Friday marked the new deadline the Parliamentary Budget Office set for federal departments to provide details pertaining to budgetary cuts that it has been seeking for months. So far, the dispute has been cast as one at a bureaucratic level, and the PBO as having overstepped its bounds. But the lack of information from the departments speaks to a bigger, more problematic issue about how much parliamentarians and Canadians know about how government is spending money.

After issuing a fresh request for information earlier this month, the PBO heard back from over 40 federal departments that they were working toward getting the fiscal watchdog the details pertaining to how cuts would be administered. As of Tuesday, the PBO had still not heard from 20 departments, including the Canada Revenue Agency, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Environment Canada, Finance, Foreign Affairs, Justice, and Treasury Board.

Officials at the PBO confirmed to iPolitics that, as of 5p.m. Friday, it had received only one information package from a small federal organization, but it did not say which one. The PBO has said it requires clarification on some aspects of the information provided, and the organization has confirmed that it will respond Monday.

Once the deadline has passed, the PBO has the option of issuing a legal challenge in order to obtain the information it’s after, and has 30 days to do so. That means for the departments that did not respond to the PBO’s initial request earlier this month, that clock started ticking October 12, the original deadline the PBO set. Should that judicial review come about, the deputy ministers of each department would be named in the proceedings.

Asked why his own department hadn’t yet given over the details, nor committed to doing so by Friday, Treasury Board President Tony Clement told the CBC Thursday “we’re happy to co-operate with the budget officer when he asks questions that are within his mandate.”

“Our government has communicated details to Parliament, to the Canadian public, through our quarterly reports, through our estimates, and through our reports on plans and priorities… and we will continue to do that,” he said. “As these requests come in from the budget office, we assess them, assuming they are within his mandate to ask, we respond.”

Clement said Treasury Board was “evaluating the situation” and would reply to the PBO “when we’ve done our evaluation.” As far as whether that would be on Friday, Clement said: “I don’t know.”

According to Scott Clark, former deputy minister of finance and senior adviser to the prime minister, Clement might not be alone — and not just on when a department might respond to the PBO, but in a greater sense, how the government is spending its money.

Back in June, 2011, Treasury Board President Tony Clement announced a strategic and operating review of all government departments. The plan, he said at the time in a speech to public service executives at the APEX Symposium, was to find “at least $4 billion in permanent annual savings by 2014-15… departments are being asked to develop both 5 and 10 per cent savings scenarios.” Unlike a strategic review, he said, the spending base would “focus on all operating expenses – including wages, salaries, capital and payments to Crown Corporations.”

A committee of nine ministers headed by Clement was set up to review each department’s proposal, and that body would eventually have approved departmental plans, says Clark.

In so doing, Clement said the government was “encouraging departments to develop a full range of options in areas such as administrative and program efficiencies, business consolidation and user fees. […] We all know there is more to be done to standardize, consolidate and re-engineer the way we do business – not just in individual departments, but across the whole of government.” And Treasury Board, he said, “will be front and centre in this major undertaking – and the pressure is on us all to deliver.”

The results of that review, the government said, would be reported in Budget 2012.

“Sounds easy,” Clark says. “It’s not. It’s a very complicated exercise to get agreement with every department and the Treasury Board,” but they “had to do it somehow.” From there, the government would, under normal circumstances, know what it was proposing and where it would end up. That plan, Clark says, “has to exist somewhere.”

And, he asks, “If they had it in the first place, why wouldn’t they make it public?”

This, fundamentally, is what the PBO has also been asking for.

But what about those reports on plans and priorities that Clement told the CBC are one of the ways the government communicates to Parliament? Quite simply, up-to-date ones haven’t been offered up. In May, the government tabled some, but, as it stated at the time that, like the main estimates, “they do not cover initiatives announced in Budget 2012.”

“There is no document that’s come out that would allow you to know what any one department is doing,” Clark says. What the PBO is trying to do, he says, is put get that information, “because it doesn’t exist in the public.”

“I think what’s absent in this process is transparency and accountability as to what they actually did do, department by department by department,” Clark says. “And to this day, I don’t think the committees know what their departments did because they don’t have anything from Treasury Board that tells them.”

What parliamentary committees did have in the spring were the Main Estimates, which committees use to gauge departmental spending. They are also based on different accounting than the budget itself – on a cash basis, rather than accrual. And anyway, the estimates parliamentary committees approved in the spring did not include 2012 budget cuts.

“So, the estimates were out of date. They basically approved spending numbers that were out of date last June,” Clark says. “They would have been what the government was planning to spend this year without knowing what was being cut in every department.”

All of which means at the moment, there is no frame of reference going forward. Even when supplementary estimates – where the departments request further spending allowances – arrive, it will be difficult to distinguish what they represent.

“Those are already starting from a base that’s irrelevant anyhow, because we don’t know what the cuts are. There’s no frame of reference that says: ‘Here’s the starting point,’” Clark explains.

So what is being cut? And what is it being cut from? What is that starting point? And what is it for each department, and how can Parliament judge every department’s performance?

“Nobody knows that in this government,” Clark says. “And Parliament doesn’t know it.”