Information and Empire

The case of the Parliamentary Budget Officer again locking horns with the federal government because of a request for information is symptomatic of a broader problem.  The PBO is giving the government until the fall to release additional details of planned budget cuts or will take them to court.   Naturally, in Ottawa’s current budgetary siege mentality, the reluctance of a majority of government departments/organizations to provide information (apparently only 18 out of 82 have complied) in response to a request by the PBO is bureaucratic self-interest.  After all, any criticism of the government is viewed as an attack and the source of the information itself can become a retaliatory target.  In an era of budget cuts, civil servants are becoming super cautious.

The focus of this issue has become the tug of war between the PBO and the Conservative government.  This is wrong as the PBO is pursuing its mandate.  This would not be the case if there was an effective political opposition in Ottawa but the state of the Liberals and the NDP as political opposition is so poor that the current federal government now sees bureaucrats, professional expertise and the media as the opposition and responds accordingly. In many respects, the PBO has been let down by the public and particularly the opposition whose ineffectiveness has allowed the PBO to take most of the heat for its budgetary analyses.  In essence, the messenger has become the message and the issue rather than the analysis provided.  A more able opposition would have been out there getting the legal opinions and threatening to take the government to court thereby preempting the PBO.

Despite vocal statements of commitment to open government and debate, politicians usually only like such debate when in opposition.  Indeed, the idea of an independent public budget watchdog with free and timely access to government budgetary and financial data was created by the Conservatives in their early days when they still very much had an opposition mentality.   It is an amazing example of time inconsistent behaviour. Once entrenched in office, from the lowliest municipal councilor to the mightiest cabinet minister, politicians do not like to be criticized. While the Liberals and the NDP may publically applaud the PBO, even they perhaps realize that down the road roles may be reversed.

Yet, politicians have chosen a vocation where criticism is constant and one should expect them to have thicker skins. Deep down they all seem relatively insecure and thin-skinned and expert opinion - unless it is of the cheer leading variety - is often resented. Anyone who knows more than a politician makes them "look bad" and unfortunately in today's knowledge based economy, that is a lot of people.

The solution? The fuel for criticism is information. Reduce the numbers and statistics and the ammunition for criticism is gone.  Without evidence, criticism is no longer informed analysis but merely speculation. That levels the playing field between politicians and their critics.  The result is a gutting of information infrastructure as in the case of Statistics Canada and the census.  This is not a recent phenomenon.  Have we forgotten the end of the Ontario Economic Council or the Economic Council of Canada? Is it a surprise?

For many politicians, their concept of “public debate” occurs in the scripted public consultations they stage.  My personal favorite is the Ontario Far North Act where in response to continued criticism by First Nations and the northern Ontario business community, the Ontario Natural Resources minister responded with an op-ed in the Thunder Bay paper that essentially stated that the act was being misunderstood and needed better explanation upon which the same government points were reiterated. Obviously some politicians believe debate means saying the same thing over and over until people give up.

Do we give up and continue this imperial phase of Canadian government that has been decades in the making?  Has government in Canada simply become a case of “Rome has spoken, the case is closed”?  Is there not an irony that the government emphasis on documenting accountability and transparency throughout the broader public sector is increasingly accompanied by less and less access to effective information? Yet, how do we have evidence-based decision making without evidence and without the cut and thrust of real policy debate? Politicians have lost sight of the fact that their positions are to make decisions as representatives of the public and not as ruling overlords.  Politicians have chosen an up front public role and yet often take public policy criticism on an initimate and very personal level.  To be fair, politicians have a tough job and the public scrutiny is merciliess.  Nevertheless, politicians should understand that in the absence of good information, evidence and analysis, all you are left with is personalities and even more personality-based politics, which can make politicians both look and behave even worse. 

Comments

[Brian D.]

Good post, Livio.

[Simon van Norden]

I hadn't heard about the PBO's trouble getting info. Could you suggest any links I can use to reduce my Ignorance Quotient on this issue?

[Livio Di Matteo]

Simon:
Just go into Google News and search "Parliamentary Budget Officer" or "Kevin Page".

[Jeremy Fox]

On a related note, Crooked Timber will be publishing a series of posts on the growing push for "Open Data" and its implications for politics and government:

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/25/open-data-seminar/

Hopefully there will be some discussion of the appalling Canadian situation, which you've articulated very well.

[Lorenzo from Oz]

There is a rich irony in this in that transforming society so it is more "legible" to the state has been a central project for states for centuries (see James C Scott's "Seeing Like a State). On the upside, blocking information is a protection mechanism that equally goes back and implies a feeling that there is a more powerful force than oneself. So, in an odd sort of way, it is nod to fear (and so the power) of democratic accountability.

[Wonks Anonymous]

For those interested in information and "Seeing Like a State", Tom Slee (author of "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart", who has commented here before) has an interesting post at Crooked Timber.

[Determinant]

A more able opposition would have been out there getting the legal opinions and threatening to take the government to court thereby preempting the PBO.

This is rarely, if ever done in Canada. It's a waste of political parties' dollars. As a contributor to the NDP, it is certainly a waste of the money I have donated to the party.

MP's can request documents through a procedure which complements Question Period. It's used frequently. Further, outright lying to the House is illegal so you have to have at least the bare colour of truth to your claims. There is Question Period and by convention the Finance Committee is chaired by a member of the Opposition so as to provide a strong counterbalance to the government's power of the purse.

Political parties have access to much cheaper tools than lawsuits.

Second, we are recovering from one of the greatest political upheavals in modern history at the Federal level. The NDP is fighting tooth and claw over the F-35 estimates in committee, but of course it has gotten little coverage.

In fairness the media in Canada is in shock. There are a plethora of pundits, reporters and editorialists who made their career being Liberals. They just can't or won't talk about the NDP. Genuine NDP pundits are very rare and often inexperienced, they almost never got the time of day from corporate media before.

I doubt this problem of commentary will resolve itself before the next election. If, as I hope and suspect, the NDP at least maintains its Official Opposition status (or dream of dreams actually forms a government, almost certainly a minority one), the media may start to bring itself around.

Lastly, it isn't so much that the NDP or Liberals are ineffective, it's that the Conservatives have a special contempt for the Public Service, they want it cut, don't trust its senior leadership and see it as riven with Liberal supporters who see the Liberal Party as the Natural Governing Party and the Tories as interlopers to be tolerated at best. This has some truth actually, much as it pains me to say it.

[Billiam Smith]

I'm afraid I'll have to self-identify as one of those who "don't get what all the fuss is about", specifically with respect to what the PBO is asserting as his need-to-know. The central question to my mind is, "Does the PBO need item-by-item program cut details to accurately forecast spending, or is it sufficient for him to work with the numbers the government has allocated for each department in the budget?"

As I understand it, the PBO was created to serve a similar function to the Congressional Budget Office in the US: essentially to sanity-check budget cost projections for new spending initiatives (it's worthwhile observing that the US has no equivalent to our Treasury Board Secretariat, where that happens in the Public Service). I don't suppose anyone imagined in creating the PBO that it would be used to challenge budget cut projections.

It seems self-evident to me that in many departments the Pubic Service hasn't yet worked out exactly what programs will be reduced/cut to meet the budget targets, nor exactly who's positions will be made redundant (and since the approach seems to be to achieve reductions through attrition, there's no particularly compelling reason to make those decisions "today"). Of course the government doesn't want to say, "Well we don't know, exactly" when asked how its targets will be met, but that doesn't mean that just because they haven't finished a thorough line-by-line analysis of a $170B budget that the targets can't be met (as will be asserted by the Opposition).

I would suggest that the PBO is attempting to fill the constitutional role of the Opposition in demanding this information, but is that truly the role of the PBO? I don't buy into the newspaper-friendly PBO-vs.-government paradigm playing out in the media, since I rather suspect the Conservatives are more happy to have the PBO exist than not (they created it, after all, and then augmented its budget many times). I believe that it's a simple matter of a diligent bureaucrat doing what he feels is right and a government who's trying to do a necessary job navigating though politically tough waters (the real opposition for them is not the Official Opposition, but the Public Service that has been heel-dragging on a large number of government priorities).

That being the case, it doesn't really serve much purpose to try to study motivations: the real question is whether or not the PBO needs what he's asking for to fulfill his mandate, and whether his mandate is truly what he seems to believe it is. I don't have the insight to answer those questions.

[Simon van Norden]

"Just go into Google News and search "Parliamentary Budget Officer" or "Kevin Page"."

As usual, the standard media coverage sucks; there is more discussion of style and spin than substance.
Is that all you got?

[Livio Di Matteo]

"Is that all you got?"

Well, I'm afraid it does not seem to have made the New York Times or The Guardian yet.

[Shangwen]

The issue of the government's combativeness on this is certainly depressing, but as with so many other things about this government, I am of the "meet the new boss" school of thought. Those over 30 may remember the infamous centralization and message control that occurred under Chretien; the only difference with the Tories is that they are more overtly neurotic about it. I know the PBO wasn't around in the 90s and early oughts, but when Chretien had faced information requests of this type during his reign, he usually said, "Whatever", let people do their thing, then went on to ridicule and harass any critics, and defended his gangsta ministers in the House. The only difference between that era and the current one is that we have gone from Anitsocial Personality Disorder to Paranoid Personality Disorder. (And, frankly, if Harper tried to strangle someone in public, he would have been sent fleeing to Miquelon; the last guy just laughed it off.)

It is true that the context has changed and information is more available. But so is misinformation. And since the latter is more readily crafted and controlled, everyone--governments, opposition parties, and outsiders--have a greater incentive to develop misinformation than to dig up and review real information.

I agree with Billiam that there is much going in the civil service (according to my sources) that is simply unresolved and highly uncertain, and reliable information may not yet exist. I think this also has to be looked at in organizational terms where a relatively new entity (PBO) simply does not have enough history behind it for its role to be relatively settled in government, in contrast to the CBO in the US.

[Stephen Tapp]

Hi Simon,

In 2008, the PBO worked with the government's central agencies to establish a formal information protocol. The details are available here:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/PBO-DPB/documents/Information%20Protocol.pdf

All formal PBO info requests and government responses to-date can be found here:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/PBO-DPB/InformationRequests.aspx?Language=E

[Bob Smith]

I'm surprised we haven't seen a post about this: http://www42.statcan.gc.ca/smr09/smr09_039a-eng.htm

[Jacques René Giguère]

Bob Smith: darkness is the new standard.