Page is pulling no punches in the final days of his mandate, veering into punditry that infuriates the government and his detractors. He wants public servants to serve Parliament and not just the government; he wants Parliament to regain “power of the purse” and he wants Canadians to fight to save his office, which he fears is doomed.
“If we had a transparency act as opposed to an accountability act, would we be in a better place? I would say yes,” Page told the Citizen’s editorial board this week. “If all the financial work used to support cabinet discussions was made available to the media, Canadians and the opposition, would you really need a PBO?”
Page said the Conservatives, who created the PBO to make budget projections more transparent, have instead fanned a transparency crisis that is threatening to erode Canada’s democratic institutions.
He is equally hard on the bureaucracy, where he worked for 27 years steering budgets and financial information through the system from the perch of powerful central agencies like the departments of Finance, Treasury Board and Privy Council Office. He said it’s up to the public service to provide the analysis, costing and financial information MPs need for fulsome debates on how the government is spending Canadians’ money.
“Are we weak in the public service right now in doing this stuff? Yes. Are they culpable and complicit? Yes. Is leadership weak when it comes to transparency? Yes. Does this have an impact on our country for democracy? Yes.”
He argued this kind of analysis was routinely done 15 or 20 years ago and former deputy ministers of Finance such as David Dodge and Scott Clark “put them on the table” for debate. Trust goes hand-in-hand with transparency and when public servants aren’t open with even routine information, Canadians’ trust in government, the bureaucracy and Parliament disappears, he said.
“There’s no way Kevin Page would exist in the media when (they) were doing analysis. It would already have been on the table. There would have been multiple data points. They would not have allowed it to be otherwise because they were really true and strong public servants and that was transparent,” said Page. “When (public servants) don’t provide decision-supporting analysis ... and fill that space, it raises trust issues, which is not good.
“Let’s have transparency on the table so when PBO puts out an analysis it’s another data point for debate. We shouldn’t have a political reaction that says it’s unbelievable, unreliable and incredible. They should say, ‘OK, here’s our analysis.’ So we are not in a good spot.”
Page has waged a public battle with senior bureaucrats and Wayne Wouters, the Clerk of the Privy Council, to get departments to turn over their 2012 spending plans so MPs could see what was being cut. He also fought with Treasury Board Secretariat bureaucrats when they questioned his methodology and suggested his reports be vetted by the department before they are released.
His biggest detractors, however, come from the government: Treasury Board President Tony Clement, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird have railed at Page for overstepping his mandate and have promised that his successor will be reliable, non-partisan and credible.
Page draws a distinction between the public service’s lack of transparency and growing criticism that bureaucrats are “politicized” and are crossing the line between politics and public service.
“You can hide a lot when you are not transparent ... and avoid the whole scrutiny thing,” he said.
The problem is this growing opacity has become the “new normal.”
MPs get a multitude of reports — a mixture of accrual and cash accounting — they don’t read and main estimates that don’t reflect the budget.
Page argues MPs need to “kick the tires” and not “just sign on the dotted line” and trust that the government has done the ground work. To do otherwise, he said, is like telling elected representatives they’re “useless.”
Page has pushed hard for MPs on the Commons government operations committee to revamp the government’s archaic financial reporting that he says only serves the interests of the government and the public service.
He argues, however, all the “incentives in the system” are stacked against transparency. The government doesn’t want to release information that the opposition “will beat them on the head for” and the public service is just as happy to follow along.
The Conservatives created his office in the Federal Accountability Act to provide independent analysis to Parliament, but Page said his office ended up filling the transparency gap and that put him on the wrong side of the government. Without government spending plans and cost analyses, the PBO’s reports became the discussion.
“We never see ourselves as politicians but we have been caught in this political fray because of a lack of transparency,” he said.
In his latest book, What Happened to the Music Teacher?, Donald Savoie, a professor at the University of Moncton, decries the power and growing number of parliamentary watchdogs for contributing to a large, costly and inefficient public service. He was particularly critical of Page for becoming a political player and catering to the media. Savoie wants fewer watchdogs and he says the PBO should be among the first to go.
But Page says the government made him a media celebrity. His office wouldn’t be in the spotlight, he says, if the public service and government were more open and did more evidence-based research and policy debates.
“I would say the government created the media spotlight on the PBO. We put out our analysis and if the government put out its analysis, we would just be another data point ... but when you are the only data point in town on these big issues, who would people come to? The government gave us this space. We never wanted it.”
Page unwillingly took the job five years ago and never expected lack of transparency to be the issue that dogged his office from the day he released his first report on the cost of the Afghanistan war in the middle of an election campaign.
The fight for transparency was the central issue in every report, whether it was on the cost of F-35 stealth fighters, or the government’s law-and-order agenda, or the ongoing battle for the details of the $5.2-billion in spending cuts announced in the 2012 budget. It drove his decision to ask the courts to clarify his mandate and determine whether he has the right to ask for information. That hearing will unfold next week during his final days on the job.
Meanwhile, he says the selection process to replace him is also suffering from a lack of transparency. The government recently appointed Parliament’s chief librarian, Sonia L’Heureux, to fill in as interim budget officer after Page leaves March 25.
Page says the appointment of L’Heureux, whom he says doesn’t have the “moral authority” or experience for the job, coupled with the weak legislation that created the PBO, doesn’t bode well for the future of the PBO. A successor chosen from his office could keep it going.
“I would not put any money on this office existing after five years,” he said.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: KATHRYN MAY
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