Exactly who watches over the watchdog?
The only thing worse than a politician telling lies is a politician using public money to tell lies through paid government advertising.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on self-serving ads comes naturally to political parties in power. All those on-camera Mike Harris TV commercials, back when his PCs ruled Ontario, left the opposition Liberals suffering from publicity envy — and vowing to clamp down.
In power, Dalton McGuinty enacted tough restrictions on partisan ads, to be enforced by the provincial auditor general. But no other government has ever emulated Ontario’s burst of idealistic zeal.
Now, as the federal Conservatives shamelessly flood the airwaves with pro-government ads, the provincial Liberals are once again suffering from publicity envy. And having second thoughts about tying their own hands — or allowing the auditor general to keep tying them down.
Kathleen Wynne wants the megaphone back.
But the auditor general won’t quietly fade to black.
The premier claims auditor general Bonnie Lysyk is blocking public service messages in a bout of bu- reaucratic myopia. Wynne keeps mocking the auditor’s cumbersome screening process for rejecting ads that show bright red apples or red bricks (red-flagged because they supposedly promote the official colours of the Liberal party).
Wynne has a point about those pointless rejections. But she has picked a fight she can’t win.
Does the auditor’s office occasionally err on the side of caution, bordering on bureaucratic absurdity? Yes, of course.
But that doesn’t mean the Liberals should use those isolated decisions as a pretext to gut the entire process. Nor replace the existing safeguards against blatant partisanship with their proposed new window dressing that merely rules out personal appearances by politicians in paid ads.
The auditor’s office notes that it has rejected less than 1 per cent of the 7,200 ads submitted during the past decade. And it makes no apologies for those rejections.
No surprise there, because asking an auditor general to acknowledge error — even a margin of error — is like asking a pope to admit fallibility.
Even if Lysyk were wrong — and on this one, she is largely right — challenging any auditor’s conclusions in today’s political culture is a form of heresy that takes a special kind of political hubris.
What makes this battle of wills so interesting is not just Wynne’s overreach but the rapid-fire counterpunch from this auditor general.
Lysyk issued a strongly worded news release denouncing the government’s initial plan last month, and followed it up with a 27-page special report last week claiming her “role would be reduced to that of a rubber stamp.”
As power struggles go, it was an unprecedented rebuke from the auditor general, who pointedly reminded the Liberals that she is an independent officer of the legislature, not an agent of any government (the distinction is largely semantic given the Liberal majority).
She argued that diluting the ad rules would turn her into a “lapdog.”
The lapdog image is, of course, a counterpoint to her “watchdog” role. But who watches over the watchdog? Even if Lysyk is more or less right this time, what happens if an auditor gets it wrong next time?
Journalists tend to report uncritically on auditors. The opposition cites them gleefully. Cabinet ministers who dare to disagree with an auditor are dismissed as selfinterested or self-deluded.
The growing clout of public auditors is a good thing. But no one, not even a pope, is perfect.
Recent reports on the cancellation and relocation of two gas plants were commendably muscular but occasionally speculative — as when they made questionable assumptions to impute future costs that dramatically escalated the overall tally beyond $1 billion (breaking through the alliteration threshold for billion-dollar boondoggles).
Fresh from her advertising tiff, the auditor general has just joined another fight against the government. A joint statement last week by Lysyk, ombudsman André Marin and six other oversight officers of the legislature lobbies for continued oversight of Hydro One even after partial privatization.
An anti-government gang-up by eight unelected overseers seems an overreach. Why, for example, would the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth sign a statement offering his expert view on legislative oversight in perpetuity for a privatized, publicly traded utility? Even if one opposes the sale of Hydro One (as I do), why are supposedly independent overseers suddenly operating as a tag team?
They all do valuable work exposing wrongdoing, incompetence, and yes, partisan advertising. But keep an eye on the watchdogs, because they’re not always right — even if it’s heresy to say so. Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn