The new PBO appears to be spinning his wheels

When he started asking around for departmental budgetary information sometime last year, then-Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page probably didn’t count on the whole thing boiling down to a wonkish letter-writing exercise. But even by the established standards of this seemingly endless back-and-forth between New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair, the PBO, the Speakers and various government departments, Monday’s missive from the new PBO is a weird one — and perhaps telling.

Let’s back up a couple months, to the last odd letter. It was in July, when the PBO (then under interim boss Sonia L’Heureux) again asked a number of federal departments to release data on budgetary cuts from 2012 at the behest of the Speakers. That letter was very much like an earlier one, from April, in that it named each departmental deputy head and asked for each one to tell the PBO (finally) how they were planning on achieving the savings outlined in last year’s budget and what might happen if they could not. The deadline for replying was July 19.

At the time, there appeared to be two questions: First, what would happen if the departments did not comply, and second, why were the Speakers asking the PBO to do anything? The Library of Parliament answered the second one simply by saying that L’Heureux had “shared her concerns” with the Speakers about the difficulty she was experiencing “in fulfilling her legislative mandate” (that’s presumably the bit about “providing independent analysis to the Senate and to the House of Commons about the state of the nation’s finances”). That was enough to explain the Speakers’ motivations.

The July 19 deadline came and went. A few departments replied; many stayed silent. And the Speakers did nothing. But Mulcair was thinking it over. Perhaps he was even considering suing everyone. Who knows? In any case, earlier this month, he asked the new PBO, Jean-Denis Fréchette, whether he was going to pursue the budget data and whether he was “working on taking this impasse back to court in order to fulfill your obligations.”

If he wasn’t, Mulcair wanted to know why. After all, Judge Sean Harrington gave MPs on all sides a boost this past spring when he concluded that “financial analysis should be available to any member of Parliament, given the possibility that the government of the day may be a majority government with strong party discipline.”

Which brings us up to this week.

On Monday, Fréchette responded and said the July request at the behest of the Speakers “saw some successes” but that taking the whole thing to court again might not be a good idea. To justify this, Fréchette decided to spell out a potential course a judicial review would take, should the PBO seek one.

Saying the “Attorney General would likely argue that the matter is not judiciable,” and assuming that argument would be sustained, Fréchette — writing like a man stuck in a permanent shrug — mapped out an increasingly bleak and argumentative scenario that ended with him concluding that he’d rather “exhaust parliamentary remedies” first.

But those parliamentary remedies, as outlined by Judge Harrington this past spring, are weak sauce. They include, in no specific order: “complaining to the Chief Librarian” (consider it done, given L’Heureux bizarrely filled both those roles until only a few weeks ago); “perhaps complaining to the two Speakers and the Joint Committee” (again, at least one of those has been done — and the other is fraught with political gamesmanship); or perhaps complaining to Parliament as a whole — where, again, you run up against the politics. Besides, even if a decision came via Parliament, in the end it’s up to the judicial branch to interpret statutes.

Mulcair wrote back Wednesday and accused Fréchette of ignoring the Parliament of Canada Act, and formally requested that the PBO take the matter back to the Federal Court, citing his right as a Member of Parliament to have the budget data analyzed. So I suppose we’ll just wait to see what happens there.

Frechette, meanwhile, told iPolitics on Thursday that he would not rule out going to Federal Court to force the data out of the departments — a position that was not made at all clear in his letter. If that had been his intention all along, why didn’t he mention it earlier?

For now, we have a few new things to think about.

We might ask ourselves: If sections 79.1, 79.2 and 79.3 of the Parliament of Canada Act — those that outline the PBO’s mandate — can be so easily ignored, why can’t others be as well?

And we might also wonder what’s going on with our federal departments. Are they refusing to hand over data because, as some are inclined to think, they’re getting politically-motivated direction from the governing party? Maybe the answer is much simpler — maybe they simply haven’t done the math.

Finally, we can re-read Fréchette’s defeatist response to Mulcair and think about what it means that the PBO has sought recourse already via parliamentary means and still hasn’t been able to look at relevant cost-saving budgetary data from 18 months ago.

It seems members of the House, particularly Conservative ones, are very fond of speaking loudly for the benefit of “the taxpayer” — but unless they support an office explicitly designed to help those taxpayers, we have to conclude that they don’t really care about “the taxpayer” at all. At least, not as much as they do about strong party discipline.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan