Conservatives should remember why we needed a parliamentary budget officer

The ongoing debate over the Parliamentary Budget Office has now come to a head driven by the PBO’s legal action against the government of Canada and the imminent departure of Kevin Page.

Both issues highlighted foundational structural mistakes in 2006 that caused the frictions of the last five years.

Moreover, the relationship with the PBO clearly reveals the federal government, the parliamentary librarian and some senior public servants in the Privy Council Office, Treasury Board Secretariat and Finance have been hoisted on their own PBO petard.

After the sponsorship scandal and the attendant public disgust, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives promised a parliamentary budget office as part of a package of reforms to address the mess. Indeed, the entire issue of accountability in general and a PBO in particular led to the election of the Harper government.

However, the Conservatives in opposition perhaps misunderstood the role and consequences of a PBO when they proposed its creation. As the U.S. Congress and the U.S. president learned when it established the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) in 1975, such a body — or more precisely its analyses — are inherently controversial as they frequently contradict government policy proposals or decisions. It is inherent in the design and structure of an independent budget office.

But power disciplines political parties and in 2006, the newly elected Conservatives appeared to change their mind. Likely influenced by their senior advisers in PCO and Finance, they thought they could honour the promise of creating an independent PBO while simultaneously containing it, by placing it in the bowels of the Parliamentary Library, reporting to the parliamentary librarian.

To paraphrase Mackenzie King, these advisers and the government attempted to establish a “PBO if necessary but not necessarily a PBO.”

The new government justified the decision on the basis that the Library was non-partisan and therefore independent — a false conclusion. And, it was argued, placing the PBO there would save money by attaching it to an existing organization. An added but not well-publicized bonus for the decision makers was that it exempted the PBO appointment from parliamentary scrutiny as it was not an officer of Parliament. Therefore appointment was by Governor-in-Council and the PBO would serve at pleasure, meaning the person could be removed.

Fortunately for Canadians, the parliamentary librarian and his committee were spectacularly wrong in selecting Kevin Page, for they assumed he would be an obedient poodle. Instead, he turned out to be an aggressive pit bull. But the frustrations were not only at the political level. The librarian found that no matter the interventions attempted, Kevin Page could not be controlled in his determination to ensure the independence of the PBO.

The standoff culminated in the 2009 attempted “coup d’état,” otherwise known as the Standing Joint Parliamentary Committee Report on the Operations of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Initially, it appeared the members wanted to remove Page and when that failed, attempted to impose obedience by ordering the PBO to accept instructions from the parliamentary librarian (to suppress controversial PBO reports from the public).

While revolutions such as the French Revolution are normally driven by desperation and despair by the underclass against the elites, the 2009 attempted coup was rather unusual for it was nothing less than a revolt of the elites against ordinary Canadians.

The history of English democratic constitutional governance from the time of the Magna Carta in 1215 to the present is the history of the slow, incremental expansion of checks and balances imposed by the governed on the governors.

Restated, Parliament and MPs are not synonymous with democracy, for they are merely one of the myriad institutions — albeit at the epicentre — of constitutional democratic governance that has evolved over 800 years.

In that light, the PBO is a natural, logical, inevitable evolution no different than the democratic innovations — such as rule of law, habeas corpus, elections, freedom of speech, religion and assembly, Question Period, political parties, main estimates, the auditor general, a free and independent media, audited financial statements, a public accounts committee, independent universities and public inquiries — that have become part of the essential institutional furniture in modern constitutional governance.

Rather than continuing to scheme over ways to emasculate the PBO — which merely addresses symptoms but not the underlying disease — the government must address the irredeemably flawed structure and process established in 2006.

First, the PBO must be transformed into an Officer of Parliament. This will ensure the independence of the office. The PBO must be more closely modelled on the CBO in the United States with its mandate clearly defined and grounded on three underlying principles established by the first CBO director, Dr. Alice Rivlin in 1975: independence, non-partisanship and empirical objectivity.

Secondly, there must be a clear division of labour between the auditor general and the PBO. The auditor general should be limited to auditing past government expenditures. The AG cannot audit the future — for the future has not yet arrived. The PBO — not the AG — should evaluate — not audit — forecasts, estimates, budgets and procurement proposals.

Lastly, the PBO director should be appointed for a single non-renewable term similar to the auditor general, to ensure unfettered judgments. Similar to the Office of the Auditor General, the PBO should be drawn from outside the public sector, from outside Ottawa, to ensure no baggage from past bureaucratic battles is brought to the position.

And the Conservative government must relearn what it has forgotten — a PBO is a comrade in arms against fiscal imprudence and an enemy of fiscal profligacy.

While Kevin Page must be celebrated for ensuring the independence of the PBO against a full-court press by the political and bureaucratic elites, the enumerated reforms here must be adopted to ensure the future success of the PBO in the never ending 800-year struggle for accountability by and from government as trustees to the people — the true locus of sovereignty.