“Patronage is a rot that is affecting Canada’s trust in public institutions,” NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus said Thursday in Ottawa.
Angus is calling for the revival of the Public Appointments Commission, a stillborn Conservative initiative from 2006 that was supposed to be an arm’s-length body preventing federal boards from being stuffed with political cronies.
But the parties disagreed on who should run the commission and it was never staffed. It was officially shut down this year.
Angus accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of breaking his promise to clean up Ottawa. He listed off a series of recent Conservative appointments as evidence Harper has embraced the practice of patronage he once railed against.
The government counters that it brought in the toughest accountability laws in the country’s history with the Federal Accountability Act. Among other things, the act gave the ethics commissioner further power and banned former senior civil servants from lobbying government until five years after they leave the public sector.
“We turned the weak Conflict of Interest Code into tougher stand-alone legislation,” said Andrea Mandel-Campbell, spokeswoman for Treasury Board president Tony Clement.
“We also ended the Liberal practice whereby the prime minister could overrule the findings of the ethics commissioner.”
Angus pointed to several recent appointees with ties to the Conservative party. They include Angela Weisenberger, appointed in June as a director of the Canada Deposit Insurance Corp., and John Weisenberger, a director of the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
NDP researchers discovered that Harper was the MC at the Weisenbergers’ wedding.
Angus also criticized the appointment of Kevin MacAdam as director general for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency in Prince Edward Island. MacAdam is a former staffer of Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s and is in the midst of two years of drawing his salary while taking French-language training before starting his ACOA job.
Angus accused the government of stacking a board to get Public Safety Minister Vic Toews appointed as a Manitoba judge. Three Conservatives — John Tropak, Jonathan Lyon and Marni Larkin — have been appointed to Manitoba’s Federal Judicial Advisory Committee.
Toews has not said he is looking to join the bench in his home province, but there are rumours to that effect in Ottawa.
Angus said the government needs to bring back the Public Appointments Commission to restore people’s faith in government institutions.
The commission had a troubled and bizarre six-year history. Harper created it with much fanfare after the Conservatives gained power in 2006. But when he tried to appoint Calgary oil executive Gwyn Morgan as the first volunteer head of the office, the opposition parties used their majority in the House of Commons to block the appointment.
Harper was furious and refused to appoint another commissioner.
“So what that tells (us) is, we won’t be able to clean up the process in this minority Parliament,” Harper was quoted as saying in the Ottawa Citizen.
“We’ll obviously need a majority government to do that in the future.”
Yet while the commission remained unstaffed and unused, the bureaucracy supporting it stayed in place for six years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
In this spring’s budget, the Conservatives shut down the commission altogether, saying it was no longer needed because it had “significantly strengthened the rigour and accessibility of the public appointments system over the past five years.”
This included advertising upcoming appointments and conducting open selection processes for leadership and full-time positions.
Original Article
Source: the chronicle herald
Author: PAUL McLEOD
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