government debt is an issue at every level. The Government of Canada, for example, currently allocates eleven cents of every tax dollar toward interest.[3] Federal income taxes could be reduced, or, alternatively, program spending could be increased, by 11 percent if governments over the last half-century had exercised more fiscal discipline. Meanwhile, municipalities, such as my hometown of Edmonton, spend upward of 13 percent of tax revenue collected on debt repayment.[4] Only the money allocated to the police service ranks higher than interest charges on the Edmonton Expenditure Statement,[5] a sobering fact that I reflect on every time I drive into a pothole.
So, how did we get into this mess? Stated simply, our elected officials have failed in their duty to be good stewards over the public purse. Government institutions, by their very nature, will attempt to grow both in scope and size; it is incumbent, therefore, on legislatures and municipal councils to provide a check on such institutions’ attempts at expansive growth.
It is not realistic to expect civil servants, at any level, to exercise fiscal discipline. In a culture where bureaucratic success and influence is measured by growth in the mandarin’s budget and the number of employees supervised, it is the job of elected representatives to defend taxpayers against unsustainable government growth. Many of the projects promoted by government, either by the bureaucratic social engineers or their political masters, are, of course, positive and laudable — the issue is whether or not they are affordable.
Affordability is both subjective and conditional on revenue, though the latter concept seems lost on institutions that are paying for projects with someone else’s money. Individuals and families, however, understand these concepts intuitively at the micro level. Every household understands that although one can purchase a home by taking out a mortgage one cannot live forever on borrowed funds.
The same family also understands that one cannot consistently use high-interest credit cards to pay for unnecessary, though perhaps desirable, consumer goods such as big screen televisions and exotic winter vacations. As long as the household is able to make the interest payments on its credit card debt, it will be like Canada: spending too much of its income on interest, and, therefore, reducing its actual purchasing power in the process. When the household ceases to be able to pay the required minimums, however, it becomes more like Detroit: insolvent.
Insolvency throws everything into disarray. In the case of personal bankruptcy, assets are surrendered, budgets are imposed, and creditors, some who might be personally known to the bankrupt, are left bitter and holding the bag. In the case of a government, like Detroit, becoming insolvent, the jobs and the vested pensions of public employees are threatened and all programs and services are jeopardized, whether necessary or not.
In the language of governmental budgeting, words like “desirable” and “necessary” have become synonymous; they are not. More troubling still, questions of affordability seem to become irrelevant once a project is deemed to be necessary, or even merely desirable.
It is not reasonable to expect a child to appreciate the difference between necessary and desirable (a child will still want to go to Disneyland notwithstanding the fact that his mother has just had her employment hours reduced); however, government bureaucrats should be able to make the distinction. The fact that they seem unable to may arise from the fact that the projects are being funded with public money rather than their own resources.
This concept is central to the principle of financial accountability — the person making the financial decisions, ideally, should be the one who is responsible for paying the tab. Since the child does not pay the bills in most households, he will generally not be able to distinguish between something that is a necessity, like school supplies or prescription medication, and something that is merely desirable, like a trip to Disneyland or a new Xbox.
Like the child, civil servants will often evaluate projects based on their desirability rather than their necessity or even their affordability. This is natural since they do not personally have to pay for the project themselves. But somebody does have to pay for these projects, and in the case of public works and government programs and services, that somebody is the taxpayer. Accordingly, if elected representatives do not keep an eye on public spending, public spending will go unchecked.
Every four years or so, the taxpayers elect a group of peers to represent them at the respective levels of government. The expectation is that the elected officials will provide representation; that they will pass appropriate laws and that they will hold government to account. The bureaucracy (i.e., the permanent government) does not represent taxpayers; their job is to design and administer government programs and services. It is the elected Parliament, legislatures, and municipal councils who must represent taxpayers if taxpayers are to be represented; it is the elected bodies that must hold government to account. Failing that, government will by definition become unaccountable.
As I will show in the following chapters, the people’s elected representatives in Canada have failed miserably in their constitutional duty to hold government to account. This is true for all levels of government. At the federal level, consolidation of power, first in the cabinet and more recently in the Prime Minister’s Office, has not only led to a diminished role for Parliament in both the budgetary and legislative processes, but also to the predictable growth in governments’ size and expense. Even “conservative” governments cannot resist the institution’s natural tendency toward expansion. Alongside of this, there has been a parallel growth in the government’s consolidation of power — something that has occurred at the expense of Parliament and its members. Ironically, the current executive’s attempts at neutering the legislative branch, including its own caucus, challenge its very claim to being conservative.
My decision to resign from the caucus of the governing Conservative Party was widely reported to be a result of the government’s deliberate decision to eviscerate my private member’s bill dealing with disclosure and transparency of public servant salaries, responsibilities, and expenses. Although this is true, my action was not motivated by private feelings of disappointment; rather, I resigned because I came to realize that the gutting was indicative of a more general lack of commitment to transparency and open government. Values that brought me into the conservative family — government accountability, transparency, and respect for taxpayers — had all either disappeared from the government of the day’s playbook, or had been so severely compromised, sacrificed at the altar of electoral expediency, as to become unrecognizable. The government seemed to me to have become less and less accountable, less and less answerable to the elected Parliament.
At the same time as media attention was aroused by my departure from the Conservative caucus, a major political scandal was also being seized on by the press. The Harper government was embroiled in several controversies, the most notable one involving the Senate. Three senators appointed by the prime minister (and one other) were all under investigation for filing ineligible, possibly fraudulent, expense claims. More scandalous in my view, the executive (in the form of the chief of staff of the prime minister) “gifted” $90,000 to a sitting legislator in an alleged effort to make the scandal go away and salvage the reputation of the Conservative appointment and its key fundraising asset.
This action, representing an obvious lack of separation between the executive and legislative branches of the Canadian government, shocked many Canadians, and facilitated a RCMP investigation into both of those branches. What Canadians do not realize is that in the “Ottawa Bubble,” that lack of separation is the norm — the executive constantly meddles in the affairs of the elected legislature, MPs, and even parliamentary committees.
Over the last generation, the executive has grown much too dominant and Parliament much too weak; in fact, things have become so bad that Parliament, supposedly the supreme legislative body in the land, could be described as subservient. Sadly, this has evolved to the point that the executive (the government) regards the legislative
