TWO QUICKIE EFFORTS TO TAKE STOCK OF PROVINCE’S BOOKS
Former British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell will lead the Progressive Conservatives’ inquiry into Ontario’s provincial accounting practices and the Tories are looking for a firm to go over the government’s spending, Premier Doug Ford announced Tuesday.
“I want you to be presented with a full, accurate and honest picture of Ontario’s finances because you deserve to know where your money’s been going, how it’s been wasted, and how we are going to fix it,” Ford said, backed by Finance Minister Vic Fedeli and Treasury Board President Peter Bethlenfalvy.
Both will be quickie jobs, with results due before the end of the summer.
The inquiry is to be a bigpicture look at how the government keeps its books — what gets included in provincial budgets and what gets left out. Ford promised it on the campaign trail as a response to the then-governing Liberals’ permanent spat with the provincial auditor general over how the books should treat several billion dollars in government-sponsored pension funds. Each side had blue-chip accountants arguing for it. The upshot was that auditor general Bonnie Lysyk insisted that the Ontario deficit was about $6 billion worse than the Liberals insisted it was, more like $12.5 billion instead of $6.5 billion.
Campbell and his fellow panellists — Michael Horgan (a former federal deputy minister of finance) and Al Rosen (a renowned forensic accountant) — are to make definitive recommendations on that and any other iffy bookkeeping practices they might find by the end of August.
That short time speaks to how little else the Tories realistically expect Campbell & Co. to find. Lysyk and her team signed off on how the Liberals kept the provincial books every year until Lysyk said new accounting standards meant the Liberals had to start handling the pension money differently. Not doing what the auditor general said was pure pigheadedness but there was never any suggestion anybody had taken the money or anything. The dispute is over which spreadsheet column the money goes in.
Campbell, Horgan and Rosen will get $50,000 each for their six weeks of work, and another $350,000 has been allotted for expenses.
“I am confident that the commission has the right leadership, the right mandate, the right resources to get this job done,” Fedeli said. “We are prepared for the likelihood that we may not like what we see. But unless we accurately diagnose the sickness, we will not be able to prescribe the right cure.”
I mean, we could just keep the books the way the auditor general says to keep them. Campbell, Horgan and Rosen are an experienced trio, though, and maybe they’ll find trickery Lysyk’s team has never noticed.
The other thing is what Ford called “a thorough, end-to-end, line-by-line audit of all government spending, programs and services.” It’s not that, unless the lines we’re talking about are on a simple list of ministry budgets.
“We will find out where your money is really going, where it is being wasted and how it can be invested more efficiently,” he said.
Maybe eventually. For now, the winning bidder’s duty is to identify areas of spending that have increased out of step with other parts of the economy. They’ll “recommend programs for targeted review, based on the analysis of expenditure trends and identified opportunities to reduce expenditure or expenditure growth, to help improve program efficiency and overall value for money of program spending,” the bid documents say. Not actually conduct those targeted reviews.
Ford’s promise suggests beady-eyed investigators descending on every government office from Kenora to Cornwall, questioning every practice and rooting under the couch cushions.
“The public, including public servants, will be provided with opportunities to contribute to the audit and identify places where we can spend smarter and more efficiently,” said Bethlenfalvy, the minister responsible for nuts-and-bolts government operations.
There’s not much time for that: the government put the job up for bids Tuesday and wants to pick a firm to do it by Aug. 10, with a final report due Sept. 21. And it can cost no more than $500,000. The bid documents specify that the winner is not to recommend any “involuntary job losses,” in keeping with a Ford campaign promise that not one single person will be laid off in his pursuit of efficiencies.
When Ford was a Toronto city councillor and his brother Rob Ford was mayor, that city hired consulting firm KPMG on a similar assignment. KPMG came up with recommendations like closing city-run daycares, cutting garbage collection and snowplowing, ending arts funding, and stopping fluoridation of the water supply. Great advice for politicians who don’t want to be politicians any more.
KPMG took two years and $3.5 million to come up with actual savings of $16 million, according to an audit of the audit completed by the Toronto auditor general afterward. Not nothing — $12.5 million is $12.5 million — but also not a tectonic shift in city finances. (Ford on Tuesday repeated his claim to have saved Toronto taxpayers $1 billion while he was a councillor, a frequently debunked lie.)
At least all this will be brief and relatively cheap. It will not likely make much difference to Ontario’s finances. Closing a $12.5-billion deficit and covering billions of dollars in tax cuts Ford has promised remains a great big challenge and it’ll be up to the politicians, not hired guns, to pull it off.