Every time a finance minister deliberates over a pair of
shoes, what to buy to express their view of the country’s best way forward, I
am hopeful, hopeful that just once, there will be an extended discourse on accountability
mechanisms – you know, monitoring and reporting – I am always left with my
hopes dashed. To be fair, the last conservative government at least attempted with the Accountability
Act to give voice to the issue, the challenge is that substantive change to
government operations has seen very little evolution. There is a massive
requirement for real accountability, accountability that has ANY government
policy subjected to a public mission statement, metrics and indicators that
measure whether the mission statement has been met AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, an independent
assessment and reporting entity. I have lobbied the government repeatedly to
deliver this type of accountability, we focus attention on Senator
miss-spending or other “nickel and dime” issues, “nickel and dime” compared to
the billions of dollars government eats in wasted spending because, present
reporting mechanisms have such a long and winding, ambiguous accountability cycle
– there is just no resolution to the efficacy of spending for the public.
In business we have a “dashboard” to guide use, firstly,
there is always the bottom line as a gross measure of performance – there is
just no hiding from that. Secondly, in business, we have key metrics and
accompanying indicators that we use to measure performance. We also benchmark
our performance relative to the norm or our peers, indicators like market
share, gross margin, internal rate of return, and return on assets – a nearly
endless list of ratios and measures are used to ensure our decision-making is taking
us on the right path. The quality of a decision can only be assessed if it is
measured, if you can't measure you can't manage it. We need a dashboard for the
Canadian public, so they have an objective measure of governance; presently we
have no clear dashboard or clear communication of governmental performance.
There needs to be a government entity that is at arm’s
length from the government that firstly has a narrow mandate analogous to The Bank of Canada, to at least, publish, or preferably, limit government
spending to an agreed ratio with GDP or some other metric – the key being to
maintain government size and spending at optimum. Secondly, this entity would
report to the Canadian public on the efficacy of government spending against a
fully declared policy mission, metrics and indicators and reporting in a clear
and standardized manner.
The primary impediment to this dream coming true is; that any
incumbent government that institutes a measure such as this incurs a
disadvantage, because of the variance of accountability relative to past
accountability mechanisms. The best means for implementation are nonpartisan
development and deferred implementation – participants are always better at
developing policy absent immediate effect.
This is in no way left or right issue, this is an issue of
universal concern; regardless of what size you believe government should be, or
the degree of spending you want the government to do – we should all want to know
government funds are used wisely – we have no idea now.
More Thoughts On the Issue
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