Posts Tagged Harper

In the recent BBC TV Doha debate on whether Wikileaks is helpful or harmful to society, a Qatar student rose to ask the debaters that included two Americans likely instructed by their State Department, “How can we trust a government if we don’t know what it’s planning?” Dead centre as a public accountability question, with a Qatar student leaving behind Canadians mired in ritual after-the-fact accountability.

In 1796 George Washington wrote to a friend, saying:

“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…..”

After two hundred years of inadequate government accounting worldwide, Dr. Ursula Franklin of the University of Toronto’s Massey College, whose insight into the workings of society are unmatched, made the point clear in her prestigious 1989 Massey Lectures:

“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?’”

It took Dr. Franklin to show us the need to have government adequately explain before the fact. Answering the who question is central to the needed explanation. Dr. Franklin’s word “project” includes any intention of an authority that would affect citizens in important ways.

To make sensible decisions in their civic duty, legislators and citizens need full and fair public explanation of executive government intentions before the fact, at the time it is needed. This means government intention assertions of who is intended to have what outcomes and why they should, and who would bear what costs and risks, and why they should, in both the short and longer term. This allows sensible public challenge of government’s intentions and reasons. Public accounts and budget statements don’t help legislators decide from among alternatives, and performance audits after the fact don’t prevent intentions reasonably seen as running counter to the public good.

Set in the law, the requirement that all authorities produce full and fair public explanation of their intentions before the fact is likely the strongest single force for fairness in society.

It is a self-regulating influence on authorities because knowledgeable people and organizations will audit the fairness and completeness of the public assertions and make their assessment public. The result will likely raise or lower public trust in the authority, with loss of public trust meaning loss of power.

The standard of explanation needed by legislators and citizens requires the executive government to publicly explain, in what can be called an “equity statement,” each of its specific intentions that would affect the public in important ways:

• 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.

“Affect the public in important ways” is not vague. It is the equivalent of significance in published financial reporting.

Senior civil servants cannot claim that producing an equity statement for each major government intention is too costly: it requires no more information than the officials must have themselves to do their jobs properly. What they know, they can report.

Those opposing an apparent government intention can set out publicly their own equity statement for the intention, leaving legislators and citizens to judge which assessment is fairest.

This public explanation requirement cuts through ideology, spin and partisan ranting. The simple obligation to explain is unassailable, totally nonpartisan, and tells no one how to do their job. It is simply explanation. Citizens can then make their own decisions on the fairness of what the government intends.

Legislators and citizens alike will find this reporting structure and content reasonably complete and easy to understand. Knowing the intentions, they can then more sensibly and fairly decide their trust in the executive government’s ability and motivation.

Because public accountability is nonpartisan and not political policy, but is a society imperative if the society is to work properly, the Governor General can hold up signature of a Bill that doesn’t make clear who will publicly explain, how, for the discharge of important responsibilities assigned by the Bill.

For the same reason, it is open to auditors general, who stand outside the accountability relationship between the executive government and legislature but serve that relationship, to propose to the legislature that it require government to give before-the-fact public explanation for what it intends along the lines of what is proposed here as a standard.

Federally we have a litany of government intentions not meeting standards of public explanation before the fact that legislators and citizens have the right to see met. In BC, for example, we have a premier forced to resign over this issue, in the case of his executive government’s refusal to adequately and publicly explain its HST intention.

The refusal of an executive government to give full and fair public explanation before the fact is legitimately and in common sense the basis for a non-confidence motion.