Election must not subvert second Gomery report
Hey, does anyone here remember a judge named Gomery? No, apparently not. Just a week ago his first report on the Liberal theft of taxpayers’ money was the talk of this town. Now his second one, the one fixing failures that began with patronage and ended in corruption, is at risk of being blown away by the winds of an early winter election.
That’s a shame. Once important enough to delay the campaign until spring, Justice John Gomery’s recommendations are the last, best chance to find solutions to systemic problems that run much deeper than a relatively penny- ante scheme that, in depositing public money in the ruling party’s pocket, also made a few of its friends rich. Come February, Gomery will tell Canadians how the federal government can be more transparent, accountable and, wait for this, honest. In the process, he will repair the fractured relationship between ministers and mandarins that allowed a supposedly non- partisan civil service to look away from what was clearly wrong. But politicians, beginning with Prime Minister Paul Martin, are tired of waiting.
Martin’s government- rescuing promise to call an election within 30 days of receiving Gomery’s second report isn’t stopping him from pre- empting its conclusions. Treasury Board President Reg Alcock is rolling out more than 200 “ reforms,” including spending $40 million hiring an astonishing 300 more auditors, that he insists will put Parliament in the vanguard of good governance. Not to be outflanked, Stephen Harper is offering more direct remedies. Remembering that the Tory component of his reconstituted Conservatives turned advertising, polling and communications contracts to their advantage, Harper is promising — remember that word — to overhaul ethics. Both steps in that direction are welcome. Even precariously tilted toward systems and away from people, Alcock’s package reflects a genuine interest in modernizing civil service accounting and accountability. Harper’s is even better because it focuses more on where the problem lies: with politicians and Parliament rather than bureaucrats and the bureaucracy. But this sudden ethical fit is mostly situational.
Desperate to distance themselves from Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, Martin’s Liberals aren’t about to let Gomery stand at centre stage delivering a soliloquy on morals. And with an election looming, Harper couldn’t wait to commit to a Calvinist capital.
It’s a sure bet Gomery’s recommendations will reflect thinking closer to Harper than Alcock. A preview of Alcock’s plans drew a yawn from Gomery experts and his whodunit report prepared the ground for recommendations no party in power will like.
Gomery’s solutions will skew toward simplicity and cost- efficiency. Instead of more controls, he will make it easier for civil servants to blow the whistle on wrongdoing and for taxpayers to follow their dollars through an opaque system.
Results aren’t guaranteed. But Gomery’s fixes have more potential than those designed by politicians.
Without a profound culture shift, Alcock’s new safeguards will be effective for about as long as the split- second it takes car thieves to crack the newest high- tech alarms. Equally worrying, promises lose their sincerity after elections and after insiders consider the full implications for the daily exercise of power.
What the past tells the future is that the best intentions are poorly matched against the worst motives. Both the essential Access to Information Act and the Liberals’ long- delayed appointment of an independent ethics commissioner were easily neutered; the first by a thriving, subversive cottage industry here and the second by the strikingly convenient appointment of a watchdog frightened of his own bark.
Gomery’s second report is no panacea. Whoever wins the next election will have rubbery flexibility to implement his recommendations — or not. Even so, report two is at least as important as the first. As a rare objective observer, Gomery has the stature to drive reforms that go beyond party interests to tackle the fast failing credibility of the political system itself.
Understandably, politicians are anxious to forget Gomery and his second report. Canadians should not. James Travers’s national affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. jtraver@thestar.ca.