Watch out for the watchdogs
Amongst the jumble of proposals in Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s new plan are undefined measures to “ensure the Parliamentary Budget Officer is truly independent, (and) properly funded,” and that all “watchdogs” are “properly funded and respected for doing their important work to help Canadians.”
Who, save the malignant Stephen Harper, could want to hamper anyone doing important work to help Canadians, or deny them respect?
Search “watchdog” in any media outlet any day and you are likely to find a story or two. There are scores of them in Ottawa and in the provincial capitals, their every press release promptly published in the media and reverently commented on.
Some have real work to do, like the chief electoral officer, who has to manage all the details of elections. Others, like the parliamentary budget officer (PBO), have no work to do, but, in his case, to critique the government’s spending plans.
They are all legally independent of the general bureaucracy under government direction and have millions of taxpayers’ dollars at their disposal. Whether their funding is proper, too little or too much, is something we might consider. They all think they haven’t enough. No watchdog has ever suggested that he or she could get by with a little less.
Nor has any ever suggested that their purview or powers might be curtailed.
What distinguishes watchdogs from the rest of government officials is their official righteousness.
While politicians are just politicians, and we know what they’re like, and bureaucrats are bureaucrats, either doing politicians’ will or empire building for the sheer fun of it, watchdogs are a special class whose job is simply to stand up for what’s right, in their respective fields. The whole point of their existence is that they must be righteous.
But you cannot make people righteous by appoint- ment, and the attempt to do so, and the assumption that you can, is itself corrupting.
People of the finest character would understand that official righteousness is humanly impossible and decline appointment. But there has been no shortage of previously unheard of people to take up the well-paid and prestigious work of official righteousness.
The parliamentary budget officer, as near the purest watchdog, is a good example.
This sixth wheel, though sadly adopted in other parliamentary democracies, like the United Kingdom, where there is an Office for Budget Responsibility, is modelled on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in Washington. The United States needs a CBO because there Congress can spend money whether the government wants to or not and somebody has to look at the budgetary consequences. In parliamentary democracies, no money can be spent except on the government’s initiative. And it has to present a budget and Parliament has to approve it.
Of course governments have a temptation to make rosy budgetary predictions. The most striking recent example was in Ontario in 2003, when the Eves government’s budget projected a slight surplus.
The banks, think tanks and so on predicted a $4-billion deficit. Dalton McGuinty, on taking power, professed to be “Shocked! Shocked!” and took it as an excuse to break his promise not to raise taxes. But it needed no PBO to see the truth in Ontario in 2003.
Budgetary prediction is a matter of economic assumptions and theories and ideological biases. We do much better from the free flow of non-governmental predictions that got Ontario right in 2003 than we can hope to from the officially right PBO. By late 2011 Jim Flaherty’s Finance Department was more accurate nine times out of fifteen in deficit predictions than Kevin Page, the first PBO after the Harper government created the silly office in 2006.
Once established, the PBO had to prove his independence and righteousness by regularly criticizing the government’s budgets. And, naturally, the government didn’t like being criticized. But when it tried to defend itself, it was condemned for harassing the PBO.
It is time we stood back and took a critical look at all the watchdogs. Those that have real work to do should be watched closely by Parliament, the media and the public to see that they are doing it right. Where they are only officially righteous critics of the government, they can be dispensed with, or at least given no more deference than we give politicians and bureaucrats. The lazy respect the media and opposition politicians grant watchdogs distracts and degrades public debate.
Unlike the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, the PBO does not critique the spending plans of the opposition.
If a congressman presents a spending bill, the CBO runs it through its computers and makes a report. What would the PBO make of Trudeau saying his policies are “properly funded”?
The lazy respect the media and opposition politicians grant watchdogs distracts and degrades public debate