Campbell not the right man for the job

Doug Ford, the new Conservative Premier of Ontario, is about to take a hatchet to Ontario’s budget, having made promises to eliminate the waste and end the questionable accounting methods which he says were allowed to flourish on the watch of the previous, long-lived Liberal government.

To this end, Premier Ford has announced the appointment of a special Commission headed by Gordon Campbell a former Liberal (in name only) premier of British Columbia. The Commission will examine the previous governments’ spending and report by the end of August.

Cuts of $6 billion or about 4 per cent of the most recent Liberal budget is the objective of the government. A 4 per cent reduction is not huge, but will still be a challenge. And asking Campbell to head up the Commission making recommendations as to what must be cut is foolhardy.

Why? Well remember what Campbell did when he was premier in the run up to the 2010 Winter Olympics when expenditures on the games were apparently running out of control and Campbell wanted to avoid any tax increase.

He trimmed or eliminated a host of expenditures that, on the face of it, appeared to be minor or incidental and unlikely to attract much attention. The trouble with this approach was that seemingly minor expenditures often proved to be important.

The forestry service was a major target. The infrastructure used to determine the annual allowable cut in the provincial forests was eliminated along with much of Ministry’s staff. Forestry management, which was previously based on strong empirical evidence, morphed into seat-of-the- pants decisionmaking. The forest pine beetle infestation was allowed to go virtually unchecked since there had been inadequate research on the problem because the forestry research budget had been effectively eliminated.

The BC Liberal government also drastically cut education budgets and arbitrarily revoked portions of a collective agreement which specified class size. That move cost millions in legal fees to defend and was, eventually, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Similarly, the cuts to spending on the Ministry responsible for children in care led to a rapid rise in child deaths and increasing social problems.

Of course, under the Campbell government, the plundering of both ICBC and BC Hydro began. And this is the person Ford selected to help guide the trimming of public expenditures!

I spent more than 13 years managing large operations in the federal government. I learned that expenditure reform and sustainable and substantial increases in productivity were possible but it took careful analysis, extensive two-way communication with all the stakeholders involved, and then careful selection of leaders for each part of the total project. Tons of praise when goals were achieved helped to solidify permanent commitment to cost-effective change.

Cost-reduction in complex processes requires understanding bottlenecks and why they exist as well as applying the continuing revolution in information storage and retrieval to the specific problems identified. It demands a willingness to try something new and the ability to assess the risks involved and the upside, if successful, both short and long-term. If change means redundancy of personnel (and most government expenditures are for people) open and honest communication to everyone involved — not just those whose positions become redundant — is essential.

Thus, “quick and dirty” examination of past Ontario budgets by the Campbell Commission will be more show than substance. (B.C. voters who lived through the Liberal years may not be surprised if this turns out to be the case.) Mr. Campbell should have learned that most problems cannot be solved with a so-called “silver bullet” but only after hard work and careful thought.

A substantive and useful report would cover some obvious areas of difficulty and suggest further analysis and development of policy. It should also stress the need for sound administrative management, something I have found increasingly absent from many government activities whether at the federal, provincial or municipal levels.

David Bond is a retired bank economist who resides in Kelowna.