The authority would “provide objective analysis directly to Parliament about the state of the nation’s finances and trends in the national economy,” said the Tories’ election platform.
Agencies and departments would be required to “provide accurate, timely information to the Parliamentary Budget Authority.”
The Conservatives kept their word, passed a law establishing the Parliamentary Budget Office, and in 2008 appointed Kevin Page, an economist from Thunder Bay, Ont., who spent 27 years working as a civil servant in Ottawa.
The only problem is that Page has been providing “objective analysis directly to Parliament about the state of the nation’s finances,” which is the kind of thing that sounds good when you’re in opposition but turns out not to be your cup of tea when you’re running the country.
He has repeatedly embarrassed the government by publicly reporting — quite aggressively — when he thinks their numbers are dishonest or wrong.
In a town where senior civil servants get ahead by currying favour with higher ups, Page has been a rebel with a calculator, an accountant with a defiant streak, the rightful heir to the mantle of former auditor-general Sheila Fraser, speaking truth to power, as he is mandated to do by law and as he is inclined to do by nature.
His office has established a series of databases that track government spending, so that for the first time in Canadian history opposition MPs, journalists and researchers can figure out where the government is spending our money. It’s a second set of books, which is necessary, because finding real information in the first set of books is so difficult.
In principle, in the Westminster supply system, all federal spending is approved by votes in the House of Commons. The money is then sent to departments and agencies, which spend it and then report back to the House.
The problem is that one key part of the system — the budget — is a political document, a long pamphlet highlighting things the government wants you to see. And civil servants have devised accounting systems that resist scrutiny, and governments are constantly finding ways to fiddle with the books, so that they can avoid headlines that say they are cutting something or other that voters might not want cut.
In the 2012 budget, for example, the government announced that it would cut the Experimental Lakes Area, a world-renowned research facility, by stating that it would “refocus its research activities by leveraging, where it can, academia and other independent facilities.”
It wasn’t until the scientists who work there got their reassignment letters — along with stern warnings to keep their mouths shut — that anyone realized what that bland language meant.
To try to pierce that official secrecy, Page wrote to 56 deputy ministers and asked for their plans for the cuts announced in the 2012 budget: $38 billon over five years. They said no.
Page had meetings with officials, sent more letters and finally threatened to sue.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who headed the cabinet committee that made all the cuts, went public to say that Page was going beyond his mandate.
“There’s lots of work for him to do inside his mandate and he should stick to that,” he told CBC. “When you look at the words in his mandate — the finances, the estimates and the trends in the national economy — it’s not about money not spent, it’s about money spent.”
Clement’s argument was tissue thin, and he and everybody else knew it. This Wednesday, after the weekly deputy ministers’ breakfast meeting, the government backed down and the numbers are on their way to Page.
Page is skeptical that the Conservatives can make the cuts they have promised without damaging impacts to service delivery, and he hopes that the report he does will help MPs judge the cuts before they vote on the budget implementation bill, which is how our system is supposed to work.
As it stands now, MPs vote on such bills without having any idea what they actually do or any practical method to find out. The auditor general reviews spending after the money is out the door.
What Page is trying to do is give MPs the tools to understand their votes, giving meaning to the foundation of our system of public accountability, the power of the purse.
Page likes to quote William Gladstone, the great 19th-century British prime minister. “The finance of the country is ultimately associated with the liberties of the country … If the House of Commons by any possibility lose the power of the control of the grants of public money, depend upon it, your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison.”
Stephen Harper, who is so often attacked for being undemocratic, has given Canadians a powerful tool for keeping the government honest and renewing the power of the purse.
The prime minister does not always seem to be happy about it now, but we ought to give credit where it is due.
Original Article
Source: windsor star
Author: Stephen Maher
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