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A unique insider's account of the Harper government so damning that it cannot be ignored
In March 2008, Kevin Page was appointed by the federal Conservatives to be the country's first Parliamentary Budget Officer. The move fulfilled a Tory campaign promise to deliver greater government transparency and accountability. He was later denounced by the same people who appointed him to scrutinize their spending. When he challenged the government on several issues--most notably about the true costs of the F-35 fighter planes--and publicly claimed the government was misleading Canadians, Page was vilified. He was called "unbelievable, unreliable and incredible" by then-Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Page's term was not extended and he retired from the civil service.
Page's assessment of the F-35 procurement was proven right, a major embarrassment to the Harper government. But Page's overriding concern is that Parliament does not get the information and analysis it needs to hold the executive (the prime minister and cabinet) to account. Parliament, he argues, is broken, with power centralized in the PMO. The civil service appears cowed, and members of parliament almost never see enough financial analysis to support the policy decisions they make. That was true at various times on the tough-on-crime legislation, new military procurement as well as changes to the Canada Health Transfer and Old Age Security.
In this shocking insider's account, Page argues that democracy is being undermined by an increasingly autocratic government that does not respect facts that run counter to its political agenda. Elected officials need accurate, independently verified data to support the implementation of policies and programs. In Unaccountable, Page tells all Canadians why we should be concerned.
- Sales Rank: #3452112 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-25
- Released on: 2015-08-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x .90" w x 6.20" l, .88 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
• "Helps shine a light on an important part of the history of institution-building in Canada and shouldn't be ignored. . . . A call to action." --Maclean's
• "A scathing critique of the federal public service."--Ottawa Citizen
About the Author
KEVIN PAGE was the first ever Parliamentary Budget Officer, appointed to the position in March 2008. Previous to that position, he was a civil servant for the Canadian Government for over twenty-seven years. Currently, he is based in Ottawa, where he holds the Jean Luc Pepin Research Chair at the University of Ottawa.
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A Partisan but Valuable Memoir from the Man Who Defined the Role of Parliamentary Budget Officer
By Andrew Baldwin
[I recommend that anyone interested in Mr. Page’s book read Ian Lee’s excellent paper “The Origins of the Parliamentary Budget Officer”, which was very helpful in writing this review.]
In the 2015 federal election campaign, in the leaders’ economics debate, Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau said: “…a list of the former Parliamentary Budget Officers, there are many people who’ve said now is the time to invest and that’s exactly what the Liberals are going to do." In September 2015, when Mr. Trudeau said it, there was actually only one former Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page; it is to be hoped that in time there will be many more of them, but Kevin Page was the first to serve in that role, and the man who defined it. He has now penned a fascinating memoir, mainly devoted to his time as the PBO.
Unfortunately, the book seems to have been rushed into print in August to serve as a source document for the Anyone-But-Harper forces prior to the October 19 2015 federal election. There are a number of errors of fact that should have been spotted. (For example, there was no mandatory component of the long form census (p.95). The federal government didn’t suddenly run a deficit in 2010-11 “as opposed to the long run of surplus budgets that had been the norm” (p.137). This was the third deficit in a sequence that would run to six, and much smaller than the preceding year deficit.) The chronology of events at the end of the book starts with Mr. Page’s appointment in 2008, not the establishment of the office of PBO, as it should, and all events are identified only by year, and not, where appropriate, by month or day.
Mr. Page well defines the differences between the PBO and the Auditor General: “a high functioning PBO should be responsible for financial due diligence before Parliament spends money. That is, it has to look ahead and forecast…The work of the auditor general, in comparison, is opposite to that of the PBO. The AG carries out financial due diligence after the money has been spent.” (p.12) So it seems strange that in his discussion of the controversy over F-35 costing he saw nothing untoward in the new AG, Michael Ferguson, releasing “a scathing report on the F-35 report” that “had basically endorsed our numbers” (p.131). As Ian Lee has noted: “The AG should not be involved in evaluating procurement bids, such as the F-35s, now that we have a PBO which is responsible for evaluation of prospective spending.”
In this memoir Mr. Page encourages the media perception of him as a “white knight” crusading for openness and truthfulness against a secretive Conservative government. It says something about the level of bitterness that obviously accumulated during his five years as the PBO that he actually speculates on his appointment by the PM (p. 41): “Perhaps he thought that, given the turmoil that had occurred in my life with the death of my son, I might not be as vigilant in the position as I might have been, meaning that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) wouldn’t have to contend with any worries coming from the PBO.”
On November 20, 2008, the PBO released its first “Economic and Fiscal Assessment”, which correctly forecast that Canada and the world were entering a severe recession. This contrasted starkly with the much rosier forecasts coming from the DOF. As Mr. Page recounts things, the Conservative government, if it wasn’t initially resolved that the PBO should be essentially a toothless fiscal watchdog, came to that view because it resented the PBO’s much superior performance in forecasting the 2008-9 recession. However, another version of the deterioration of his relationship with the Conservative government stresses the PBO releasing a critical report on costing of the War in Afghanistan by the PBO, just five days before the 2008 election. This, as Ian Lee wrote, was ‟in violation of the long standing practice in the federal public service that no public servant can release any report during the writ period on the basis that no public servant should influence in any way the outcome of an election.” Any government would see this kind of a move as enemy action and seek to reduce the budget or the powers of the PBO, as the Harper government did.
Mr. Page wrote (p. 94) that “Finally, on June 16, 2009, the [Standing] Joint Committee [on the Library of Parliament] issued a report that they wanted to include ten recommendations specific to the PBO”. This wasn’t a general report; it was a ‟Report on the Operations of the Parliamentary Budget Officer within the Library of Parliament”, and all ten recommendations were included in it. Recommendation seven read: “That the Speakers of the Senate and the House of Commons direct the Parliamentary Budget Officer not to release any report during a general election”, but it isn’t specifically mentioned at all by Mr. Page. One wonders, does he really not see this recommendation, directly prompted by his mishandling of the Afghanistan report, as something significant, does he not want his readers to know about it, or perhaps both?
I will always be very grateful to Mr. Page and his colleagues for promoting the idea of real gross domestic income estimates before StatCan committed to publishing its own estimates. (This was in the 6 July 2009 PBO “Economic and Fiscal Assessment”.) The official estimates, when they came to be calculated, were better than the PBO estimates, using a superior deflator to calculate measures of real income. Unfortunately, while the PBO estimates, calculated using a final demand deflator, excluded the statistical discrepancy from the definition of FDD, the StatCan estimates, which use the related gross domestic final expenditures deflator, have included the statistical discrepancy in the definition of gross DFE. This is an error that should have been corrected years ago, but never has been.
Mr. Page makes a strong case for an independent PBO that reports to Parliament, not to the Parliamentary Librarian, and there is a good chance that his recommendation will be adopted by the new Parliament.
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