Pre-budget consultations in British Columbia.

• Author: Ryan-Lloyd, Kate

British Columbia's Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services has recently adopted two innovative consultation methods to carry out its statutory mandate to seek public input on the government's fiscal priorities. After tracing the origins and evolution of the province s parliamentary pre-budget consultation process, this article describes and assesses the site-visit experiment, which enhanced urban legislators' knowledge of the challenges and opportunities facing rural, resource-based communities. It then demonstrates that the Committee's first experience with e-consultation dramatically affected the level and nature of public participation in the parliamentary pre-budget consultation conducted in the fall of 2004.

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During the past twenty years, governments in Canada have widened the circle of people consulted during the budget-making process to include the public at large, in addition to stakeholders representing the key sectors of the economy. Today government-led public consultations have become part of the annual budget cycle in several of the 14 jurisdictions that make up the Canadian federation. (see Table 1)

In British Columbia, Ontario and the House of Commons, parliamentary committees are also directly involved in the annual pre-budget public consultations. They provide an alternative and valuable forum for public input on the future direction of fiscal policy, as outlined in a series of questions posed by government. Until recently, each parliamentary committee used similar and conventional consultation methods--namely, public hearings and calls for written submissions.

In the fall of 2004, the British Columbia Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services added two novel features to its annual pre-budget public consultations. The first was the incorporation of site visits into the public hearings schedule in order to enhance the legislators' understanding of the key sectors of the provincial economy and the concerns of resource-based rural communities in the province. The other was the inclusion of the government's questionnaire on the committee website to provide another means of allowing citizens to participate in the parliamentary pre-budget consultation process.

Historical Context

British Columbia was the third Canadian jurisdiction to initiate parliamentary pre-budget public consultations. Ontario started the trend, with the creation of the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs in 1986 to provide a forum for the pre-budget hearings. (1) Its example was followed by the federal House of Commons eight years later, when the Standing Committee on Finance began holding annual pre-budget consultations. (2)

What these three Committees share in common is the mandate to seek public input on a range of fiscal policy options framed by government and to report back on the results of the pre-budget public consultations to the House, as well as to the Finance minister. They were all created as part of the drive towards greater accountability and transparency in the budget-making process.

In the B.C. case, (3) the catalyst for the reform process was the 1996/97 budget. It was presented to the House as a balanced budget on April 30, 1996--just hours before the call for a provincial general election. After re-election of the incumbent government, the reliability of the revenue forecasts was questioned. Subsequently, the province's public accounts confirmed that the 1996/97 budget was not in fact balanced. This series of events highlighted the need for greater financial accountability.

In February 1999, the Auditor General of British Columbia released a report with 25 recommendations for improving the estimates process that stressed the importance of legislative scrutiny and public participation. (4) The government responded in April 1999 by establishing a 12-member Budget Process Review Panel, chaired by a well-respected chartered accountant, Doug Enns. The panel held academic and business roundtable discussions, invited comments from public and private sector organizations, conducted interviews, and received numerous submissions from individual members of the public. The panel issued its final report in September 1999, making 26 recommendations aimed at improving the credibility, transparency and accountability of the budget process in British Columbia. The first two recommendations proposed that:

1. Legislation require that a pre-budget consultation document be publicly released by the Government no later than October 31 of each year as the basis for public pre-budget consultations. The document should update economic and fiscal forecasts from the previous budget and indicate the key issues that need to be addressed in the budget.

2. Legislation establish a public pre-budget consultation process undertaken by a select standing committee of the Legislature created for this purpose, with the results reported publicly and to the Minister of Finance and Corporate Relations by December 31. The process should allow for input from interest groups and include opportunities for dialogue with interest groups and the public (round tables) and mechanisms for public dialogue, such as through web-sites and/or large web-based public forums. (5)

In response to the Enns...