“I think there is a little defence going on here, protecting the PMO,” NDP MP Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre, Ont.) told The Hill Times last week. “I think it’s unfortunate that Mr. Wouters is doing that. I think it’s incumbent on the government and the Prime Minister to provide that information. They could do it in a heart beat and they’ve chosen not to.”
In response to a request for information about the Conservative government’s budget cuts from Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, Mr. Wouters said in a letter that Mr. Page does not have the mandate “to review all of the operations of government.”
Mr. Page posted the letter, dated Sept. 21, on his website last week. “The government concurs that your statutory mandate encompasses your proposed independent analysis of ‘budgetary targets at the department and aggregated fiscal framework level,’ and remains prepared to provide your office with data in its possession that is necessary for this purpose,” Mr. Wouters wrote. “However, the Parliament of Canada Act does not confer the Parliamentary budget officer a mandate to review all of the operations of the government.”
Mr. Wouters later noted that various government departments have already provided Mr. Page with as much information as they could.
“The federal government has shared extensive data with you on Budget 2012, and will continue to do so,” Mr. Wouters wrote.
Mr. Page’s last recourse is to take the federal government to court to order it to hand over the documents and information on exactly where cuts would be made.
Liberal House Leader Marc Garneau (Westmount-Ville Marie, Que.) said last week that Mr. Page should take that measure if he needs to. “I think he should. He’s just doing his job,” Mr. Garneau said.
Mr. Dewar said that he hopes court action is not necessary. “I hope we don’t get to that stage. That’s a choice. It’s expensive. I don’t think it’s necessary and if the government was following the spirit of the legislation for Mr. Page, we wouldn’t be in this kind of dog fight right now,” he said.
Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.) said if Mr. Page does take the government to court and wins, the government could continue to appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court hoping to run down Mr. Page’s term, which expires in March 2013.
“If there’s no other way to do it, what other option does he have? In order to do his job, he should have that information. According to the law, he should have this information. Clearly, the government should give it to him, and yet for whatever partisan reason the government refuses, I guess he has no alternative but to take him to court,” he said. “It’s hardly the ideal situation, but it may be the only alternative he has.”
Mr. McCallum, who sits on the House Government Operations and Estimates Committee, said he wants to review the Parliamentary Budget Office’s mandate at the committee level to clarify it once and for all. Because the Conservatives hold a majority on the committee, the issue has not yet been agreed upon.
Meanwhile, in an interview with The Hill Times recently, Mr. Page said that Canadians, and, more importantly, MPs are not receiving the necessary information to make informed decisions. He said there are “huge gaps” in reporting financial information, especially on the recent $5.2-billion of spending cuts announced in the 2012 budget, which is expected to result in 19,200 federal public service job losses.
Details on these cuts were supposed to be contained in departmental plans and priorities documents earlier this year. Last fall, however, Treasury Board instructed departments not to include the details in their reports.
“That is unprecedented. The RPPs, the reports on plans and priorities are provided to Parliamentarians so that they can vote on main estimates—they’re providing authorities to these departments, and they could vote on supplementary estimates A. They were given nothing. The question of normal here, we’re way past normal,” Mr. Page said in last week’s issue of The Hill Times. “Because the RPPs did not provide planning information, there’s nothing to hold the government to account. There are no baselines, there’s no planning information, there’s no plans to say, ‘First of all, here’s where the cuts are going to happen, and here’s how we’re going to manage the cuts to maintain certain service levels.’ There’s no accountability framework at all. They’re just saying, after decisions are made and money is spent you’ll see through these other reporting vehicles how we did.”
Because of this, MPs have become disempowered to do their jobs to hold the executive branch of government to account.
Former Liberal MP Joe Jordan, who testified at the Government Operations and Estimates Committee hearing on the estimates process this spring, agreed, saying that without adequate information and resources to do their jobs, MPs could be giving up their responsibilities to hold the government accountable.
“I agree, that’s certainly where we’re headed. How can you expect me to exercise my responsibility in terms of expenditure approvals if you’re not telling me what’s going on? The government could say technically we’re cutting spending, but I guarantee there are costs associated with downsizing a workforce and those costs need to be approved,” Mr. Jordan, a former Parliamentary secretary to the Treasury Board president, told The Hill Times last week. “In order for those costs to be approved, you’ve got to have some information about what they’re doing. Politically the opposition wants this information so that they can embarrass the government. The problem is when you politicize anything, you’re not going to achieve the policy objective.”
Mr. Jordan explained that “Parliament is a check and balance against the actions of the executive branch” and that MPs’ jobs are “to make sure that the money being spent is accomplishing its objectives in the most effective and efficient way possible.”
On paper, the accountability process makes sense, he said, but it is not carried out in practice.
Normally, the reports on plans and priorities are tabled so that Parliamentarians know what departments plan to do and how much money is needed to carry out their stated objectives. The main estimates for spending then come out, and should be an estimation of what’s reflected in the RPP documents. The government’s budget documents are then released to explain any new spending or reductions. Supplementary estimates are then tabled to reflect budget announcements. Often, the Finance Minister then tables a fall economic update, which then requires another set of supplementary estimates to be approved. At the end of the fiscal year, departments then release a document called the Departmental Performance Report to show how they did or did not meet their objectives as outlined in their Report on Plans and Priorities. And finally, almost 18 months later from the start of the spending cycle, the public accounts are tabled to reconcile how much money was spent overall and where. MPs are supposed to scrutinize each aspect of this cycle, but today only do a cursory study.
“The system on paper has all the pieces you should need,” Mr. Jordan, a consultant with the Capital Hill Group, said. “The pieces are all there. Where it breaks down is the absolute overload that an MP would face if they actually try to drill down into this stuff.”
This is why it’s important for MPs to know all of the information before they vote on it, Mr. Page said. If MPs don’t know where departments are cutting, information which should normally be found in plans and priorities reports, they are giving the federal government a blank cheque, Mr. Page said.
“Normal would mean that you provide this information to Parliamentarians before they provide their consent to spending these authorities for departments. The power of the purse rests with individual MPs,” Mr. Page said. “[By not giving MPs information at the front end,] what [the government is] saying is that the power of the purse effectively rests with the public service and it rests with the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, which is not the way the system is designed to work. … There’s no front-end due diligence in that work. That is the work of Parliamentarians, it’s also the work of the Parliamentary budget officer. That’s the reason why this office was set up, to help strengthen that front-end due diligence system. I would say that answer is inadequate from the Privy Council. It’s not new, but more importantly, it’s inadequate.”
Mr. Jordan said that if Mr. Page can’t do his own job properly, there is very little hope for MPs to do theirs. “There’s a guy who has the education, the experience and the mandate to do this, and he can’t do it. What hope does an MP have?” he said.
In response to a question by NDP MP Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park, Ont.), her party’s finance critic, who asked, “Why are the Conservatives afraid of making these figures public?” Treasury Board president Tony Clement (Party Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) said that the government is complying with the normal financial reporting procedures.
“We believe that rather than spending his time and energy tracking money that was not spent, the budget officer would do well to spend his time ensuring that money that will be spent is spent correctly,” Mr. Clement said, referring to the F-35 procurement in which Mr. Page was the first to dispute the government’s cost figures.
“We will continue to report to Parliament through the normal means, which are the estimates, quarterly financial reports and the consideration of the public accounts. The reports are presented to the House,” he said. “We will continue to report as required by Parliament. We are proud to do so because what we are doing is in the best interests of this country to create more jobs and opportunities across this great land.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Bea Vongdouangchanh
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