The focus of the hearings on Thursday and Friday in Ottawa was, largely, the PBO’s mandate as outlined in the Parliament of Canada Act, and whether the judge present could offer an opinion on it. The PBO, seeking a clarification on its mandate, thinks the answer is yes. The attorney general and both Speakers tend to think the answer is no, and that the PBO’s mandate is something that ought to be defined exclusively by Parliament.
All of which means, one supposes, that for the average Canadian, the conversation is already too far into the reeds to carry any meaningful resonance. It’s not on its face, for example, a story of government over-spending, or election rigging, or personal privacy breaching. If there’s such a thing as ‘inside baseball,’ then surely the debate over whether the PBO’s appeal to a federal court constitutes a breach of parliamentary privilege is tilting towards deconstructing the actual baseball itself.
Which is why Friday’s hearing at the federal court on Sparks street in Ottawa felt essentially like the second episode of a protracted exercise in unraveling the twisted twine of Parliament – the kind of thing that really only immediately holds the attention of two kinds of people, probably: 1. Semi-wonkish Hill journalists and, 2. Other lawyers, curious about either the outcome and the arguments being presented, or who were maybe just there to learn how they, too, could one day throw in a reference to the terms under which William and Mary were crowned joint sovereigns in 1689.
But, anyway, perhaps Canadians ought not to be asking themselves how parliamentary privilege works. Perhaps we need not worry too much about the minutiae of how the three branches of our democracy – each represented in the room Friday – ought to, or can be expected to, interact. That’s important, ultimately, but there’s a much simpler question at hand: that of the value of services rendered to the public, and how good we want or expect those to services to be.
When the Conservatives first came to power in 2006, they created the PBO to provide members of Parliament with timely and objective analysis about the state of the nation’s finances, the government’s estimates, and trends in the national economy. What that actually meant, inherently, was that the people of Canada were being helped in the same way, via their elected representatives. If MPs, theoretically capable to request this information from the PBO, could hold the government to account better with that information in hand, the stronger the system would be. As then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper lectured Prime Minister Paul Martin in 2004, “in the Canadian Constitution it is the prime minister who is supposed to be accountable on the floor of the House of Commons.” Indeed. There’s a reason, in other words, that it’s called the public service.
“Public servants, like me, we’re kind of the keepers of these institutions,” current, out-going PBO Kevin Page said in an interview late last year. At that point, Page had no way of knowing that this court hearing on the parameters of the position he’d just filled for the past five years would, ironically, fall on the his last two days on the job.
“Politicians, they come and go. But public servants like me, we hang around for like, three decades.”
So, maybe the context of the PBO’s saga should be this: Whether we all grasp the finer details of the PBO’s mandate clarification or not, it feels that if we’ve come to the point where the government has to sit in court arguing against a financial oversight office it once created, it might be time for us to consider how well we want our institutions kept, and what we consider to be the value of our public service. Or, whether we put any value in it at all.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan
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