Canadian politics has been gripped in a veritable "accountability frenzy" for much of the past two years. In many ways, it is reaching its climax this winter with the release of the second Gomery report and the swearing in this week of the new Conservative government, with its "Accountability Act" as its stated first order of business.
Indeed, political parties are virtually tripping over each other in their endorsements of Judge Gomery's 19 recommendations (and to think Moses was content with only 10 commandments).
But far from providing a remedy for what ails our body politic, this accountability crusade is actually fuelling two crises.
The first is the crisis in confidence of Canadians in their governments and politics. A decades-long series of legislative and regulatory initiatives have made Canadian governments - at all levels - more transparent than ever before. Scrutiny has never been more intense. There are a plethora of rules and regulations regarding the conduct of public officials and the governance of public institutions that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. Arguably, politics and government in Canada - generically - have never in our history been cleaner than they are today. And yet public distrust and cynicism toward them have never been greater.
Perhaps this was inevitable. After all, the more we know about what goes on in a restaurant kitchen, the less appetizing the items on the menu look to us. Why shouldn't the same be true with government?
The problem is perspective, or rather the lack thereof. The aberrant is portrayed as the norm. And sensationalism, whether to sell newspapers or gain political advantage, is the order of the day. In the political arena, it has become acceptable to accuse an entire government of having "links to organized crime" and to sprinkle every public pronouncement with assertions of an opponent's "corruption" (as Stephen Harper did), to wield a complaint to the RCMP as a political weapon (as NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis did) or to characterize oneself as a "wire brush that will scrub clean the stain on Canadian politics" (as Paul Martin was described by one of his staff).
The media, so quick to demand accountability of public officials, shows very little of its own. The Human Resources Development Canada "billion-dollar boondoggle" consumed the media for months in 2000 and has attained mythical status as an account of waste and mismanagement. As it happens, an exhaustive audit concluded that the amount that went missing was not $1-billion - it was $85,000. The "scandal," in other words, was phony. The media caravan moves on - but the damage is done.
In many ways, the second ongoing crisis caused by the accountability revolution is even more insidious: the paralysis of public administration.
I have worked in or with all three levels of government in Canada, and I have witnessed the same deadening phenomenon at play in each institution. Public servants work with one eye looking over their shoulder. They must not only make reasonable decisions, they must make decisions that can withstand the most infinitesimal scrutiny and the most deliberately unfriendly light and unfair interpretation.
The consequences can hardly be surprising: a culture of butt covering; the indefinite deferral of essential decisions; the triumph of process over results. Risk taking has become taboo. Initiative has been squelched. Creative solutions to public policy challenges have become stifled. In a perverse way, doing nothing has become the easiest, and certainly the safest, course. Because doing something - anything, really - may get you into trouble. Doing nothing won't.
This phenomenon is not unique to Canada. British academic Onora O'Neil has written at length of the "culture of suspicion" that is re-enforced by what she has dubbed "the audit society."
Indeed, the raft of solutions prescribed by Judge Gomery and embraced by all parties will only increase public distrust - and render government more dysfunctional. Put aside their "do as I say, not as I do" character - after all, Judge Gomery was not selected by the same fair, competitive process he advocates, nor, more tellingly, were his deputies, or the communications firm he single-sourced. More troubling is the built-in assumption that, since some fraud occurs, we must treat all public officials as potential defrauders. What was uncovered in the sponsorship program was fraud. It was unacceptable and should not be minimized. But wouldn't it have made more sense for Judge Gomery to recommend, say, increased criminal penalties for fraud, rather than erecting walls between elected officials and public servants?
The supreme irony of the accountability frenzy and its corrosive impact is that it is all so unnecessary. Our system has built into it the most ingenious accountability mechanism known to history, and one used just recently: It's called elections.
Peter Donolo, executive vice-president of the Toronto-based market research firm Strategic Counsel, served as director of communications for Jean Chrétien from 1991 to 1999.
