Responsibility creates accountability, but public accountability drives the performance. Our current laws state people’s duties and powers but don’t require the directing minds of governments and their agencies to fully and fairly explain their intentions and reasons before they act.

It took a Qatar student, in a May 2011 BBC Doha debate on whether the Wikileaks disclosures were good or bad for society, to publicly point out the problem. He asked the debating panel a dead-centre public accountability question: “How can we trust the government if we don’t know what it’s planning?” Western legislators tout “democracy” but still haven’t installed the public accountability obligation in their laws that would allow citizens to sensibly decide their trust in their executive governments.

In the Arab World, and as well emerging in the entire Middle East, we will be seeing required major change in governance pprocesses. With it may well be installation in their new laws of the needed basic components of adequate government public accountability. And it would likely be before we see it in the self-congratulating West.

The basic public explanation standards are simple and need to be installed clearly as law if they are to be met for intentions of government that would affect citizens in important ways. Legislators and citizens must require the executive government to fully, fairly and publicly answer the following questions:

• Who would gain what benefits from what is proposed, and why they should, in both the short and longer term
• Who would bear what costs and risks, and why they should, in both the short and longer term; and
• Assuming the intention were to go ahead, who would be required to meet what standards of performance and public explanation in carrying out their responsibilities.

As the first United States president George Washington put it, in 1796:

“I am sure the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters….”

And as Dr. Ursula Franklin in her 1989 Massy Lectures clarified as the most important yet overlooked issue in public accountability:

“Whenever someone talks to you about the benefits and costs of a particular project, don’t ask, ‘What benefits?’ Ask ‘whose benefits, and whose costs?’”

But all we have produced in Canada, having no constitutional or other restriction, is a 2006 Federal Accountability Act purporting to cover off accountability but titled purposefully and fraudulently to cash in on the now-fashionable word “accountability.” The Act is instead a piecemeal collection of rules of conduct. As the government undoubtedly knew, responsibility is the obligation to act, but accountability is the obligation to explain.

We first have to clarify the meaning of public accountability. Public accountability means the obligation of authorities to explain publicly, fully and fairly, before and after the fact, how they are carrying out responsibilities that affect the public in important ways.

Installed in the law, the concept could not be simpler as a means of allowing citizens and their legislators to sensibly decide their trust in the executive government.

Holding to account means the process of extracting the needed public explanations from authorities at the time they are needed, validating them for their fairness and completeness and doing something fair and sensible with explanations given in good faith

The full title of the Federal Accountability Act describes it as “providing for conflict of interest rules, restrictions on election financing and measures respecting administrative transparency, oversight and accountability.” The government knew that measures “respecting… accountability” are related to accountability but are not the accountability requirement. Yet the title “Federal Accountability Act” would logically imply the public accounting required from authorities, particularly from the federal executive government. Therefore the Canadian federal government’s Accountability Act is no model for any country to use..

In Canada, elected representatives as municipal councilors, legislators and ministers of the Crown, and the hundreds of thousands of appointed civil servants have had no education in public accountability, let alone as a society imperative if the society is to work properly. Academics don’t teach it in their courses and in any case they don’t write for citizens.

Nor have accountable elected and appointed officials, boards and civil servants had training in publicly and adequately accounting for their responsibilities. This lack of understanding can be perpetuated and exploited by people in power.

We won’t have adequate public explanation obligations in the law until citizens see the need and require their elected representatives to install it. Canadians can be said to confront nothing, yet its citizens will readily grasp the importance, as the Qatar student did, of having valid answers to the three basic public explanation standards. This is because it would help them to sensibly and fairly decide their trust in their government’s motivation and ability to actually improve fairness in society.

The key is for citizens as activists to present the three public explanation standards to their elected representatives, ask them if they agree with the standards (and if not to say why) and ask what their elected representatives personally commit to doing to have the standards installed in the law.