Roundup: Another cry for technocracy

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After Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office weighed in on the government’s figures in advance of the election, he too finds that the province’s deficit is probably bigger than reported, as will its debt figures be. The accounting dispute between the government and its Auditor General remains in the air, while there are doubts being raised as to whether there are really surpluses in the pension funds in a meaningful sense. And it’s all done Andrew Coyne’s head in, because now he thinks that it’s time to simply take away any financial reporting away from a government, and turn it all over to a neutral, arm’s length, third-party body because the alternative is to let governments and other political parties spin and manipulate about what’s in the books. In his estimation, Auditors-General and Parliamentary Budget Officers/Fiscal Accountability Officers are of little use because their reports and opinions are not binding, who can pretend that they’re related to matters of opinion and accounting disputes, while opposition parties aren’t doing the job of accountability because they use the same torqued figures for their own purposes.

But I think that Coyne is completely off the mark here, because he places too much faith in the words of the current watchdogs. We’ve seen examples where the Auditor General has been wrong – the Senate audit being a prime example where he was out of his depth, based a number of findings on opinion that were later overturned by a former Supreme Court of Canada justice hired to adjudicate the findings, and further legal analysis of his findings poked yet more holes in his analysis. We also see numerous examples of where the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s methodology is suspect (to say the least), but we rarely see these challenge being made public in the media because the media takes the words of these watchdogs as gospel, which should be alarming to anyone who engages in the slightest bit of critical thinking. To turn even more of our government’s fiscal processes over to yet another unaccountable technocratic body strikes fear into my heart because the people we keep demanding we turn this power over to are not infallible, and there are no ways for us to hold them to account – especially if the media refuses to do so responsibly either.

So while I can sympathise with Coyne’s frustration – and the situation in Ontario is particularly egregious, with all three parties guilty of playing along – the answer is never technocracy. We may get the governments that we deserve, but that also means that we, the voting public, need to do a better job of doing our own due diligence and demanding better, and we’re not – we’re just shrugging our way toward oblivion, which is part of the problem.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/991855272565002241

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau wouldn’t commit to following the Senate Aboriginal People’s committee recommendation to delay implementing legal cannabis by a year.
  • Trudeau also reaffirmed the clean drinking water pledge for First Nations at the AFN special meeting, but also warned they can do things quickly or do it right.
  • More tributes from MPs for Gord Brown, who died of a heart attack in his office yesterday.
  • Chrystia Freeland says she will monitor the internal Justice Department investigation in to the extradition of Hassan Diab.
  • Health Canada plans to stick big yellow warning stickers on legitimate opioids being prescribed to advertise that they can be highly addictive.
  • The Federal Court declined to overturn a US NAFTA tribunal challenge to a Nova Scotia quarry, citing that it was unfairly discriminated against.
  • It looks like Canadian refineries may be more polluting than equivalent American ones, in part because of less stringent regulations here.
  • Suncor’s CEO says that he believes the PM will get pipelines built after meeting him during the PM’s visit to Fort McMurray earlier this month.
  • The government is looking at cloud-computing as a way of dealing with the fact that its data centres are aging out and think the inherent security risks may be worth it.
  • The AFN passed a resolution calling on the government to ensure that they have a revenue stake in legalized cannabis, as well as some regulatory control.
  • There remain questions as to whether the Senate will be able to move to the Government Conference Centre on time this summer.
  • Remember how the vaunted shipbuilding strategy was supposed to prevent “gaps” between shipbuilding programmes? Turns out there will be gaps after all. Oops.
  • Senator David Adams Richards complains that too many Americanisms has infected hockey commentating in Canada. Okay. Sure.
  • University of Ottawa law professor Teresa Scassa is unimpressed (to the point of scandalized) about the privacy protections in the electoral reform bill.
  • Jagmeet Singh still hasn’t talked about the report following the investigation into Erin Weir, as Weir’s allegations about why he was accused get more detailed.
  • Economist Trevor Tombe looks at the perception gap that lingers in Alberta with the recession now fully over, but people don’t believe it/are being told differently.
  • Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column offers a refresher on what to do when the Commons and Senate don’t agree on a bill and its amendments.
  • With Quebec MPs more robust now in all three major federal parties, Chantal Hébert sees little room for a new party by ex-Bloc MPs to defend the province’s interests.
  • Paul Wells adds a heap of perspective sauce on the current pipelines-versus-environment debate playing out, and wonders if Trudeau can make it work.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/RoyNorton1/status/991871710172532736

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