Improve reporting to Parliament.

What success looks like

Increased transparency so that parliamentarians and all Canadians can more easily hold the government to account.

Government's narrative on progress

The government simplified Part III of the Estimates (i.e., Departmental Plans and Departmental Results Reports). The government also changed the Standing Orders to better ensure consistency across the Budget, Estimates and Public Accounts, and to provide greater clarity in voting on appropriations. Recent GC InfoBase updates include: • Actual and Planned Spending and Results information in support of the Policy on Results; • An aggregation of program performance to provide data-driven results narratives at the department and government-wide level; • A Budget Tracker tool that makes it possible to follow where public funds are going and how they will be spent all the way down to the programs delivering the services; • A Government at a Glance flow chart to see how government resources flow across different tagging schemes; • More granular expenditure data at the program level with spending on specific components such as salaries, capital, transfer payments, etc.; • Open and accessible datasets organized by the source report (e.g., Public Accounts, Main Estimates, Departmental Plans, etc.) These changes help parliamentarians and all Canadians better examine government spending and allow for the timely flow of funding outlined in Budget plans.

Note: this is the government's own description, not an independent assessment.