The man who became Canada’s fiscal ‘white knight’
OTTAWA—By the third year of undergrad, the discipline of economics was starting to lose lustre for young Nigel Wodrich. The tenor of it — with its technocratic nomenclature of human capital and price equilibrium — felt a bit staid, a bit agnostic.
But that feeling was swept aside when he met a new professor who arrived at the University of Ottawa that semester. His name was Kevin Page. Wodrich had heard of him, of course. It was 2013, and the bespectacled bureaucrat had just left the public service in a blaze of publicity, after finishing his fiveyear term as Canada’s first-ever Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). In an era remembered for the government’s tight information control, Page’s blockbuster reports and financial forecasts repeatedly whipped up furor for Stephen Harper and his Conservative administration.
This earned him accolades as a champion of transparency and accountability, but also a sizable legion of detractors. Former MP Patrick Boyer told Canadian Business that Page was a sanctimonious “white knight” who preened for the media by “wrapping himself in this flag of accountability.” The late Jim Flaherty, Harper’s finance minister for eight years, once slammed Page as “unreliable, unbelievable, and incredible.”
Such acrimony sparked awe for a student like Wodrich. Here was an economist with the gumption to call it like it is, who used his craft to put pressure on
politicians to make smarter decisions that would — hopefully — make things better for people. When Wodrich saw that Page was to teach his first class on the 2008 financial crisis, he was hooked. “I have to take that class,” he recalled thinking.
It didn’t disappoint. In listening to Page talk about how to apply data methodologies to policy issues, Wodrich felt the flame of inspiration. “Working on salient things, working in the public interest, being bold in that work, and being an advocate as well,” Wodrich said. “It was something I had never associated with economics.”
Soon thereafter, Page opened the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD) at the university, which he now runs as president and chief executive officer. The place operates as a sort of think tank and training ground, not just for students like Wodrich, but for working public servants who come for schooling in the rigours of fiscal analysis. His methods have since become a model for other governments, who send bureaucrats to his institute.
“People can’t follow the money from budgets to estimates documents. And this stuff gets quickly lost,” Page, 61, told the Star in his office at the institute. “We need to get to a way better place.”
“Kevin takes a genuine interest in developing the next generation,” added Sahir Khan, a close friend of Page’s who was among the first to join his team at the PBO, and now works with him as executive vice-president of the IFSD.
“His view is that Canada is better off with 35 million PBOs.”
There’s actually been some progress in that regard. Wodrich was hired as a junior analyst at the PBO in 2015.
Page once took a puck to the face during a men’s league hockey game. The impact cratered his cheek and cracked his orbital bone in two places. It required the expert hand of a plastic surgeon to fix a titanium plate against the broken section of skull.
“Everybody gets injured,” he said with a shrug, seated behind the wooden desk in his office at the IFSD. His face — identical to the image from Harper-era news photos, but for the carpet of post-vacation stubble — tightened into a hockey-guy grimace.
“It’s just the price you pay,” said Page, crossing his arms and leaning over a steaming mug of coffee. “If you’re not getting hit, you’re not playing the game.”
It’s a good metaphor for his time at the PBO. In his 2015 book, Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill, Page describes a threat to slash his office’s budget in the wake of an early controversial report, as well as a feeling of general resistance to his insistence on maximum transparency. “We hung on for dear life,” he writes.
He didn’t set out spoiling for a fight. When the creation of the PBO was first forecast, Page wasn’t sure why anyone would want the job. In the wake of the Liberal “sponsorship scandal,” Harper, who was then the new prime minister, had promised legislation to increase government accountability and transparency. Part of the law was the creation of the new position of a Parliamentary Budget Officer, who would lead an office to produce cost estimates for proposed programs at the request of MPs.
By that time Page had climbed the rungs of the public service, from his beginning in the early 1980s as a master’s of economics grad in the finance department to his standing as an assistant secretary in the Privy Council Office, the nerve-centre of the federal bureaucracy that supports the prime minister and cabinet in Ottawa. Approaching 50, he lived a comfortable life in suburban Ottawa, married with three kids and coaching hockey and baseball in his spare time.
“You could have a nice, secure job path. Retire and live happily ever after,” Page said. “It was kind of a dream job as an economist.” Everything changed in the early hours of Sept. 9, 2006. Page’s 20-year-old son Tyler was walking on the train tracks near Algonquin College in Ottawa when he was struck by a train and killed — a tragic accident that, as Page writes in his book, “felt as if a knife had been thrust into my stomach.”
Priorities like a “nice, secure job path” to retirement were suddenly meaningless. After several months in a haze of sorrow that he says never dissipates, Page decided to gamble everything and apply to become PBO. He had lost a son. Nothing could be worse than that.
“There’s no question. We’re all shaped by different experiences in life,” Page said. “You don’t look at risk the same way.”
He never knew why exactly — out of a lack of other options, or out of empathy for his loss, Page guesses — but Harper gave him the job. Page was named Canada’s first PBO in March 2008.
He had long admired the Congressional Budget Office in the United States. Established in the late 1970s, the CBO set the standard for independent assessment of proposed public programs and financial forecasts, Page said.
He also admired its commitment to transparency, how it makes information public and aims to communicate what it is doing clearly with American citizens. He wanted to build something of the same quality with the PBO.
“The first thing he told me is I have a mandate, and I think Parliament needs help,” said Mostafa Askari, a career bureaucrat who first met Page at Queen’s University when Page was a master’s student who marked papers for Askari, then a PhD candidate in economics. Askari was among the first people to join Page and set up the PBO. He is now deputy PBO in Ottawa, and plans to retire in January.
“He said, ‘I don’t care about the risk, I don’t care whether people get upset,’ ” Askari recalled. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to join him.”
Not long after the 2008 election, in which the Conservatives won a minority government, he had his first confrontation with the Harper government. Page produced an economic forecast that predicted a recession after the 2008 financial collapse — correctly. But that conclusion contradicted the government’s own fall economic forecast that year.
There were further episodes of friction, including a withdrawn plan to slash the PBO’s budget — already relatively modest at less than $3 million — by one third. Asked once if the government was purposely misleading the public about the cost of its plan to buy F-35 fighter jets, Page flatly stated “yes.”
“The purpose was never to attack the government,” Askari said. “We thought Parliament was being misled, so we thought it was our job to inform our clients.”
Page’s term as PBO ended in 2013 with no prospect of an extension from the Harper government. But by then, his reputation as an ardent pursuer of accountability gave some power to the idea of a respectable PBO. In Ontario, there was a minority Liberal government that agreed to create a Financial Accountability Office for the province.
Two years later, during the 2015 federal campaign, Justin Trudeau promised to make the PBO more independent by ensuring the sitting government doesn’t have the unilateral power to dismiss whoever holds the position, and to give it a legal duty to cost out platform promises by major parties in future elections — changes that were enshrined in law in April 2017.
The murmur of a class in session could be heard through Page’s office door on a recent Tuesday morning. The former PBO was contemplating whether his work has changed Canada’s political discourse — as his friends and supporters insist it has. Page said he is happy with the expanded mandate of the office, which he had pushed for when he was there.
But beyond the durability of an institution to empower MPs with information about program costs, Page wants to keep doing the type of work that inspired Wodrich when he first became a professor at the University of Ottawa. Outside his office, public servants from Canada and visitors from Jamaica’s finance department were listening to a PowerPoint about how to measure the effects of an economic shock on government deficits.
He wants his students to leave with an appreciation of technical economic tools, but also — like Wodrich — a sense of how those tools can be used for the betterment of policy. Page mentioned his colleague, Helaina Gaspard, who is working on an analysis of the funding shortfall for Indigenous child welfare in Canada. It’s that type of work that brings the technical stuff to life, he said.
And so in establishing Canada’s first legislative budget office, and laying the groundwork for more analysis at the IFSD, Page said he hopes he can shift Canada’s political discourse toward more honesty, in grappling with the realities of dollars and cents.
In its way, the PBO has pushed open the door to that change, Page said. “We nudged it,” he said. “We pushed it a little bit.”
Now others just need to keep pushing it wider.
“Kevin takes a genuine interest in developing the next generation.” SAHIR KHAN A CLOSE FRIEND OF PAGE
The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to girls’ sports league founder Dana Bookman.