone in this room would differ on that. If you look further in the business plan of 2009-2010, it said – and it was put on-line and it’s available for everyone to go see it if they want to Google it here – that the monitoring and reporting was to be promised to be made available on-line. Well, that’s never happened. To this date, there is nothing that has ever been produced, published that the public actually has seen. This has been, in my mind, and I think I used the term in one of my Member’s statements, this is a private army of ombudsmen working and dedicated to our Cabinet, and now it’s being moved to the budget, treasury and debt management area.
We’ve heard the Minister of Finance indicate that there was a reaching out from the Premier to the Members of this committee. Well, may I remind Members of the House that reaching out occurred about a year ago, and it was asked for our input. Committee provided input. We had a list of priorities that we asked this program review office to undertake. We have not received one correspondence as of that request. This is not a current issue. This is something that is not being readily available to Members and least of all not being readily available to the public as it was stated publicly in earlier program review offerings.
The taxpayer has spent, since its inception, my rough calculation is about $4.5 million, and in my humble opinion, $4.5 million, I think, goes a long
way in communities. I think you can do a lot with $4.5 million in communities. You know what? I believe that the savings that this program review office could undertake, in my humble opinion, to be found within the respected departments themselves and financed accordingly.
Why do we need a separate office that works, really, undercover? I’ll use the cover of almost secrecy, because we don’t know what’s going on. I’ve learned more about the program review office in the last 24 hours than I did in the last 12 months. That should say something about this office, and it should be a concern to everyone in this House, and it should be a wakeup call for Cabinet and it should be a wakeup call for the Department of Finance. This is a consensus government. This is not party politics, and if there is an office that is supposed to work for the people, then why aren’t we sharing this information?
Transparency, accountability and protection of the public purse, those are just words, but they actually have meaning, and they have meaning to many of us on this side of the House. I believe this program review office really, I guess, touches on some of those areas in a way to which I think it deserves a motion because of the fact that we’re not seeing transparency, not seeing accountability, and I do question our public purse if it’s value added and money well spent.
To be perfectly honest, I would have a better inclination to actually delete this completely out of the budget. If I had the opportunity to, I would, but I know I probably didn’t have the strength of the committee on that. But I just want to let Cabinet know that this is something that I wish I could be doing right now, is deleting this right out of the budget, and no disrespect to the people working there. I even know people that work in that office, and that it takes a lot of work to bring to the House those types of comments, especially when it involves people, but I’m talking about protecting of the public purse. Sometimes you have to rise to the occasion as a legislator, and I think this motion does speak to this.
I might have other Members weighing in on this, but clearly this is a very strongly worded motion. Hopefully that gets the attention that it does deserve and, hopefully, we see some efficiencies in design, and I’m expecting that we see resolve.