The real value of the auditor general’s office
After two years on the job, auditor general Bonnie Lysyk is making her mark.
Her annual crusades against government waste feed the media’s insatiable appetite for exposés. Voters revel in her revelations of wrongdoing.
The auditor’s latest report has once again thrown the Liberal government off balance: critiques of an unhealthy home-care sector, and unsupervised children’s aid societies, have forced Queen’s Park to acknowledge years of neglect.
Opposition politicians cite her chapter and chart. The media treat the auditor as an oracle.
But who watches the watchdog? Who audits the auditor to determine if Lysyk’s $16.5-million office budget delivers value for money?
With an annual salary of $253,580, Lysyk earns about $45,000 a year more than Premier Kathleen Wynne. By generally accepted accounting standards, that’s far from a windfall.
For someone who regularly excoriates government expense accounts, her own spending seems admirably frugal — $121.12 for meals in 2014, $18 for parking and $17.70 for taxi fare. Everyone else in her office makes less than $200,000, prompting Lysyk to complain that she can’t keep up with private sector competition after freezing salaries for the last five years.
“Our public-service salary ranges have simply not kept pace with compensation increases for such professionals in the private sector,” her report laments. That has prompted her to contract out more work to outside accounting firms, pushing up those costs by 30 per cent last year. But by any measure, the auditor general’s value-for-money audits deliver value to taxpayers.
The bigger question, however, is whether she confuses value for money with political values that are more properly the preserve of elected decision makers. Her latest report throws that tension into sharp relief — politicians’ values versus value for money among bean counters.
Environmentalists have noted her seeming skepticism of energy conservation programs in Ontario. The auditor also gives short shrift to phasing out coal-fired power plants since 2003, while sharply criticizing increased spending on renewable energy — twin heresies for the environmental movement.
Tim Gray, head of Environmental Defence, has complained that the auditor’s report ignores the benefits from phasing out coal, notably an estimated $4.4 billion in health and environmental costs a year, and the impact on global warming.
Mark Winfield, who teaches environmental policy at York University, argues that the auditor focused excessively on future costs of renewable energy, at the expense of much higher legacy costs of nuclear energy.
“While Ontario’s electricity system planning process is in need of serious repair, Ms. Lysyk’s report provides an incomplete picture of the problems and an inadequate approach to addressing them,” Winfield wrote on his blog, adding that the auditor labours under a “fundamental misunderstanding” of electricity pricing and the need for new investments.
Criticizing an auditor’s critique can be politically perilous. Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli was widely mocked and accused of sexism a year ago for daring to dissent from her report on Ontario’s energy sector (he maladroitly questioned her grasp of the subject).
Lysyk countered that she knows a thing or two about energy after spending a decade at Manitoba Hydro. She also protested furiously when the Liberals rolled back part of her authority to scrutinize government advertising.
The auditor’s office in Ontario is unlike any other in the country. Under Dalton McGuinty, the Liberals gave the provincial auditor unprecedented powers to ensure pre-election budgets were free from political deception; and the auditor won the right, still unrivalled in Canada, to screen paid government advertising for partisan distortions.
Under Premier Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals rolled back some of the auditor’s authority to scrutinize government advertising, notably her powers as keeper of the colour palette (the auditor kept rejecting ads with too much red — notably bricks — arguing they gave a subliminal advantage to the Liberals and their party’s official colour).
Lysyk issued a special report castigating the government for trying to streamline advertising reviews, warning that it would open the floodgates to partisan advertising. That hasn’t happened, but her latest report once again raises the alarm — in an alarmist way.
But the bottom line — borrowing from her vocabulary — is that the auditor’s reports pack a powerful punch, as even the government grudgingly acknowledges.
Lysyk’s latest 773-page behemoth is bigger than a telephone book — so weighty that one wonders why her catalogue of government mismanagement is dumped on the public all at once, just before the holiday break.
One way for Lysyk to deliver more value for money: rather than a single seasonal Christmas offering, transform her annual report into the gift that keeps on giving, chapter after chart, all year long. Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn