Roundup: Setting the Auditor General up for failure?

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Andrew Scheer was first out of the block this morning for a presser to call for the return of more in-person sittings of Parliament when the current suspension order lifts in a week’s time – which he is correct to do – but his bombast and rhetoric about Trudeau looking to avoid accountability is over the top and unnecessary, and simply alienates the audience he needs to persuade. Score another one for Scheer’s complete inability to read the room. Later in the day, the Procedure and House Affairs committee tabled its report recommending full virtual sittings (over my dead body – and yes, I’ll write more about this next week), but we’re faced with a number of MPs who immediately start to clutch their pearls about travel to Ottawa, as though there weren’t better options available to minimize said travel.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau was up next for his daily presser, and he announced some $450 million in funding for health researchers and others who have been unable to access the existing aid programmes due to technicalities, so it shows that the government has been responsive to some of the complaints that have been lodged about those programmes (well, those that are within federal jurisdiction, anyway). Trudeau also announced that the wage subsidy programme would be extended until August, as well as expanding the eligibility criteria, which is a signal that they are looking to transition more people on to the payrolls of their employers and not the CERB.

Little remarked upon was the fact that the nominee for Auditor General went before committee of the whole in the Senate yesterday, after they completed their debate on the dairy bill, as is customary for the appointment of any new Officer of Parliament. And Senator Peter Harder did make a pretty good intervention on the focus on value-for-money audits that the AG’s office seems to have shifted toward in recent years.

https://twitter.com/SenHarder/status/1261429867410751488

This having been said, I find myself irritated by this concern that MPs are apparently setting up the new AG for failure because her office is currently “underfunded.” Why? Because they created these conditions, and are trying to now blame the government for them. There have been concerns about the office’s resources, which are fair, and some of that blame has to lie with the previous AG, Michael Ferguson, who voluntarily cut his budget and put off needed IT overhauls in order to please the Harper government and its deficit reduction plans. The current government increased the funding, but apparently that’s not enough. But in the past few months, the current crop of MPs have passed a motion in the Commons to order the AG to audit the federal infrastructure programme in a politically motivated move to try and embarrass the government (when it was the slow response of provincial governments that has been holding up federal dollars going out the door), and then on the eve of the pandemic and the suspension of Parliament, MPs ordered the auditor general to track all of that spending rather than doing their jobs and checking the money before it goes out the door, like they’re supposed to. And now they want to complain that the Auditor General doesn’t have enough money to do the audits that he was working on before this happened? Seriously? Does nobody have any self-awareness? Add to that, this notion that the office needs an apolitical means of funding its budget so that governments can’t “politicize” the resourcing is technocratic bullshit that has no place in our system. Officers of Parliament have already been given way too much power and authority without any accountability for it, and now we want to turn over the ability for them to get any of the resources that they demand, when they already have no accountability? Seriously? Does nobody actually listen to themselves? Would that we could get some MPs who know their own jobs and do them. It would be embarrassing if they had any sense of shame.

Good reads:

  • Four of the soldiers working in Quebec nursing homes and one in Ontario have contracted COVID-19 as a result of this extraordinary deployment.
  • Health officials offered some clarity as to the purpose of the national stockpile, which was not to backstop provinces in the event of a pandemic.
  • Air Canada is planning to lay off some 20,000 employees as the airline sector is largely dormant and not expected to recover for some three years.
  • The Progressive caucus in the Senate is actively courting ISG members to defect.
  • Justin Ling walks through Peter MacKay’s dubious record as justice minister.
  • Now that membership sales are over, the Conservative leadership race shifts to the jockeying for positions on the ranked ballot, battling for second-place votes.
  • Andrew Scheer says he’s turning over a “well-oiled machine” to his successor. That’s…generous considering how much chaos the party organization is in.
  • My weekend column looks at why it’s an enormous shock that Senator Peter Harder reversed his previous positions and joined the Progressive caucus in the Senate.

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One thought on “Roundup: Setting the Auditor General up for failure?”

  1. Scheer says the CPC are a well-oiled machine. An interesting euphemism for greasy palms and robocalls. Besides, #HarperIsLurking, and will be so for quite some time, if this is any indication of where the “organization” stands.

    https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/05/15/Harper-Fingerprints-Leadership-Race/

    As Mike Meyers’ mother-in-law might say, “Talk amongst yourselves. The International Democratic Union is nationalist, undemocratic, and breaks unions. Discuss.”

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