Is the PBO dead, or just sleeping?

For John Ivison at the National Post, the appointment of long-time Library of Parliament drone Jean-Denis Fréchette as the new PBO signalled a tilt toward a weaker office. According to Ivison, Fréchette already has told PBO staff “that the future will be synthesis, rather than analysis; committee support, rather than public reports; and a lower profile in the media” — all of which sounds, to those who’ve been following the Parliamentary Budget Office saga, very much like it came off a PMO talking points list.

Fréchette’s presence, Ivison writes, is a sign that “the culture of furtiveness that has taken hold in Ottawa has deteriorated far beyond what Canadians might reasonably be expected to stomach.”

Aaron Wherry at Maclean’s, on the other hand, is less inclined to write off the new PBO that quickly. Thanks to promises both the New Democrats and Liberals have made in recent months, the prime minister’s rivals “are now compelled to promise better” should they take office, Wherry wrote.

It’s entirely possible, he went on, that Prime Minister Harper’s legacy will be the opposite of what it might look like now: a heightened interest in and knowledge of some of the more wonkish aspects of our democracy. Perhaps, no matter what Fréchette does, we’ll still be closer to the original PBO ideal than we were before Kevin Page took the job in 2008.

Which brings us to a bit of a puzzle. Is the new PBO appointment — and the dubious aspects of the committee that picked him — the very definition of an omnishambles? Or is it a bump in the road to a better system? Perhaps the real question here — the one those of us following the PBO file are asking ourselves — is this: Who is to blame for what the PBO is now, five years after its creation? I’m not convinced we’ll ever really know the answer.

Still, we might conclude that having an activist bureaucrat in the job was a good thing — if for no other reason than the fact he provided an example of what the public service can be and how it can make a difference. Kevin Page probably was/is a somewhat extreme example of that, but it’s equally arguable that what some saw as Page’s media grandstanding looked that way simply because of the context of a hushed federal bureaucracy. In a world of quiet, it’s notable when a man speaks up.

I’d be kidding myself if I thought many Canadians spent their time thinking about the future of the public service. I’d probably be downright delusional if I figured those my age or younger who don’t already work in the federal bureaucracy thought about it at all, ever. If the U.S. is any example, not thinking about the federal bureaucracy certainly seems to be the trend among the under-30. Over at The Atlantic last month, Ron Fournier explored the fact that, south of the border, millennials don’t see a career in government as one that effects change, or accomplishes much at all.

“Politics just doesn’t seem relative to a lot of us and our world,” Kennedy School grad student Chike Aguh told Fournier. “Since the Great Society, tell me one big thing that has come out of Washington. Results are important to us, and sadly, politics isn’t a place for results.”

In Canada, anecdotally at least, it feels about the same. Asked in 2011 about voter apathy, University of Toronto professor Megan Boler noted that during her research she’d come across a “sense of disempowerment, that even if politicians were to address so-called youth concerns, there is a sense among young people of, ‘What’s the point of our voting for you, given your doublespeak and broken promises?’”

Perhaps that attitude isn’t surprising, considering that politicians, not public servants, are the faces of ‘government’ now — the very people so often seen as incapable of achieving clear results without doublespeak and broken promises.

But what happens to those public services, delivered by all those quiet people in Ottawa who aren’t politicians? If we can’t recruit anyone decent to fill those public service positions because few people see the bureaucracy as a worthwhile vocation, or anything other than a cynical political racket, we may find them seriously lacking in efficiency, innovation and, most importantly, staff.

Whether a PBO with Fréchette at the helm is the mark of our democracy’s horrible decline, or a signpost on the road to better days ahead, it seems we may have lost something important, at least for the time being. We know little about Fréchette or his potential to take a Page-esque stand on things. But unless he is as willing to promote, in plain and accurate language, his office’s hard results, its innovative research or its fulfilled promises, that once-strong voice from our federal bureaucracy will be just another uninspiring whisper.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan