Ford’s outlay in pandemic wasn’t wrong
Bad things happen in pandemics. Not just the uncontrolled spread of a virus, but out-of-control cash flow.
As she does every December, in good times and COVID times, provincial auditor general Bonnie Lysyk has catalogued all the bad things Ontario does. Will any good come of it?
Let’s audit the auditor.
The big news, in more than 1,300 pages of detailed appraisals: The Progressive Conservative government sent more than $200 million to ineligible enterprises, and COVID relief exceeded business losses by some $714 million.
As expected, Doug Ford expressed dismay — what else would one say? But the premier also put it in the context of COVID, pointing out that his government cut red tape in the rush to get billions of dollars out the door. To be sure, his government could have shown more prudence — but should it have been tightfisted in a pandemic? Of Ford’s many sins, moving quickly in a crisis does not top my gotcha list.
In fact, critics have long faulted his government for not moving rapidly enough when people were hurting. What if the bureaucrats had held back the payments demanding tighter controls when businesses were at death’s door — or ordered their staff to come into the office before they were vaccinated, as Lysyk did to her own team of auditors last year.
In the annual hunt for hyperbole and headlines, the temptation is to paint a picture of a public sector spinning out of control. Not merely in a pandemic, but perennially.
Yes, bad people bilk the treasury in bad times, and an auditor’s mission is to point out malfeasance and incompetence. But the challenge is to do so in a way that governments will learn from past mistakes rather than duck for cover — or cover up.
That’s why, over the years, people have started to watch this watchdog more closely. A past report misstated a bridge mistake (implausibly claiming the truss was upside down, when another component was out of place), and she has overstated the provincial deficit (independent experts pointed out she had improperly discounted the value of a pension surplus).
This year, the auditor has reined in the exaggerations, though the report tells us what we already know — not what we need to know (to do better). For example, the auditor painstakingly describes how personal protective equipment was purged from warehouses before the pandemic, a painful blunder that is by now old news.
The report reminds us what the media have long been telling us — that this government has been using and abusing the so-called Ministerial Zoning Orders (MZOs) to circumvent the land-use planning process. What was once a rarity is now routine, leading to “criticisms of conflict of interest and unfairness,” which fairly echoes what you read in the newspapers.
It is now old school to say that colleges are hugely dependent on high tuition from international students, which makes up more than two-thirds of all revenues. The auditor notes that this leaves colleges exposed to external events — a little late in the day, given that Saudi Arabia has already recalled its students in a diplomatic spat, and the large number of Chinese foreign students leaves us vulnerable if bilateral relations deteriorate further.
The trouble with these audits is that they aren’t just about auditors tallying sums or looking at ledgers. They are so-called “value for money” assessments that are highly dependent on the values of the auditor doing the auditing.
When Lysyk raises questions about colleges being too dependent on foreign tuition revenues, is the answer to boost government funding? Should the government go deeper into debt, or raise taxes to make up the difference?
Much of her report is taken up with Ontario’s growing debt burden, which might seem like an obvious accounting question until you look closely at how this auditor analyses it: “To put this in perspective, the amount of net debt owed by each resident of Ontario … was $25,334.”
Yet that’s not a perspective serious economists would take seriously. Personal debt and government debt are different — they are accrued and assessed differently, the latter in the context of economic growth and tax capacity.
Elsewhere, the auditor lumps in borrowings by Ottawa and municipalities to overstate Ontario’s true indebtedness — only to admit her analysis is not “consistent with debt-measurement methodologies used by most jurisdictions.” Just as she oversteps on debt, the auditor exceeds her authority in other areas.
The previous Dalton McGuinty Liberals empowered the auditor to review provincial advertising for partisan excesses. Under Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals streamlined that authority (noting the auditor had lapsed into nitpicking), but Lysyk has refused to back down, even with Ford’s Tories.
Bizarrely, she has taken it upon to herself to continue critiquing any advertising she believes might be too partisan — without any legal mandate to so do. This might sound arcane, but as a servant of the legislature, on what authority does she defy the will of two elected governments, one Liberal and one Progressive Conservative?
Some might cheer her personal obsessions. But to whom is she accountable, if not the legislature? At the end of the day, voters have the final say and MPPs get their democratic way — until they go down to defeat. In our system, we rely on unelected auditors for their accounting vigilance, not their values.
In our system, we rely on unelected auditors for their accounting vigilance, not their values