“Canadians are rightly asking how they can trust this government’s imminent budget when they still don’t know where the cuts from budget 2012 are coming from,” Liberal treasury board critic John McCallum remarked as he released a list of federal departments he said are engaged in an exercise in secrecy.
Among those agencies hiding the impact on Canadians of reductions in services as a result of budget cutbacks are Health Canada, the Transportation Safety Board, the RCMP and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, according to the Liberals.
McCallum said Canadians are being kept in the dark and Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer, is being denied information on how the budget cuts announced last year are changing the services and programs Canadians count on from Ottawa.
“The result has been ministers unaware of what they’ve actually cut, a parliamentary budget officer who can’t get the information he is legally sanctioned to have, and increasing evidence that front line services are bearing the brunt of the cuts,” McCallum said Wednesday.
Page has been fighting with the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for months over access to the detailed cuts in programs and services planned by departments to meet the Conservatives’ goal of spending reductions of $5 billion a year. The Conservatives say Page is overstepping his marching orders. On Friday, Page will ask Federal Court for a ruling on whether his mandate requires departments to provide his office with such information.
But Page’s term ends March 25, and some MPs have expressed doubts about whether a new financial watchdog will be in place in time to provide MPs with analysis of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 2013 budget.
McCallum said it appears the government has decided it’s better off to put up with criticism from MPs and the media over budget secrecy than it is to let the public know the full impact of the Conservatives’ spending restraint.
“The Conservatives have clearly tried to let this information trickle out in order to keep Canadians from seeing the big picture,” he said.
Treasury Board Secretary Tony Clement has repeatedly responded to such criticism by saying the government is rolling out the details of the 2012 budget through the normal channels. “Departments have provided Parliament with publicly-available information on departmental finances and we continue to report to Parliament through the normal means, including the (spending) estimates, quarterly financial reports and the public accounts,” Matthew Conway, a spokesperson for Clement, said Wednesday.
But Page has said this process is too slow to give MPs the information they need on the impact of the budget before parliamentarians vote on measures in the 2012 fiscal and economic package. McCallum echoed that criticism, saying Clement has not fulfilled his promise of budget transparency.
“We still don’t know — months and months after the (2012) budget — where these cuts are,” he told the media.
McCallum said the cuts are being felt by Canadians when they call Service Canada and can’t get through for help or when they have to wait longer to receive their Employment Insurance cheques. “Service levels have in fact deteriorated,” he said.
The government has admitted that its employees have had trouble keeping up with requests from the public concerning certain programs. But the Conservatives say they have taken steps to ensure that services are performing up to standard.
McCallum noted that legislative budget officers from the 34-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development have gathered for a conference in Ottawa this week. It’s a “great embarrassment” that Canada is hosting such a meeting at a time when the Harper government is trying to “discredit” its own parliamentary budget officer, McCallum said.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Les Whittington
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