Among the many items in the government's new budget implementation bill are provisions that would create an independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, freed from the constraints of the Library of Parliament, and the constant threats of having his budget cut in retaliation for speaking truth to power by the government of the day. But included in that legislation is also a narrowing of the new Office's mandate, which has caused no end of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the nation's column inches, without anyone really underscoring the fact that empowering the PBO too much might actually be a bad thing.
And this is the part where most people get their backs up. Why wouldn't we want a non-partisan body to crunch those numbers and provide an independent analysis of government projections or costings of bills or proposals? We need more people to hold the government to account, after all. Why isn't this the answer?
The reason why an empowered PBO is not the answer is because it further weakens the role of MPs, and most especially the official opposition. For decades now, our parliament has slowly been divesting itself of its responsibilities, which is supposed to be holding the government to account. Instead, that accountability is falling to an increasing number of independent Officers of Parliament, from the Auditor General, to the Commissioner of Official Languages, to the Information Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioner, and more recently the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, and Lobbying Commissioner. A newly independent PBO swells those ranks even further.
While it cannot be argued that in many of these cases, there are areas of expertise that most MPs don't possess that these Officers are able to provide a reasoned watchdog role therein, it also shouldn't be argued that their proliferation has hollowed out the capacity of the Opposition in Parliament. Instead of putting their resources and research dollars toward doing the critical policy work that are supposed to define their role, the opposition now simply waits for the reports of these officers to use as both the cudgel for their criticisms of the government, but also the shield by which they hide their attacks behind.
"Don't take our word for it," they insist. "The independent, non-partisan PBO says this is true, therefore it must be and the government is terrible!" They don't provide their own analysis, and really, don't do their own homework. Why bother, when they have all of the independent officers that they can fob it off onto, who can make their arguments for them?
And this is where a overly empowered PBO starts to become a problem. As it stands, the PBO has an overly broad mandate for such a small office, and I do have genuine concerns about the proposal to have that office start costing party platforms during an election campaign, which will further politicize an office that is already used for doing partisan homework. It would also involve the PBO in the bickering about just how transparent those platforms are, which also starts to encroach on the job of the media. Remember how the NDP released their first "costing" documents in the 2015 election that had these broad categories of items like "Helping Canadians" and "Supporting families" and other such meaningless headers with no actual breakdown of what those actually entailed? Those of us in the media roasted them for it, which is our job. I'm not sure that it should be the PBO's job to get involved there.
The other major problem with this proliferation of independent officers is that they essentially have no accountability, barring gross misconduct that can have them removed for cause. MPs are held to account by their electorate, but independent officers have no such mechanism, and I do worry about officers who showboat, because I do see signs of that happening, not only with the first PBO, Kevin Page, and some of the fights that he picked, but I've also seen elements of that with other officers, including the Auditor General.
So who is supposed to hold the watchdogs to account? The media? Would that it were the case, but most of the time, the media are far too deferential to the independent, non-partisan expertise of these officers that they are blind to the problems in some of their work. Most emblematic of this was with the AG's report on the Senate, which was riddled with problems and arbitrary determinations for which expenses were legitimate that did not stand up to a legal analysis conducted after the fact when the Senate's internal economy committee had to decide whether to pursue prosecutions for those senators which did not repay amounts identified in the AG's report. Did the media say anything about it, or were they critical of the quality of the report with these flaws out in the open? Of course not. The AG is not to be questioned, while senators raising the objections were treated as being self-interested and looking out only for their own entitlements.
The other problem with this lack of accountability for these officers is that it is also weakening our system of Responsible Government. We don't live in a technocracy, and it should not be up to the bureaucracy to do the job of holding government to account by virtue of their non-partisanship, and yet that is in essence what we are demanding when we would see that work offloaded onto these officers. And while it's true that financial documents have become far more complex in recent decades and parliament's own Estimates cycle has become disjointed from the budget and the public accounts, the answer should not be offload the work of scrutiny to other officers. Instead, MPs should be the ones to demand clarity in reporting and in documentation, so that they can do their own jobs, rather than simply passing those jobs off onto others. Creating new officers only serves to further the decline of parliament — it is not a remedy for what ails it.
