Interim PBO – and Library of Parliament head librarian – Sonia L’Heureux issued a statement Monday afternoon noting that the (new) July 19 deadline for information “necessary to undertake analysis” has come and gone “and I have yet to be provided with all the information that I need to undertake the requested analysis.” If and when it does come, L’Heureux says she looks forward to performing said analysis – a line that feels more sarcastic than anything at this point.
It’s the second time in under a week that the PBO has publicly released more evidence of departmental stonewalling.
Last week, the PBO released a letter it received from National Defence Deputy Minister Richard Fadden (seen above), wherein he noted DND would not be providing a statement of requirements (SOR) for the new Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships, as the PBO had requested in order to fulfill a cost analysis of the project. That initial request had been made back in February. Fadden told the PBO in June via the letter that “it is our view that this would constitute information that falls outside the scope of the mandate of the [PBO]… and is therefore not being provided to your office.”
Which was probably news to the team at the PBO, because that certainly sounds like a new approach, compared to the one the department took when the PBO was doing a cost estimate of the F-35 fighter jet acquisition. As the PBO noted in its report in the spring of 2011: “The PBO has been provided with and has reviewed the relevant SOR.” Strange, then, that this particular SOR isn’t something National Defence feels it can provide to the PBO. One wonders what the difference between them might be.
When it comes to costing, too, DND was completely vague in response to the PBO this time. In his letter, Fadden reminded the PBO that the AOPS is currently in a “definition phase” (he even highlighted those words to make the point) and that “cost estimates [will] become increasingly substantive.” Until then, it seems, the PBO will have to simply stare at the figures that have already been publicly released for the AOPS project. “The acquisition cost of AOPS is estimated at $3.0B, excluding taxes,” Fadden wrote, before noting that the government had also set aside $738 million “for the definition phase,” and that “additional funding will be allocated upon approval of the implementation phase of the project.” All of which is essentially meaningless jargon, devoid of usable information for an office like the PBO.
Again, when it came to the F-35 procurement, the DND gave PBO costing figures well in advance of any actual acquisition – or even signing a contract, as the government liked to retroactively remind everyone when the analyses came back from both the PBO and the auditor general. The AOPS, by contrast, most definitely already has at least one contract signed and promoted. We are, I guess, left to assume that DND was willing to have the PBO look over costing figures for a project it wasn’t sure it would undertake and for which it had not signed a contract a few years ago, but has now deemed similar information beyond the purview of the PBO for a separate project for which it’s already signed a contract. What?
But let’s assume that DND doesn’t actually know all these things the PBO has asked for by now. Maybe they don’t actually have the costing information defined for the AOPS. If the contract is still in its so-called “definition phase” then maybe how much everything will come to is truly a question mark. Fine. In that case, we can expect those figures to come soon enough – or, at least, we ought to. Fadden doesn’t seem to have been deemed those to be outside PBO’s purview, they’re just… unavailable, I guess.
That brings us back to the SOR, something which DND must by now surely have defined, if only in the broadest terms. Why is that not available to the PBO? Fadden didn’t provide any justification at all in his letter.
Earlier this spring, after he ruled on the PBO’s appeal for a clarification of its mandate, Judge Sean Harrington commented that “Parliament not only intended that the [PBO] be answerable to it and to its committees, but also to every backbencher irrespective of political stripe. In my view, the purpose of the statute is to shield any given member of either House of Parliament from the will of the majority.” So, in the end, here’s the key thing about Fadden’s refusal: Thanks to that ruling, which determined at the very least that MPs had the right to request costing information from departments via the PBO for further analysis, Fadden is, in effect, not just saying the PBO can’t have this data, but that MPs can’t, either – at least, not this way. Which seems like something that ought to strike us all as slightly troubling.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan
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