Never, ever take a knife to a gunfight. Federal politicians are recklessly ignoring that imperative by resisting Sheila Fraser’s request to take a peek at how MPs spend some $500 million a year on expenses.
It’s not just that the auditor general is vastly more credible. It’s that a dysfunctional House of Commons long ago ceded accountability to a pack of watchdogs.
It’s an awkward truth but not even politicians trust politicians any more. Given a choice between doing their elected duty and off-loading responsibility, those elected to act in the public interest delegate democracy’s heavy-lifting to others.
You name it and someone here is supposedly keeping a sharp eye on it.
Among many other things, public accounts, access to information, lobbying and ethics are all under the scrutiny of auditors, independent officers and commissioners.
Superficially comforting, the appointment of so many overseers is an indirect admission of serial failures. Parliament and its many committees are no longer capable of following taxpayer dollars. They can’t force ruling parties to be open with the citizens they swear to serve.
Unsettling in themselves, those failures are made infinitely worse by the frailty of the fixes. Once appointed, public watchdogs are systemically held on the shortest possible leash.
Proof of that pattern is easily found. It’s self-evident in the year Fraser has been kept waiting for an answer to her reasonable request to open MP books. It’s in the stacked reports of consecutive information commissioners accusing Liberal and Conservative governments of intentionally frustrating the access law’s letter and spirit. It’s in loopholes this government left in the lobbying regulations it wrote and in its determined effort to cripple the budget officer it created.
If the evidence wasn’t so conclusive, MPs might have had a chance in their fight with Fraser.
Instead, they are positioned on the wrong side of political history and public opinion. In more ways than one, that’s a shame. Along with reminding voters that Stephen Harper hasn’t been noticeably more successful than Paul Martin in slashing the democratic deficit, it also muffles an important debate.
A case can be made that officers of Parliament are accountable to Parliament, not the other way around. Officials with offices that in some cases have grown into bureaucratic empires should be helping MPs do their work, not doing it for them.
With one exception, there’s no reason why MPs, operating transparently and assisted by respected auditors, can’t monitor their own spending.
The pivotal exception is that the job isn’t being done in a way that instills confidence.
Confronted by that reality, wise MPs would agree to let the auditor general peek over their shoulders. On top of taking a small step toward restoring faith in their prudence, her performance-oriented audits could reasonably be expected to give more bang for the taxpayer buck.
Most of all, her work would help persuade understandably suspicious Canadians that those they elect aren’t slipping sticky fingers into the public purse. That suspicion would only be a shadow if Parliament wasn’t so dysfunctional. It wouldn’t haunt MPs if the watchdogs, let loose because the system is so dysfunctional, were allowed to sniff where they please and bark when something’s wrong.
But that’s not the way it is and MPs are now making it worse. In trying to keep Fraser at arm’s length they are again shooting themselves in the foot.
Jim Travers writes for The Toronto Star Syndicate.