Canada. Treasury Board Secretariat. Program Branch : The Program Branch of the Treasury Board Secretariat was created in 1966 as a corollary to the Secretariat becoming a separate department of the federal government. The functional antecedents to the Branch stretch back to the 1920s and earlier when the Treasury Board's administrative arm in the Department of Finance began to develop and coordinate the comprehensive Main and Supplementary Expenditure Estimates to convey the government's spending plans to Parliament. The mandate and jurisdiction of the Treasury Board gradually expanded to provide direction to departments and to prepare the estimates in a review framework of departmental requirements in relation to the Government's fiscal and policy priorities as set out by Cabinet and the Department of Finance. The governing philosophy, however, remained very much qualified by continued emphasis on central control and direction into the 1990s. Throughout this period, the Program Branch administered to whole scope of Treasury Board expenditure management activity (with the Administrative Policy Branch and the Comptroller General function addressing standards and regulation of internal financial management and information systems).
Throughout its existence the Program Branch provided advice to the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Finance on submissions, program design, constraints on specific programs and priorities related to expenditure allocation; it has advised and collaborated with departments to ensure cost-effectiveness of existing and proposed policies and programs; and it has developed orderly processes for adjustments needed to meet government deficit reduction and management objectives. By the 1990's it was advising and issuing policies on the means of alternative program delivery, privatization and cost recovery.
By 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 and various instruments for multi-year planning, were only one of many coincident changes that completely altered the mechanisms of financial control and accountability across the Government of Canada in the years 1969-1995, 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. In addition, the Program Branch received an additional mandate in regards to Crown Corporations (beyond the purview of government departmental reporting) in 1984. These changes gave the Program Branch of the Treasury Board Secretariat 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. Up to 1993, however, there remained an uneasy tension in the conflicting emphasis of enhanced levels of delegated authority and practical and often rigid mechanisms of central control and direction, and multiple level of accountabilities and reporting avenues between departments and various components of Treasury Board -- Program Branch, the Administrative Policy Branch and the separate Office of the Comptroller General. To reconcile the conflicting emphases of delegation and accountability and the parallel reporting requirements, the revised Expenditure Management System after 1995 emphasized a functional business line approach to planning, ever enhanced levels of authority and flexibility vested in Deputy Heads, a commitment to performance measurement, risk management, enhanced accountability mechanisms to report results against goals tied to funding levels, and accountability for internal departmental mechanisms to enforce principles of comptrollership - i. e. enhanced delegation of authority right down the departmental hierarchy in return for enhanced levels of accountabilities based on performance measure and transparency is timely reporting.
The traditional assumptions underlying the Program Branch structure were undercut by this radically new approach to comptrollership and values based governance involving enhanced delegation to deputy heads and greater accountability for planned and measurable results that transcended traditional distinctions among expenditure management, comptrollership and traditional financial control functions. Already in its last years, the Program Branch had incorporated elements of the Administrative Policy Branch into its expanded mandate (real property, regulatory affairs, materiel management, common services, cost recovery and special operating agencies). It increasingly sought to rationalize the accountability frameworks between itself and departments into single portfolio windows (government operations, social programs and economic programs) for all aspects of financial and resource allocation. As a result the Program Branch Structure of 25 years disappeared in 1995 in favour of multiple parallel portfolio "sectors," an overall cross-sectoral planing sector for the revised results oriented expenditure management system and a "Service and Innovation Sector" linking such cross government and cross sector issues as on-line digital service to the public, innovation and quality services, alternative service delivery and crown corporation policy among others.
