Something that plenty of Canadians and apparently Ontario's AG and most especially members of the media appear to have difficulty grasping is that advisors advise and ministers decide.  This isn't unique to the current pandemic situation it's a long-standing issue, such as when the federal government commissioned an expert panel to present options, and the media kept demanding to know what options the panel recommended, and they couldn't get their heads around the panel saying that they weren't making recommendations, but presenting options, which was their role because ministers decide.  The moment the panel presenting the options says that they prefer one over the other then they become cover for that government.  And we know that governments love nothing more than to launder their accountability in any way they possibly can, be it through expert advice or votes in the Commons that spread the culpability around.

Responsible Government is premised on the notion that the government is to be held to account by the legislature for their decisions and their conduct.  The civil service gets to give them "fearless advice," and the government gets to be politically accountable for the decisions that arise from that advice they also get to take the praise, but also the blame.  That way, Parliament can hold them to account by granting or withdrawing confidence, and voters can decide whether to keep them in office for another parliament, or boot them and let someone else take charge for a while.  That's also one of the reasons why the advice that governments are being given tends to be behind closed doors so that it can both be fearless because they don't have to worry about it showing up in the news with their names on it, but also to focus the accountability on the Cabinet because they are making the decision, and not the civil service or their advisors, like the CMOHs.

But herein becomes part of the problem of our current situation while people want these CMOHs to have a more active hand in making the decisions around how to combat the pandemic, we are seeing a number of governments who are content to ignore that advice and then hide behind the CMOH and say that they are taking their advice, or at the very least taking that advice into consideration.  Much of the time, these premiers are lying about the advice that they received, and pretending that the decisions that they are taking is based on the advice that they didn't actually receive or take, and giving people the impression that the CMOH is the problem.

This puts those CMOHs into a difficult position they are advisors, not decision-makers, and they don't have to face the electoral consequences of their decision-making, but at the same time, they don't have the ability to publicly disclose the extent of what that advice was.  This means that when the government makes their decisions, the CMOHs have to stick to the lines and try to do the best they can to mitigate it as best they can, often doing their best behind the scenes to change the minds of those premiers and ministers.  If they did disclose that advice or spoke out against the premiers, they would soon find themselves out of a job, and even more difficult is whether or not they feel that they have been so misrepresented by the government that they feel duty-bound to resign on principle an even more difficult choice when there is a pandemic, and they have the knowledge that comes with being at the centre of things since the beginning, and that their departure could cost lives because of the time needed to find a replacement and get that replacement up to speed on the file.

Nevertheless, one imagines that if we weren't in a pandemic that some of these CMOHs would have resigned in protest by now given how their advice has been mischaracterized by certain premiers and we know that because of this AG report, and the leaks that have come out (which will cause longer-term damage to how governments operate, but that's a discussion for another column).  When the Harper government lied about the Chief Statistician giving the okay to their plans to eliminate the mandatory long-form census, he resigned on a point of principle because they had used him as a shield for their irresponsible plans.  But the current CMOHs may feel like they have less latitude to resign on similar points of principle right now, which only emboldens these premiers to keep lying and hiding behind the supposed advice they're being given.

But this brings us back to the notion about accountability.  As much as we want to know what the closed-door advice has been, it should largely be irrelevant in the grand consideration because the government is ultimately culpable for the decisions that were made, regardless of what the advice was.  It's also why we should resist the impulse for technocratic decision-making by those CMOHs, because we can't hold them to account for those decisions if we empower them to overrule their political masters.  If we think that these premiers' policies are going to lead to people's deaths and rest assured, they are in some provinces then we should be focusing on pressuring those premiers to change course, and not on trying to divine what kind of advice they're receiving.

Photo Credit: CBC News

As the government's new climate change accountability bill begins its parliamentary journey, NDP MP Laurel Collins is making some mischief of her own over in the Commons' environment committee, where she is pushing a motion about making the Environment Commissioner a stand-alone independent Officer of Parliament.  While it's a procedurally dubious move, I nevertheless cannot contain my eyerolls as MPs look to fob off yet more homework onto another unaccountable body, and call it "accountability."  The number of these officers has proliferated as MPs abandon yet more of their own work and responsibilities, and try to find another person to act as both their cudgel and shield.

The Environment Commissioner is currently housed in the Auditor General's office, which seems like a fairly natural home for someone whose job is to do performance audits of environmental programs.  Apparently, the current interim Commissioner is having resourcing issues, which is in part because the Auditor General's office has been dealing with a hugely increased workload while trying to negotiate more of their own resources from government, while also needing to deal with upgrading antiquated IT systems that the current AG's predecessor let lapse as he played along with the Harper government's deficit reduction game, and cut his own budget voluntarily.  In the current parliament, the opposition parties have passed Supply Day motions to demand political audits of certain government programs, as well as the early emergency pandemic legislation put the work of accountability onto the AG rather than Parliament actually scrutinizing any of the spending before it went out the door yet another abdication of their own responsibilities.  (The AG also did say that she was confident that she was going to get her requested increased resources from government, for what it's worth).

We've just seen the creation of another independent officer in the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who was spun off from being attached to the Library of Parliament to his own independent office.  There were warning signs all over this particular move, and yet it went ahead because the previous Conservative government, who created the office in the first place, started to act capriciously toward it and threatening the office's budget when they started doing the heinous act of contradicting the government's spin.  Part of the danger of this, however, is the propensity for media darlings in the position the first PBO was one, and the current one is as well, to the point where he has started straying dangerously outside of his mandate and seems to want to get fired with cause because of it.  He put his credibility on the line during the election by "costing" promises by simply taking certain parties' words and just putting them on his own letterhead to give them credibility (such as the promise about "cutting corporate welfare"), and we're seeing a growing number of reports that are either borne of partisan mischief that he isn't refusing to undertake, or whose methodology is so dubious that it merits suspicion that the media doesn't actually give it.

The history of independent Officers of Parliament in this country began with the best of intentions, where officers like the Auditor General and Chief Electoral Officer had specific purposes and specialist knowledge that performed functions that were not necessarily suited to MPs, either because of the possibility of partisan shenanigans (like the Chief Electoral Officer look no further than the complete mess of 3000 different election systems in the United States, each with their own rules and procedures, and each under partisan control), or because it was a function MPs couldn't provide.  This expanded with specialist roles like the Official Languages Commissioner, Privacy Commissioner and Information Commissioner as the complexity of government grew, but it also started to change their roles.  No longer were they organically attached to Parliament, where MPs would use their reports as tools to hold the government to account now these officers have become detached from Parliament, and rely on their ability to mobilize public opinion to mount pressure on the government to act on their recommendation.

One reason why this happened is because MPs willingly relinquished their roles once these officers began to use the power of media to their advantage, and it became easier for MPs to simply quote the reports and then hide behind the non-partisan nature of the officer as "proof" that it wasn't just a partisan attack.  "Even the [insert officer here] says this government is failing," is a common line, that appeals to authority while the MPs themselves have stopped doing this kind of accountability work.  After all, why do your own homework when you have someone else to copy from?  With the creation of the PBO, MPs abandoned the work of the Estimates and let the PBO do the examination for them, and more to the point, largely abandoned any semblance of pushing the government to reform the Estimates process so that it is coherent and matches up to the budgetary cycle.  (Note that the Scott Brison led this charge for the Liberals when he was Treasury Board president, and the government has largely given up on trying to reform this in the time since Brison's retirement, because the public service has become too entrenched in the status quo).

I'm sure that Collins' thinking in trying to spin off yet another officer is the temptation of having yet another cudgel to hammer the government with, one more media darling who will feel free to go in front of the cameras and start straying outside of their lane and making political pronouncements, like the current PBO has been.  But because these officers are accountable to on one, and because the lure of becoming a media darling is very real and a sure thing with a media that refuses to question these officers, even when they get their work very wrong (like the Senate audit), we should be careful that we are diminishing parliament with each new officer created.  How many more officers can we create?  How much more of their work can MPs pass onto someone else?  Let's hope we don't have to find out.