Mr. Chair, thanks to the Minister for the explanation. I do have to say that I know that committee recommended that the program review office stay within the Executive. We didn’t feel that it should be transferred to the Department of Finance. I think there is a risk that it will lose its function of properly evaluating programs and services and that it will be used more as a tool from simply a financial standpoint. I think that’s a fairly large risk.

My second question has to do with the output, I guess, of this office. Certainly in the 16th Assembly,

there were a number of programs that were reviewed and a number of reports that came from this particular office. We, as Members, were able to see them and read them and make some comment on them. Since I have been here in the 17th Assembly, I don’t believe we have had any reports for the program review office. We certainly heard that they’ve been working on this, that and the other thing. I don’t get a sense that there’s been any report or any review that has ever been finished.

I would like to know from the Minister if he can give us a bit of an idea as to what work the program review office has finished and what reports are available for us, as Members, to have a look at. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Kalgutkar.

So there is nothing which Members can see that that has been finalized to date, or is there? If there is, can we get it? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will just confirm the commitment made from the Minister of ITI that ITI is currently finalizing their work on the report that was done on the BDIC. I recollect the Minister made a commitment to that. In due course, it will be shared with the committee and the recommendations and such reviewed and discussed for feedback. That is one of the ones that are most closely ready, I believe, to have that type of sharing. The other thing is we’ve provided the three-year proposed work plan looking for feedback and the Premier, as well, made a commitment in this House to sit down with committee to talk about how the next steps for

the program review office looking at their feedback and how do we incorporate that into the operations of the program review office. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. My last question has to go with something which I think is being reviewed by the program review office, but I don’t think I heard it mentioned. If I did, I apologize for not listening properly. Is the program review office currently undertaking or doing a review on Aurora College student housing? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Kalgutkar.

When might that be done? When could we expect to see the results of that review? Thank you.

Mr. Chair, thanks to the Minister and his officials. I am done.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Next I have on the list Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a motion.

Go ahead, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The motion is in order. To the motion. Mr. Dolynny.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. To the motion. Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I share much of the concerns raised by Member Dolynny and thank him for the opportunity to bring the motion forward to talk about it.

I was part of the group in 2007 that was enthusiastically behind this initiative of the program review office and was genuinely optimistic that it

would find savings, and it would be designed in a manner to look at savings in sort of a microscopic type of way, forensic, let’s go through these things, what does this mean, what does it affect, how does it have an impact on other things. Once that type of issue and question was qualified, and certainly quantified, it would be brought to the political machinery to just now say, look, here are your choices: red pill or blue pill. This one leads you in one direction and this one sends you right back to where you are. Quite frankly, I was kind of hoping that we’d get those types of things, but we never really did. I never felt that from its inception that it did that.

I think in a lot of ways what it did was it found pet projects to work on, and I agree that they’re great philosophical, political questions to look at, but I think at the end of the day it didn’t really look at trying to chew the costs of government on, ask the question why if we had this policy in place for 20 years and by golly, we just keep renewing it because, and because was sometimes the worst answer, but that seems to be why we’re doing stuff. I mean, I’ve had good, robust discussions with Minister Miltenberger about how do we trim things in government and all we do is we add, we add, we add, and he teases Members back about wanting more, and you know, that’s true too. But, like, when do we look at reducing programs and when do we talk about them and how do we talk about them? We never have that type of discussion, and that, in my view, is what the program review office was all about. It was about to ask those questions by saying, is this the policy our government wants to continue to follow? Is this the road that we need to be on?

I think that this program review office, we need to be asking ourselves, is it doing what we originally wanted it to do? I’m not sure it is. I think that it’s sort of down-periscope-approach on solving problems, I mean, they need to come to the surface once in a while, come to committee, and I’d say come to committee and get committee’s direction. I understand committee is a challenging sort of beast in itself, 11 opinions, different ways, and oddly enough, even though it’s 11 members, you probably leave with 12 different directions.

It is a challenge; I fully recognize that. But frankly, I never felt that we’re getting the value of this office in the direction we wanted, and I can tell you, we’re doing PTR, and some will say, well, geez, that came out of the program review office. Well, I can tell you, many Members never felt good about that from the start.

I can tell you that there was a robust thrust against the idea about the building downtown. It became a challenge. It just seems like in the end they just do what they want at the direction of Cabinet, and I’m not convinced a lot of this stuff that they’re looking

at are really about the core intent, so I think it really needs a real review as to why it’s there, as to have that heart to heart and ask ourselves, are these people in this program better served somewhere else, and only a review will be able to do that.

I’d like to leave my colleagues guessing which way I’m going to vote, so we’ll wait for the final count on a recorded vote, obviously. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Next I have Mrs. Groenewegen.

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.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Next on my list is Mr. Moses.

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.