Canada. Treasury Board Secretariat : The Treasury Board Secretariat ceased to be a component of the Department of Finance and became a separate department of government in 1966 under the Government Organization Act, S C 1966-67, c. 32, s. 4.2. While this new status was in many ways only a statutory recognition of the growing autonomy of the Secretariat since 1931 as the administrative arm of the Treasury Board as a committee of Cabinet, the formal status as a Department of Government reporting to a new cabinet minister, the President of the Treasury Board, together with the substantial increase in statutory mandate and authority of the Board in the realm of personnel policy and human resource management denote the legislative changes of 1966 as a fundamental departure. As a Department of government, the Secretariat, henceforth, had the dual mandate to support the Treasury Board and to fulfill the statutory responsibilities of a central government agency. Besides Treasury Board mandates under the Financial Administration Act, the Treasury Board Secretariat administers mandates under 20 other statutes.
Under amendments to the Financial Administration Act, S C 1966-67, c. 74, the new Public Service Employment Act, S C 1966-67, c.71, , and the Public Service Staff Relations Act, S C 1966-67, c. 72, the role and mandate of the Treasury Board were clarified and expanded substantially, especially in regard to the sphere of personnel policy. Subsequent amendments to the Financial Administration Act have further extended its mandate and authority. In 1966, Treasury Board assumed a wholly new role in human resource management in which the Secretariat emerged as the senior department of government responsible for all aspects of personnel policy (aside from staffing and recruitment). Within the new regime of collective bargaining under the PSSRA, officers of the Secretariat act on behalf of the Government of Canada as employer. The new Treasury Board Secretariat was also assigned responsibility for implementation of many of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Government Organization (Glassco), 1962-63, in the form of a more systematic regime of general administrative regulation across the public service (eg. materiel management, real property mange, contracting, major capital project management, information and information technology management, security and risk management).
About the same time (1969), the Treasury Board Secretariat modified the preparation of the annual estimates into a more formal multi-year planning and program review procedure that has evolved into a complex expenditure management cycle designed to ensure greater coherence between Cabinet priorities and actual expenditures and greater accountability of departmental managements for their program results both to Treasury Board (and hence cabinet) and Parliament. These changing procedures associated with the estimates, were only one of many coincident changes that completely altered the mechanisms of financial control and accountability across the Government of Canada. The subordination of the residual functions of the Office of the Comptroller of the Treasury into a service unit of Supply and Services and the assertion of a more independent rigorous role of the Auditor General in external audit, set the stage for a complete reconstruction of the lines of authority and responsibility among Deputy Heads, the Treasury Board, and the Auditor General in the annual accounting to Parliament for expenditures. These changes gave the Treasury Board Secretariat, and for a time the parallel Secretariat of the Board known as the Comptroller General (1978-1992), a pivotal role in the expenditure management system and the enforcement of standards in the delegated accountability and financial control regime administered by Deputy Heads. Though the Treasury Board and its modern Secretariat have never quite achieved the full legislative mandate and authority to act as a general Board of Management, in all but name and a few qualifications in jurisdiction, the modern Treasury Board Secretariat has progressively approached this administrative status in the Government of Canada since the initiatives of 1966-67.
Under a greatly broadened and consolidated mandate, the large and growing secretariat has experienced a complex organizational evolution that witnessed the creation of many functional branches in the management of financial, personnel, and material resources throughout the federal public service and, for many mandates, beyond the public service proper to include crown corporations, the RCMP and the armed forces. The activities and functions include coordination of the annual estimates, program review, expenditure planning and coordination on a multi-year basis, all aspects of the comptroller function and internal financial management information systems, administrative policy, material and real property management, contracts, information management, staff relations and conditions of employment, pensions and entitlements, human resources management, official languages policy, employment equity, regulatory affairs review procedures, and innumerable efforts to address the issue of improving the operational effectiveness and efficiency of government programs and activities.
The evolution in organizational structure of the Secretariat since 1966 may be divided into three phases, 1966-1978, 1978-1993, and from 1993 forward. From 1966 to 1978, the Secretariat incorporated several transient branches associated with efforts at promoting program effectiveness and process efficiencies but the period is principally important for defining the chief functional branches into which the Secretariat would organize itself for almost a quarter of a century, The Program Branch, the Personnel Policy Branch, the Administrative Policy Branch (1970) and the smaller specialized Official Languages Branch (1973). In 1978, amendments to the FAA created the twin secretariat reporting to the President of the Treasury Board, known as the Office of the Comptroller General. This new component of the Treasury Board took some functions from Program Branch and the defunct Planning Branch but, in a wholly new audit and accountability regime, it really extended the administrative scope of Treasury Board activity in relation to comptrollership, internal audit and evaluation and an enhanced regime of internal departmental financial accountability into activities that the Secretariat had not previously performed. The years 1978-1992 saw other experiments in organizational units with specialized mandates and varying levels of autonomy within or apart from the Secretariat such as the Crown Corporations Directorate and its successors (1984- ), the Bureau of Real Property (1986-1991) and Regulatory Affairs (1982-1991).
In 1993, the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Office of the Comptroller General merged again into a single department of government and most special offices were also collapsed into a consolidated secretariat about the same time. The consequent re-engineering of business lines at the merged Secretariat resulted in a wholly new organizational arrangement implemented between 1993 and 1996 based on functional sectors of activity that merged many activities from the Comptroller General, Program Branch, the Administrative Policy Branch, the Bureau of Real Property, and Regulatory affairs into service oriented delivery "sectors" that focused on a single portfolio of departments and agencies for all interrelated resource accountability. Personnel Policy reworked into a new Human Resources Branch maintained a distinct Branch structure but one in which the activities, policies and program philosophy changed substantially. The remaining organizational units in the reconstituted secretariat reflect the priorities that have emerged in the previous two decades: Information Management (with a strategic focus on information technology), Alternative Service Delivery, Crown Corporation Policy and Privatization as single super-directorate, and a residual Comptroller function (relating to financial and contract management, quality assurance of government services and government-wide financial information systems).
