Comments made the Parliamentary Budget Officer over the weekend should have him very nervous for his future, as he is straying far beyond his mandate. The PBO, Yves Giroux, was in the media saying that current deficit levels are “unsustainable” within one or two years, which both misreads the current situation, and is venturing into opining on policy choices, which is not his job.

As an Independent Officer of Parliament, he has a certain degree of latitude for doing the job he is tasked with doing, which is to provide costing for proposals on demand by parliamentarians – something which can be a very creative exercise at times – and to provide independent fiscal forecasts of federal budget numbers – also something which has been made redundant because the Department of Finance doesn’t publish their forecasts any longer as the current practice is to take the average of the top twenty private sector forecasts and use those in budget documents. But he’s not invulnerable – Independent Officers can still be fired for cause, and Giroux seems to be flirting with that line.

It’s possible that Giroux doesn’t understand just what he’s doing when he’s answering these media requests, but it’s not the first time that he’s said dumb things in the media, such as a few weeks ago when Bill Morneau resigned that it was akin to “changing pilots mid-flight” (apparently unaware that this is actually standard practice on long-haul flights). He’s supposed to be a lot more circumspect, by virtue of his position, and not offer up any kind of opinion on policy choices. He is not there to second-guess the government and its actions – this is not a technocracy. He is supposed to provide cost estimates when asked, and provide independent forecasts (and as we saw in the election, sometimes he has trouble with the former when he simply put certain parties’ promises on his letterhead without actually doing any analysis of them). Offering opinions on policy choices impacts his ability to be independent, which he should know if he had any particular sense about him. I suspect that someone – perhaps a former PBO who is feeling particularly charitable – needs to pull him aside and to tell him to stop answering all of these media requests, and if he does accept them, to stick to the very narrow contents of his reports. His predecessors largely did not have this problem. Other Officers of Parliament do not have this problem. He needs to undertake to rectify it.

Good reads:

• Steven Guilbeault says that big tech companies have proven that they can’t regulate themselves, and new legislation is on the way.
• Canada joining an International Criminal Court genocide application regarding Myanmar has us being subjected to cries of hypocrisy because of the MMIW inquiry.
• CBSA has turned back over 18,000 Americans since March who were trying to cross the border for non-essential reasons.
• Some 1600 veterans have benefitted from the programme to give them priority in federal job hires, but could have been higher because most didn’t know about it.
• Mike Moffatt offers more context on federal debt servicing costs, and why they are likely to continue to decline even with bigger deficits in the near term.
• Chantal Hébert suspects that the public mood for radical transformation may not be as prevalent as Justin Trudeau believes it to be.
• Susan Delacourt explores how the pandemic broadened the differences between Doug Ford and Trump, in particular in how Ford relates to small businesses.

Odds and ends:

In my latest Loonie Politics video, I discuss what happens with the WE Investigations upon the return of Parliament.

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.