Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Tories might miss Page one day

Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page departs his post next week. The Conservative government is, no doubt, relieved. In the five years since his appointment, Page has consistently demonstrated the necessity of his office and, in doing so, highlighted just how far Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has fallen from its promise of transparency and accountability.

In the 2006 election, the Conservatives took advantage of the Liberals’ embarrassment over the Quebec sponsorship scandal to proclaim they’d do government differently. Critical of Chrétien-era accounting — all those underestimates on budget surpluses — they promised to bring in legislation ensuring greater accountability and transparency on how the federal government expends the nation’s treasure.

The Conservatives delivered on the promise, bringing in the Accountability Act and establishing a budget office “to provide objective analysis to members of Parliament and parliamentary committees concerning the state of the nation’s finances, trends in the national economy, and the financial cost of proposals under consideration by either House.” In 2008, Page was appointed as Canada’s first parliamentary budget officer.

During his tenure, Page has certainly lived up to his mandate, delivering reports and analyses on everything from the cost of the military’s deployment in Afghanistan and job creation programs, to the financial sustainability of the Old Age Security program, the cost of the public service and the inadequacy of costing for the F-35 fighter procurement. In short, he’s delivered on the Tories’ election commitment even when they didn’t.

Page himself acknowledges the creation of his office reflects, at least in part, a problem with Canada’s governmental institutions. “We are not in a good place in this country when the government says we aren’t showing you our stuff (spending figures), or we’ll only show it to you under duress,” he said in a meeting with us this week. “That is not healthy for our country.”

“Is leadership weak in respect of transparency? Yes. Does that have an impact on our country for democracy? Yes,” he said, arguing that parliamentarians have allowed the government executive — the prime minister’s office, in other words — to centralize too much control over spending.

That kind of talk didn’t endear Page to the government. Indeed, cabinet ministers consistently challenged Page’s credibility, hinted at slashing his budget and denied him documents he needed to do his job. When he’s demonstrated government accounting to be patently inadequate he’s been damned as “unbelievable, unreliable and incredible,” as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty put it. Treasury Board President Tony Clement even accused Page of acting “outside his mandate” because he tried to investigate “what we’re not spending money on” — as if cuts to spending aren’t related to the “financial cost of proposals” referred to in the budget office’s mandate.

If this inanity wasn’t sufficient evidence that the Tories are bent on scuttling their own creation, consider the prime minister’s delay in appointing Page’s replacement even when his intended departure was known well ahead of time. Instead, Harper made an interim appointment, namely Parliament’s chief librarian, Sonia L’Heureux. Does she have the authority and independence needed to stand up to irate cabinet ministers? It’s been widely speculated that L’Heureux’s marching orders include abandoning a court case to clarify the budget office’s mandate that Page launched last year after nearly a dozen departments balked at providing documentation he’d requested.

But then even the wording of the advertisement for a new budget officer suggests the government doesn’t want to replace Page with someone like him. The job posting uses phrases like “tactful and discreet,” “the ability to develop and maintain constructive relationships,” and, our favourite, “achieve consensus” — something the independent-minded Page obviously didn’t achieve. This makes no sense. The budget officer’s job is to analyze numbers as they are, not negotiate a consensus (otherwise known as massaging the numbers) to fulfil political preferences.

Given all this, you have to ask: What is it Conservatives are so afraid of that they appear willing to abandon a key element of the campaign that got them elected? Their promise of accountable governance has, it seems, given way to controlling obfuscation and blatant hostility toward the office they created. Has power corrupted the Tories’ capacity to distinguish between the national interest and partisan interests? Or, do they think their interests are identical to those of the nation? Either way, if the promise of transparency has met its nadir, well, Harper and his team will sooner or later find themselves regarded in the same way as the Liberals they replaced.

Perhaps then, returned to Opposition, they’ll rediscover their commitment to government that is open to those it purports to serve, recognizing the virtue of a budget officer who isn’t necessarily tactful when speaking truth to power.

Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Ottawa Citizen

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