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Officers of Parliament have come under increasing scrutiny in the media, and none too soon. They have been in fashion for some time, and their number and mandate have expanded considerably. Establishing new officers of this kind, however, can never get at the root cause of what ails our institutions. The issue is much broader and needs the urgent attention of Canadians and our elected representatives. In brief, the unwritten part of our Constitution and our national political and administrative institutions simply no longer correspond to present-day requirements.
The chain of accountability, from voters to MP, from MP to prime minister and cabinet ministers, from ministers to the heads of government departments and agencies, and from senior civil servants to front-line managers to their employees, has broken down. No officer or officers of Parliament can repair it. They have neither the mandate nor the legitimacy to play more than a supporting role.
The relationship among Parliament, the prime minister, ministers and public servants is in need of repair, and we are ill served by pretending that all is well. We should no longer tolerate court government, by which a political leader with the help of a handful of courtiers shapes and reshapes instruments of power at will. Those with the power to introduce change for the better are reluctant to do so because they enjoy being able to wield tremendous power.
We need to define, preferably in law, the role of the prime minister, cabinet and the public service and give public servants an administrative space of their own to manage government operations, while recognizing that the prime minister and ministers must always have the authority to override public servants in all matters not covered by statutes.
Donald Savoie (University of Moncton)
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PATCHWORK
Instead of recognizing that our machinery of government is structured for a world that no longer exists, we keep patching things up, thinking the next patch will finally fix things for good. We have, over the past 25 years or so, introduced access to information legislation and measures to protect whistleblowers, and added several new officers of Parliament. By one count, we now have 11 such officers, including the newly created Parliamentary Budget Officer to "ensure truth in budgeting." This suggests that public servants can never be as credible as officers of Parliament. The message can hardly be lost on officials in the Department of Finance. In addition, officers of Parliament have been created without clarifying how they fit into the constitutional framework. Parliament itself appears to have lost its way, and its decline has been well documented.
Yet Parliament is the one institution that truly should matter to Canadians, the only one that constitutes the democratic link between citizens and their government and connects citizens from British Columbia to Newfoundland and Labrador. Ordinary Canadians do not have access to lobbyists — modern-day witch doctors — and so they must look to their MPs to speak on their behalf in Ottawa.
Parliamentarians, it seems, have turned over much of their accountability responsibilities to officers of Parliament and to the media. Officers of Parliament have somehow projected the belief that they are able to provide objective evidence about almost any public policy and administrative matter. They are independent of government and now also increasingly of Parliament: thus, their claim to be the source of objectivity. For the most part, they are answerable to themselves alone. John Reid, a former information commissioner lamented in public that, when it comes to their own accountability, MPs all but ignored them. They have an oversight function, but always from a narrow perspective, and no one is charged with providing a broad overarching perspective. The result is that those in government have several independent voices constantly looking over their shoulders from different and at times conflicting perspectives (for example, privacy versus access to information).
Opposition parties view officers of Parliament as their natural allies and do not want to challenge them, let alone hold them to account. Best to let them wander wherever they want, in the hope that they will uncover a situation embarrassing to the government. Meanwhile, the prime minister, ministers and even MPs on the government side, should they question their work, are immediately taken to task by opposition MPs and the media for tampering with their independence. Because they operate largely unchallenged in a special zone, it is no exaggeration to say that what an officer of Parliament writes is often taken as gospel, but what a government minister or official says is invariably regarded as self-serving or as posturing.
