Show us the spending, MPs demand

OTTAWA• Opposition members of Parliament grilled Treasury Board Minister Jean-Yves Duclos about the government’s COVID-19 measures, after a recent report lamented Ottawa’s “lacking” transparency on its massive emergency spending plans.

In a study that NDP MP Matthew Green called a “bombshell report,” the Parliamentary Budget Officer on Wednesday said that Treasury Board officials had declined to provide crucial details to the PBO in its review of the Liberal government’s pay equity program, which aims to level out pay disparities between men and women in the public service.

A second report by the PBO, also released Wednesday, found shortcomings in the level of detail provided on $79 billon in proposed government spending, making it “more challenging for parliamentarians to perform their critical role in overseeing Government spending and holding it to account,” the report said.

On Wednesday evening, Green and other members of the Government Operations and Estimates committee called on Duclos to justify the findings in those reports, and to provide more detailed accounts of COVID-19 spending measures thus far.

“With a Treasury Board and a government that claims to be open by default, how do you justify not getting to the PBO the critical information allowing them to provide back to Parliament the critical analysis on the federal pay equity?” Green asked Duclos.

The PBO report said that Treasury officials “refused to share” data on the costs of the program, which it estimates will cost $621 million per year to cover additional wages and pensions for almost 390,000 public servants. Those estimates did not include the other 900,000 employees in federally regulated industries like airlines, telecoms, banking and public broadcasting.

The findings come as PBO officials and other observers share growing frustrations around Ottawa’s willingness to track its spending plans months into the pandemic.

“This language, that you refuse to disclose information or data is damning, sir, and I’d like for you to answer why you wouldn’t cooperate with,” Green told Duclos in committee.

The minister provided few answers as to why they did not provide data on the pay equity measures, saying only that his office needed to be “respectful both of our relationship with bargaining agents and our relationship with people.”

In a response to questions from the National Post, Treasury officials claimed that providing detailed information about the estimated costs of the program would undermine negotiations with agencies and Crown corporations. They said cost estimates for the Pay Equity Act will be released after negotiations come to an end.

Conservative MP Kelly McCauley questioned why the government has not yet posted detailed spending accounts of its COVID-19 measures online, where it can be easily viewed by the public.

Duclos said spending accounts had already been made available online, a claim that McCauley said was “the opposite of what the highly esteemed Parliamentary budget officer stated” in its recent report.

The PBO said that while broad spending commitments have been kept up to date online, those vast pools of cash have not yet been broken down into finer details for professionals or the public to view.

“As of the publication of this report, there is currently no public document published by the Government which provides a complete list of all measures announced to date, or updated cost estimates,” the report said.