Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, September 24, 2012

Page won’t rule out legal action in fight with feds over details on $37-billion cuts

Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page says that while he’s still hopeful his office will eventually get the details of billions of dollars in federal budget program cuts, after months of  “radio silence” from the man in charge of the information, Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters, he’s not ruling out legal action.

Mr. Page talked to The Hill Times Sept. 19 about his push for the details of more than $37-billion in cuts over five years and what he hopes for the office he built after his term ends in spring 2013.

This Q&A has been edited for length and style.

 Have you heard anything from Mr. Wouters since your most recent letter?

“No. We were hoping.”

 Have any departments gotten back to you on your request?

“No. Just from talking to other people around the system, we know that the information is going to flow through the Clerk’s office.”

 The Privy Council Office has said that departments are instructed to provide the data they have “in compliance with the legal entitlement of the PBO” and that it would be provided in a variety of ways, including in the quarterly financial reports. Is that a change from what they had been saying?

“No. It doesn’t mean anything new. The first week of October, we’re going to release two reports on the austerity program. One is going to look at the latest quarterly reports that come from departments, and we’re going to provide analysis as to which departments are actually providing briefings on restraint programs going all the way back to the 2010 operating freeze and the 2011 strategic review, then the 2012 budget strategic operating review cuts.

“You will see, department by department, who has provided what. What you will see from that is that there are huge gaps. Most departments are not using that vehicle to indicate where cuts are being impacted.

“The second point to make, which I think is the bigger point, is there’s no normal here. They’re way past normal in terms of using normal practices. A year ago, Treasury Board sent out a circular in the fall of 2011 and instructed departments to provide strategic operation review information in the spring reports on plans and priorities, the 2011 reports right after the budget. That would be the normal channel. Then Treasury Board said that’s not going to happen, and we got no reasoning. My recollection was that it even caught the president of the Treasury Board off-guard a little bit. The RPPs for 2012 contained no details on budget 2012. That is unprecedented. The RPPs, the reports on plans and priorities are provided to Parliamentarians so that they can vote on main estimates—they’re providing authorities to these departments, and they could vote on supplementary estimates A.

“They were given nothing. The question of normal here, we’re way past normal. Normal would mean that you provide this information to Parliamentarians before they provide their consent to spending these authorities for departments. The power of the purse rests with individual MPs. So what they’re saying is that the power of the purse effectively rests with the public service and it rests with the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, which is not the way the system is designed to work.

“We’ve totally disempowered, I would argue, the role of individual MPs. To quote Bruce Cockburn, ‘The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.’ This is getting worse.”

“The information that we’re going to get from quarterly reports, this is after decisions have been taken. Because the RPPs did not provide planning information, there’s nothing to hold the government to account. There are no baselines, there’s no planning information, there’s no plans to say, ‘First of all, here’s where the cuts are going to happen, and here’s how we’re going to manage the cuts to maintain certain service levels.’  There’s no accountability framework at all. They’re just saying, after decisions are made and money is spent you’ll see through these other reporting vehicles how we did.

“There’s no front-end due diligence in that work. That is the work of Parliamentarians, it’s also the work of the Parliamentary budget officer. That’s the reason why this office was set up, to help strengthen that front-end due diligence system. I would say that answer is inadequate from the Privy Council. It’s not new, but more importantly, it’s inadequate.”

 Your office will start to provide its own regular reports on the cuts to Parliament. What are you hoping to do with these reports and what can MPs expect to learn?

“There’s lots that we can do without getting information from the government. We can cost fighter planes, we can cost crime bills. We can do sustainability projections around Old Age Security without actually getting a lot of information from the government. One thing we cannot do is a risk assessment of a government plan to save money, and what it could potentially mean to maintain service levels without a plan.

“They’ve basically pulled the rug from under the feet of Parliamentarians by not providing a plan around this. We’re going to try to do two things: One, we’re going to continue to insist that Parliamentarians get this information sooner rather than later. We’re not going to take this answer that we’re just going to go through normal channels.

“We had the latest letter with Wayne. There’s a good chance that we’ll talk to committee chairs on this issue in the near term just to explain why we’re doing this and why it’s important, and as you know we did get a legal opinion. It’s a last-resort type strategy of going to the Federal Court.

“The other thing we’re going to do is use everything we possibly can do explain to Parliament what’s going on. Working with Receiver General data we’re going to look at the money that’s being spent in departments and we’re going to do a year-over-year assessment to see what programs are growing, what programs are being cut. But that’s direct spending numbers, that’s not forward-looking, that’s not planning information that’s what’s happening.

“The other thing we’re going to do is we’re going to release a major paper in October on compensation. We spend roughly on public service compensation about $43-billion a year. It’s been growing fairly rapidly over time, and there’s been a lot of issues about severance pay and things, and collective bargaining agreements. We’re going to look at what is the cost of a public servant, so if you remove a public servant how much money are you taking out of the system. What does it mean to say you’re pulling 19,000-plus employees out of the system. How does it affect the baseline for spending? Compensation is about 60 or 70 per cent of operational spending. If you can’t flatten compensational spending you don’t have a chance at freezing overall operational spending.

“The government hasn’t given us a baseline, we’ve asked for one, we’re going to create our own baseline. Then we’re going to give Parliamentarians a sense of the achievability of freezing operational spending based on what we’ve learned from the amount of full-time employees who are taken out of the system.

“We’re going to use everything we can: existing data going out the door, money going out the door in almost a backward looking sense, but as close to real time as possible; looking at compensation to see what this really means over all.

“But it still does not take away from the fact that we’re well into the year, appropriations are being approved, authorities are being approved, Parliamentarians—including government Parliamentarians— do not have details on budget 2012.

“We can’t replace that, so we’re going to continue to push and we’re leaving the option of going to Federal Court as one of those downstream options. It’s not something we can wait forever for, at some point in time, timeliness has gone out the window. But definitely we’re moving in that direction.”

Your term comes up in the spring. Do you have any sort of advice to pass on to the next Parliamentary budget officer?

“We get to do work that I think in the past we did for Cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, but now we get to do the same kind of work and we get to make it available to all Parliamentarians, and to Canadians.

“There are challenges around making the system more transparent, which is kind of our core mission. Another aspect would be just getting people to use our analysis, whether it’s on our fighter planes, our crime bills, and get that to be part of the debate as well.

 “[PBO directors] Mostafa Askari, Sahir Khan and Chris Matier, these are all people who I swear are smarter than me. They all totally believe in this, in what we’re doing, in building a legislative budget office, and in the mission of promoting fiscal transparency and analysis. They want to see Parliament work better, they want to see a better estimates system.

“Even within this office there is a tour de force well beyond me. That will carry on, so I’m not worried about that.

“Five years is a pretty short runway. I would hope that we could continue to build this office through at least a couple more mandates. I’ve seen a change. I remember the first year we had reports on Afghanistan, on the costing of the war, reports on the economic and fiscal framework going forward and talking about deficits for the first time in 11 years. There was a huge shockwave at that point in time around: ‘Is this what a legislative budget office does?’ ‘Why are you so transparent?’ ‘Why are you so open?’ We started explaining to people this is the way legislative budget offices run.

“I think the debate’s moved on now, and people are getting used to it. They know now that a small office, we can produce fighter plan reports. We’re going to produce report on ships, the JSS. We can do quality work, and we will work in a very different way, a very open way.”

What would Parliament be like without the PBO?

“What if we didn’t do costing of the Afghanistan War? What if we didn’t do the F-35 project? What if we didn’t do work on crime bills and look at the impact on provinces? What if we didn’t do the sustainability work? We’re releasing a major report next Thursday on fiscal sustainability that’s going to be even bigger than our last two reports, and it’s going to put into perspective changes to the OAS and [Canada Health Transfer] and what’s going on in pensions, etcetera.

“We’ve given data points, and analysis on these data points that was not provided by the public service or the government. They’ve created space which we’ve occupied. We’d be happy to have their data points on the table with our data points, so we can co-occupy the space, but you wouldn’t have had a major analysis on Afghanistan. The same thing on the F-35, ‘Here’s how you look at costing a fighter plane.’

“I think without PBO there would have been a vacuum for sure. In some cases, we’ve been the only data point. On Old Age Security, we’re the only people who have done a fiscal sustainability report that can tell basically whether this program is sustainable or not. The government has not provided that even though they said they would provide that in 2007.

“Without the PBO you wouldn’t have that data point, you wouldn’t even have one data point. You’d have a decision and I think Canadians would be told to take it or leave it. If there’s a majority, they would just take it. I think that we can enrich debate. We have, to some degree. I’d like to do it more.”

Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO

No comments:

Post a Comment