“It’s incredibly important. I don’t think anybody in this office kind of sees it as we won something or we lost something. We had a sense that we asked for something that we thought was really fundamental to our access provisions. If a department said, ‘No you can’t get it,’ that creates a bad precedent for us,” he explained to Civil Circles on Oct. 12, as his office continued to receive commitments from deputy ministers to send him information.
“We’ve never been against the government. It’s not for the Parliamentary budget officer to question the government’s fiscal objective. We take their fiscal objective as a given … we’re saying, if that’s the given, let’s look at the plans and let’s report back to Parliament and Canadians on what those plans look like, and let them see it. That’s transparency,” he said.
Mr. Page said he was disappointed last spring when he was told he wouldn’t be getting the information.
“That concerned us, because then it says, can we really do our job if we don’t get this information,” he told The Hill Times. “From the point of view of our ability to do our job, we feel much better that we’re getting beyond this precedent that departments could just say, ‘No, it’s inconvenient for us to give you this information.’ We feel better about that. But we certainly don’t feel like we’ve won anything in that sense. It’s our job.”
Almost six months to the day of sending out its original request, the PBO heard last week from at least 25 departments and agencies who said they would provide the office with the information it was looking for. They include Public Safety, Health Canada, the RCMP, Public Works, and a number of smaller or medium-sized organizations.
In the 2012 budget, the government announced it would cut $5.2-billion out of departments’ operating budgets over the next three years.
In May, Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters wrote to Mr. Page, informing him on behalf of all departments that he would not be getting the information.
The PBO sought out a legal opinion from University of Ottawa constitutional scholar Joseph Magnet that concluded the government was infringing on the PBO’s right to the information in a timely manner.
As months went by without a response, Mr. Page said he would take the government to court if he had to in order to get the information and uphold his office’s rights. He also tried to meet with Mr. Wouters to reach a compromise over the summer, with no luck.
In talks between Privy Council officials and the PBO in late September, Mr. Page said he reiterated his office’s commitment to getting the information on behalf of Parliamentarians, and that he would go to court if he had to in order to defend it. PCO officials indicated that it would not be up to individual deputy heads to decide whether their organizations gave them the information—a change from Mr. Wouters’s blanket denial.
The change of heart came about though Treasury Board President Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) stated outright during an appearance on CBC Radio’s The House Oct. 6 that Mr. Page had no right to the information.
“He actually has got a job to do, which is look at how we spend money. All of the sudden he’s fixated on something that’s entirely outside his mandate, which is what we’re not spending money on. So my advice to the budget officer is to spend your time doing your job,” Mr. Clement said.
“When you look at the words in his mandate: ‘the finances, the estimates and the trends in the national economy’ it’s not about money not spent, it’s about money spent,” Mr. Clement stated.
Even as Mr. Clement took to the airwaves, the PBO continued to talk with the Privy Council and several deputy ministers about complying with his request.
Mr. Page said that he did not understand Mr. Clement’s comments.
“I honestly don’t understand it. It’s a communications line but it makes no sense to me substantively,” he said.
Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.), his party’s government operations critic, also said he had difficulty understanding Mr. Clement’s rationale.
“It’s clear what he said made no sense, and the departments are now complying with what does make sense. I think he looks ridiculous,” he said.
The PBO’s mandate, outlined in the Parliament of Canada Act, is to “provide independent analysis to the Senate and to the House of Commons about the state of the nation’s finances, the estimates of the government and trends in the national economy.
Now that departments have been committing to give Mr. Page the information he requested by Oct. 19, the budget officer said he is glad he didn’t have to go to court.
“It was never the option we wanted. This is a much better option for everybody involved,” he said.
Queen’s University political science professor and former senior assistant secretary of expenditure management at Treasury Board Secretariat Mike Joyce noted that heading to court wouldn’t have been “necessarily a bad thing for either party” as it could have put an end to the argument about the PBO’s mandate and rights.
“This is using the courts, I would suggest, in a quite appropriate way to resolve the present interpretation issue,” he said.
Prof. Joyce said because the language in the legislation creating the PBO is simple, it’s open to interpretation.
“The government’s interpretation is narrow and the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s, Kevin Page’s, interpretation is broad,” he said.
He added that while going to court for information would be unusual it would not be “something absolutely extraordinary.” The situation was anticipated by the officials who built the budget office and discussed at a 2008 House Finance Committee meeting on creating the PBO.
“If there’s a disagreement, if the Parliamentary budget officer wanted to insist on receiving the information, because it is a law it could go through lawyers or the Federal Court, to get the interpretation of a judge,” said Joe Wild, who was then executive director of strategic policy at Treasury Board Secretariat, at the meeting.
Mr. Joyce added that he believe that while it’s up to individual deputies to decide whether they will provide the PBO with information, it’s like that the Privy Council has given them a framework to construct their response with.
“This is such a control-oriented government, it seems unlikely to me that the government would suddenly let loose ministers to decide on their own whim,” he said.
As of the time of writing, 25 organizations committed to responding to the PBO’s request. They have been given until Oct. 19. Their answers will be added to the responses of 18 smaller and more independent organizations that had responded to the office’s original request back in April. As of last Friday, roughly 50 departments had yet to officially indicate whether they would be responding.
“We have a good indication that we should expect that all departments will provide information. But departments, if we contact them directly and they say we are not providing it … we’ll still consider some type of judicial route, basically giving them a notice that we would consider going to Federal Court,” said Mr. Page.
“But we’re not there right now, right now we’re still working under the assumption that we will get this information and we will make it available very quickly to the MPs,” he explained, adding that as more departments respond the pressure increases on those who haven’t.
NDP MP and finance critic Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park, Ont.) said that this dispute illustrates why it’s important the Parliamentary budget office be made an independent officer of Parliament.
“I think his mandate is very clear in the legislation, that it is his job to provide us with the financial information that we need to do our jobs,” she said.
Both Ms. Nash and Mr. McCallum said that they thought the threat of court action pushed the government to back down.
Ms. Nash said that she hoped there would be no future standoff on information requests, and that she could see no other reason for withholding the budget information other than the PCO “didn’t want to share these numbers.”
Mr. Page said that he wasn’t sure what provoked the government to change its position on disclosing the information.
“To be honest I don’t know what happened behind the scenes. If you wind the clock back a week ago or even a little bit more than a week ago, I would say that we could be here today … I’d say, ‘Wow.’ It’s a surprise,” he said.
“As a legislative budget officer, it shouldn’t really matter to me as long as we get the information,” he added.
Prof. Joyce said that it was “quite possible” that the reason the government wasn’t releasing the information requested by the PBO was simply that it did not exist.
“Departments, I’m sure they’d like to plan exactly, but planning a year ahead of time can be difficult. They may have plans, they may be very tentative and that might be part of the reluctance,” he said.
Mr. Clement has alluded to this situation.
“Some of these things are moving targets as well. So when we have made a firm decision we communicate that decision to the public sector unions and to affected employees and through our reporting to Parliament. They know what the sequence of events are, and we’re adhering to that,” he said.
Mr. Clement also maintained that the information on the cuts would be available in a number of regularly-published government reports.
“There’s a whole alphabet soup of different reports that we send to Parliament on a timely basis, in accordance with the rules of Parliament, that talk about how we’re spending money, and we’ll continue to do that,” he said.
But Prof. Joyce, who while at Treasury Board had a hand in crafting some of those reports, said that the type of information Mr. Page is looking for wouldn’t necessarily be in those documents, such as the reports on plans and priorities.
“I would be skeptical that you could get a complete picture from the plans and priorities and the quarterly reports,” he said.
He said that if the government has followed through on its plans to cut back office items that information wouldn’t be visible in the reports on plans and priorities as they are currently structured.
“There’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t aspect to that. If you make the document simple and readable there isn’t enough information there. If you put a lot of stuff in you’re swamping Parliament with information,” he added.
He said that Mr. Page should seek out a dialogue with the departments on the information as it evolves.
Mr. McCallum said that he would be looking at Mr. Page’s information on the cuts carefully when it is released.
“It’s about time,” he said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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