Public scrutiny may have gone too far
Alarms raised about adding to red tape
OTTAWA — Is there such a thing as too much accountability?
An exhaustive audit of Sen. Pamela Wallin’s travel expenses, released last week, has sent journalists and critics poring through her taxpayerbilled expenses — such as restaurant meals, car rentals and university events — from the period even before her appointment to the Senate. They’ve scanned her spending as a university chancellor and probed her expenses as consul general to New York.
Many advocates of open government and accountability to taxpayers say photocopying receipts and filling out expense forms is a small price to demand of the politicians and public servants who spend our money.
But others say at a certain point, creating more accountability standards and constantly requiring stacks of documentation hinders or paralyzes officials’ abilities to do their job. They argue that the increasingly minute, timeconsuming and sometimes unclear administrative work creates an accountability overload, with costly obligations progressing beyond the point of diminishing returns.
“There’s such a thing as too much accountability, and I would argue that we’ve reached that point,” said Donald Savoie, a public policy ex- pert at the University of Moncton in New Brunswick.
“We have so many auditors and audits and officers of Parliament making work for themselves and for consultants in Ottawa. It’s become a disease. It becomes very difficult for politicians or politicians to do their jobs.”
Such intense scrutiny is only to be expected. In an age of social media, politicians and public servants need to be prepared to disclose and defend everything — be it smoking pot, as Liberal leader Justin Trudeau admitted to this week — or billing taxpayers $16 for a glass of orange juice, as Conservative member of Parliament Bev Oda was forced to own up to once the purchase was made public. Oda resigned her post in 2012 shortly after several of her expenses were brought to light.
It becomes very difficult for politicians
“If somebody’s not prepared to table everything, if somebody’s not prepared to deal with the demanding transparency requirements, don’t go into public life,” Savoie said.
But disclosing each and every expense can be a daunting process.
“The whole public system has, for some years now, been on a path of pressure for more and more transparency, and I think that’s a good thing, but I also think you can carry it too far,” said Liberal Sen. Joan Fraser who was appointed to the upper chamber in 1998. “If it reaches the point where good people refuse to do the job to safeguard their families’ privacy or where it becomes a barrier to attracting good people or where it becomes a barrier to people doing their work properly, then you’ve got to rethink your system.”
The issue has been preoccupying the mind Sen. Gerald Comeau, who chairs the Senate’s internal economy committee, which oversaw the audits of four senators’ expenses.
“It is something that I’ve been reflecting on deeply, in how do we get to the accountability ... without making it completely a burden?” Comeau said, adding he thinks the auditor general’s planned look at senators’ expenses and at the Senate itself will help the upper chamber improve its internal controls.
Canadians haven’t always been obsessed with government accountability. One turning point may have come in 2006 with the Gomery Commission looking into the federal Liberal sponsorship scandal. Its conclusion that there had been widespread misuse of federal advertising dollars shocked the country.
Justice John Gomery’s report laid out recommendations to increase government accountability and some were later incorporated in the Conservative government’s Accountability Act, which created new rules surrounding political financing, conflicts of interest and lobbying, among other areas.
And with the ongoing Senate spending scandal, there are rumblings that more accountability-related legislation is headed our way this fall.
“It’s definitely heated up in the last 10 years,” said Duff Conacher, founder of Democracy Watch, which advocates for increased government accountability. “And I expect that the 2015 election will be all about this again.”
However, Ken Coates, University of Saskatchewan professor and Canada Research Chair in regional innovation, said increased accountability measures are not without their drawbacks.
“We’ve never done accounting of accountability,” Coates said. “I think that’s the funda- mental challenge.”
He said the accountability apparatus at all levels of government can be stifling, “hugely expensive,” “really demoralizing” and undercuts the work of public servants.
“It slows down the work of governments perceptively. You can see things grind to a halt, youcanseethemanagersbeing frustratedby theprocessesthey have to go through,” he said.
“What you have to have is not an abundance of process, but — in fact — an assurance of consequence,” he added, saying the Senate needs harsher penalties for improper claims, rather than burdensome reporting requirements.
But Conacher, the Democracy Watch founder, said it’s too early to have a debate about whether there’s an accountability overload.
“The real problem is vague rules that draw vague lines,” he said. “That does cause paralysis, but that doesn’t mean the rule goes too far, it means the rule is too vague.”