Give teeth to budget watchdog

In 2006, Stephen Harper came to power in the wake of the Liberal sponsorship scandal promising a new era of accountability in Ottawa. Today, looking back on nearly a decade of Conservative secrecy and abuse of Parliament, it’s hard not to laugh bitterly at the thought. Yet, early in his tenure, Harper did make an important, if deeply flawed, contribution to government oversight — creation of the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO).

Like Dr. Frankenstein, Harper unwittingly created his own worst enemy. The watchdog, which was designed to monitor government spending and report on it to Parliament, proved a persistent nuisance to the obscurantist Tories. Under the leadership of its first head, Kevin Page, the PBO exposed faulty government accounting of the costs of F-35 jets, the Afghan war and tough-on-crime legislation, among other dubious numbers buried in outsized omnibus budgets or obscure departmental planning reports.

So irritating proved Page that the government waged war on him, denying him access to departmental records, denigrating him in Parliament and demonizing him in the media. He left after a single term.

This subversion should not have been possible. As transparency advocates have long argued, the PBO’s design leaves it vulnerable to the whims of governments that will inevitably be tempted to undermine its work.

Unlike the auditor general and other similar accountability watchdogs, the Parliamentary Budget Office is not an office of Parliament. Instead, it falls incongruously under the purview of the Library of Parliament and its head serves at the pleasure of the prime minister. As Page wrote before leaving the post in 2013, “In watchdog parlance, I am appointed by the person who I am supposed to watch.” That makes no sense, as the PBO itself has always maintained.

Now the Liberal government, which like its predecessor campaigned on a vow of greater transparency, has an opportunity to undo Harper’s mistake and make Ottawa’s budget watchdog truly independent. As the National Post reports, the PBO has proposed new legislation that would improve its powers of access and make its head an officer of Parliament, no longer subject to the whims of unco-operative governments. As the Star has argued before, these changes are necessary and overdue.

The question is whether the Liberals have the conviction the Harper government lacked, especially knowing that strengthening the PBO will inevitably carry a political cost. After all, the Trudeau government, too, has already felt the watchdog’s bite. In the days after the Liberals tabled their first federal budget, PBO analysts suggested the government’s growth projections were based on distorted data and that the finance department was suppressing research that would corroborate the claim. It shouldn’t be so hard for the office to get the information it needs to help parliamentarians hold government to account.

It is a natural law of politics that when it comes to transparency, governments will over-promise and under-deliver. The benefits of vowing openness, and the costs of implementing it, are wellestablished. Clearly, our institutions of accountability should not work only as well as the government of the day wants them to. As a political party, the Liberals have every reason not to strengthen the PBO. As a government, they would be irresponsible not to.

The Liberal government, which campaigned on a vow of greater transparency, has an opportunity to undo the Conservatives’ mistake