The long-time Calgary journalist was chided for honouring the dishonoured, but she was at least technically correct. Accountability has varying degrees and meanings. It can be shown by open financial records, scheduled reports, transparent operations and frequent communications. An account is a story, or a reckoning, but it is also a place to store money, and a ledger of who owes what to whom. To be accountable is to serve any one of these definitions.
But at its most basic, accountability is pessimistic, like a vaccine. Ideally, it is theoretical, never called into action. It is the underbelly of duty, the ante of political poker. It is not a price, but a penalty, and less a virtue than a rule. To be accountable, at root, is to quit in service of the office, just like the Tory trio.
Now, however, with chiefs of staff falling before their political masters in Ottawa and Toronto, U.S. tax officials taking the fifth on politically motivated audits, Mike Duffy still a senator for P.E.I., and Anthony Weiner, whose racy self-portraiture made a further mockery of his already hilarious surname, currently a candidate for mayor of New York, there is a creeping suspicion that accountability as a virtue is on the wane.
“I think there is to a large extent in Canada a culture of impunity at the elite level that just drives ordinary people to distraction, and I can’t say they are wrong,” said Brian Lee Crowley, managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a non-partisan think-tank.
Part of this no doubt is mere frustration and impatience on the part of an electorate. Part is the pressure of collapsing news cycles, in which stories rise and fall within days if not hours, often without firm resolution. And part is the basic psychological desire for narratives to end tidily, rather than fade into ambiguity.
But part is also simple indignation that political accountability can seem to be little more than a set of policies drawn up in response to the latest scandal, or that accountability sometimes seems to be assigned to unelected subordinates, bureaucratic lap dogs who are willing to wear the office’s shame in a pinch, no matter how valuable they might be otherwise.
Accountability as a word gets “thrown around a lot, and I’m always not sure if we all mean the same thing when we use it,” said Alison Loat, executive director of Samara Canada, a charity that promotes political understanding.
“That is my main concern,” she said. “There is a system of accountability. It’s hundreds of years old in its formation. I would argue it is not well understood and it may be insufficient for modern political times. But at minimum it is not well understood.”
The chain of accountability in representative democracies, from government to cabinet to members to voters, “is only as strong as its weakest link,” said Ms. Loat “It works in theory, it doesn’t work in practice.”
Samara Canada, for example, has conducted exit interviews with 79 former MPs, from single-term backbenchers to prime ministers. Of that number, all of whom were asked what it meant to be a member of Parliament, only two or three said their main job was to hold government to account, which is an MP’s primary purpose in the Westminster model.
Original Article
Source: news.nationalpost.com
Author: Joseph Brean
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