How many times have Liberal and Conservative governments offered plans to fight global warming? Have you ever seen a credible analysis of what any of those plans would cost – in lost jobs, in lost productivity, in carbon credits purchased or taxes raised?
You haven't. No government, and no opposition party, has seen fit to put a price on greenhouse-gas reduction. Instead, they go on about new technologies and green jobs.
The Parliamentary Budget Office is ready and willing to cost the current Conservative plan to reduce emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels, not later than 2020. They could get started tomorrow. The problem is, there's no money. The PBO's whole budget for this fiscal year is only $2.8-million, and may well end up being a million dollars less.
Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, has done too good a job. He has repeatedly embarrassed growth and deficit predictions by the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty. He has exposed the true cost of the war in Afghanistan. He could, if he had the money, tell us what fighting climate change would do to the economy and the country's finances.
But Mr. Page has also deliberately violated his legislative mandate, and now he doesn't have a friend left in town, which has made him dangerously vulnerable to an angry bureaucracy and to his political masters.
The old order is threatened. The old order is fighting back. The Parliamentary Budget Office is in clear and present danger of being gutted.
BANISHED TO THE LIBRARY
Mr. Page is a career civil servant, but you'd never know it. Intense, frank, passionate, he is obsessed with making the new Parliamentary Budget Office something that completely changes the game in Ottawa, by independently judging the accuracy of government projections, and the economic consequences of legislation and policies.
“Why shouldn't we have the best budget office in the world?” he asked in an interview. “What's to stop us from being every bit as good as the Americans in five years?”
He sees the Parliamentary Budget Office, which has been in operation for a year and a half, as the Canadian equivalent of Washington's Congressional Budget Office, the powerful independent agency that, among its other duties, costs proposed legislation in the House of Representatives and the Senate. One reason the Obama administration is having so much trouble getting a health-care reform bill passed is that the CBO estimated that the initial proposal would increase the federal deficit by $1-trillion (U.S.) over 10 years, which gave even Democrats pause.
The CBO struggled in its early years to secure the independence it needed to build its current solid reputation for accuracy and objectivity. The PBO faces the same challenge, and the prognosis is grim.
In response to repeated low-balling by Liberal governments of projected revenues, opposition leader Stephen Harper promised to create an independent parliamentary budget authority to provide “truth in budgeting.”
But once the Conservatives were in government, a fully independent CBO-style agency scrutinizing the government's fiscal forecasts suddenly seemed not to be such a good thing. So the Tories squirrelled the PBO away in the Library of Parliament and gave it barely enough money to do a bare-bones job.
Despite these limitations, the PBO began releasing reports that consistently and accurately refuted government projections.
First, the PBO declared that the real cost of the mission in Afghanistan had reached between $14-billion and $18-billion, more than twice as high as the government estimate. (It didn't help that the report landed in the midst of the 2008 federal election campaign.) Mr. Page then contradicted Mr. Flaherty's November, 2008, economic update, which predicted surpluses in the face of an accelerating recession.
Three months ago, he declared that the federal government now had a structural deficit that would not disappear once the recession ended, and that either spending would have to be cut or taxes raised if the budget was to be brought back into balance. Mr. Harper called either action “very dumb policy,” but a number of independent economists sided with Mr. Page.
