Crown Corporations Directorate : The semi-autonomous Crown Corporations Directorate was created in 1984 with the purpose of securing better accountability and reporting between Crown Corporations and the Treasury Board and the Department of Finance. When established, and for many years thereafter, the Crown Corporations Directorate was jointly managed by the two departments as a common service unit and reported jointly to the Assistant Deputy Minister for Economic programs and Government Finance Branch (Finance), and the deputy secretary of the Program Branch of Treasury Board, and thereby a status distinct from the Program Branch with which it was associated in program activity.
The creation of the directorate also corresponded to a period where the purpose, effectiveness and appropriateness of crown corporations as an agent of public policy came under serious review. Efforts to manage and coordinate policy related to crown corporations in general had been a long established activity in such antecedent organizations as the Crown Corporation Division of the Program Branch and the Government Finance Division of the Department of Finance. After 1984, the directorate continued to serve operational ends of both the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Department of Finance. The main focus of the initiative on the Treasury Board side was to integrate Crown Corporations closer into the expenditure management system and ensure the application of enhanced standards of financial accountability and program evaluation based on rationalized and common criteria. The full mandate of the Crown Corporation Directorate included advising on the financial requirements of Crown Corporations, the development of policy (and legislation) governing Crown Corporations in general, special studies at the direction of Cabinet to evaluate designated Crown corporations, as well as coordination of the estimates, operating and capital budgets, and business and corporate plans of all crown corporations in response to changing requirements of the overall expenditure management process, and reporting and accountability requirements under general policies applicable to Crown Corporations.
With gradual integration of all Crown Corporations into the accountability regime of the revised Expenditure Management System that emerged after 1995, the new underlying program philosophy of modern comptrollership and values based governance, and the execution of extensive "privatization" in conformity with government policy and comprehensive standards of alternative service delivery, the functions of Crown Corporations Directorate began to be reintegrated in the late 1980s into the larger Program Branch with which it had always been functionally linked to some extent. In 1995 when the Program Branch was reconstituted as a set of five separate sectors, the mandate and functions associated with the Crown Corporations Directorate accrued to the Alternative Service Delivery, Crown Corporations Policy and Privatization Sector which was subject to further organizational mutation into a "Services and Innovation" sector. While the organizational unit and underlying philosophy towards Crown Corporations as an instrument of public policy have evolved over the years, the role and function of Treasury Board to provide a central coordinating and accountability function has remained a constant since the innovative approaches of the CCD were first introduced in 1984.
