Tory cuts risky, says watchdog
Parliamentary budget officer says Canadians could face service, program reductions
“The system is being totally undermined.”
KEVIN PAGE PARLIAMENTARY BUDGET OFFICER
OTTAWA— Canadians are being deliberately kept in the dark about how billions of dollars in the Harper government’s spending cuts may reduce the services and programs they count on from Ottawa, says the federal spending watchdog.
Despite the government’s refusal to provide full details, parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page continues to fight government secrecy in an effort to inform MPs and the public on how the austerity measures in the 2012 budget will affect everything from food inspections to border security to airline safety.
The government’s stance is making it impossible for MPs to exercise their duty to scrutinize government spending, Page said.
“The system is being totally undermined,” he told the Star.
Page’s dispute with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government arises from spending restraint measures introduced in the March 29 federal budget. It called for the elimination of 19,000 federal jobs over three years as part of reductions in Ottawa’s spending of $5 billion annually.
Together with other restraint measures since 2010, this will lead to a reduction in federal spending of $37 billion over five years, the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) estimates.
While everyone favours government efficiency, spending cutbacks can have far-reaching consequences for public services, as Ontarians learned in a worst-case scenario in the Walkerton disaster during former premier Mike Harris’s government in 2000.
And since the bulk of the Harper government’s cuts come from direct spending programs run by federal departments, Page wants to know where the reductions will be realized and how services and programs for Canadians will be affected.
“The government is basically saying they could freeze operational spending, freeze direct program spending, for five years and it will have effectively no impact on services,” said Page, who has often been at odds with the Conservatives as head of the four-year-old PBO. “And they’re not telling us where the axe is going to fall within federal departments.”
He says much of the detail on how the cuts from the budget would be implemented could have been contained in the government’s annual departmental operating blueprints called Reports on Plans and Priorities, which are made public in the spring. But federal officials were ordered not to include that information in the 2012 version of those reports.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who has been preaching the benefits of “open government,” initially told reporters he would be “crushed by the irony” of the Conservatives holding back on budget information. But Clement, who heads the spending-reduction exercise, later changed his position, saying the details of implementation of the March 29 budget would be rolled out gradually in keeping with usual practices.
“The public service and the government acknowledged there was nothing in those reports and the departments were instructed not to put anything in those reports,” Page commented. “That would have been the normal channel to explain the planning framework from the budget on a department-by-department basis and how the cuts will be implemented.”
Complete details of what services and programs are being reduced or eliminated are not likely to come out until next year. That means MPs are voting on one of the more important federal budgets in years without knowing the full impact of the budget measures.
Many of these restraint measures were contained in the first budget implementation bill, the 425-page package approved by Parliament in the summer. A second piece of budget legislation, to be tabled in the Commons in a few weeks, is expected to be passed by year-end.
It makes a mockery of an MP’s most important role: to control the use of taxpayers’ money, Page says.
“Individual MPs are supposed to get this information on a planning framework basis, before the departments take these actions,” he said. “They’re supposed to scrutinize the plans. But the government basically said, ‘We’re not going to tell you what the plans are. You’ll get it after we’ve made all the decisions and things are implemented.’ ” NDP MP Pat Martin, who heads a Commons committee examining government budget disclosure, said the government should be providing the PBO with timely information so MPs are not voting “on a pig in a poke.” Asked why that isn’t happening, Martin said the Conservatives don’t want MPs to know what is going on with the budget. “They’re obsessed with secrecy. It’s the very antithesis of open government, which is what they prom- ised Canadians when they were elected,” Martin said. Clement says the information will be made public as soon as possible, but some of it may not come out until next year because the restraint plan is an ongoing, threeyear process. In April, Page asked all government departments for detailed information on cutbacks. Only a handful of departments replied, and Privy Council clerk Wayne Wouters, who functions as the head of the prime minister’s department, wrote Page to say that government departments should not comply. Wouters said the government had to ensure that federal employees who might be losing their jobs were informed before details on cutbacks became public.
Meanwhile, next week Page will for the first time start publishing post-budget spending records based on internal government data. He said this will give MPs and the public a snapshot of how government spending is rising or falling for specific programs.
Looking ahead, he said, “The only way we turn this around is with all politicians, including backbenchers even on the government side (of the Commons), saying we do need this.
“This is a great opportunity to bring Parliament along, to increase the level of scrutiny and empower MPs by providing better information.”