This op-ed arose because politicians mired in ritual avoid understanding public accountability yet it is an imperative in society

by Henry E. McCandless

Be on your guard. The next federal election campaign will be full of “accountability.” The Liberal government is saying that they are now providing it, and the Conservatives are saying that they will put their version in the law. Each is ducking what accountability really means. And Commissioner Gomery’s explanation isn’t helpful to citizens. You’ll hear “accountability” mouthed by candidates who don’t know what it means or who use the term misleadingly. This isn’t a minor issue. Voters had better know what accountability means and doesn’t mean, or we will all be duped.

For citizens, public accountability is simply 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.

Accountability is therefore the obligation of authorities to account . They will explain publicly and adequately, before the fact, their intentions and reasoning and their performance standards. After the fact they will explain what resulted, whether they met agreed performance standards, and how they applied the learning available to them. Accountability is not political policy; it is a society imperative.

The purpose of public accountability is to increase the fairness of decisions by authorities. It does this by forcing out information that citizens need to sensibly decide their trust in decision-makers. As well, because the reporting is public and nonpartisan and stands to be publicly audited, it creates a powerful self-regulating influence on authorities’ intentions and performance. We have neither of these crucial benefits because public accountability today meets no reasonable standard.

Accountability doesn’t mean responsibility, the obligation to act, but the two are closely related. For example, departmental ministers of the Crown have the responsibility to inform themselves about what’s going on in their departments and agencies, meeting a standard of self-informing that citizens have the right to see met. Thus ministers can reasonably be expected to report to the House of Commons whether they think they are meeting that standard — a central issue in the federal HRDC and sponsorship disgraces. The responsible Ministers must not be able to claim “I didn’t know.”

Accountability doesn’t mean installing more “controls” and monitoring (the current federal government line). And it doesn’t mean buck-passing by giving more powers to parliamentary watchdogs to have them do the MPs’ duty of holding government to account (the Conservative line).

Holding to account means exacting from authorities — in this case the federal executive government — the needed public explanations at the time they are needed, validating the accountings for their fairness and completeness and doing something fair and sensible with answering given in good faith. MPs need to learn how to do this effectively. It doesn’t mean shouting at each other across the floor, asking rhetorical questions and killing off accounting in good faith by partisan use of government’s reporting. But we allow this by imposing no performance standards on our MPs.

Management control means ensuring that what should happen does, and what shouldn’t happen, doesn’t. Thus an important implication of the Gomery reports is not just the level of public trust in a particular political party. It is the standards that government officials must meet in their spending control diligence and in their public accounting for that diligence.

Ministers and senior civil servants don’t tell us what they think are the reasonable management control and accountability reporting standards for themselves to prevent further disgraces. So we can’t judge their adequacy. They don’t tell us whether they think they are meeting standards that citizens are entitled to see met, and inquiry commissioners avoid people’s accountability reporting obligations. Setting the needed standards must not be left in the hands of the executive government and parliamentary committees having government majorities. As well, we need the Auditor General to tell us whether the accountability reporting to the House of Commons by these officials is fair and complete.

The leadership candidates have yet to tell us what they would install and buttress in law as the control and reporting standards for their ministers and deputies. Without this commitment we will never get the information we need to decide our trust in government, and we will forego a powerful self-regulating influence on ministers and senior civil servants.

Don’t put money on seeing the leaders make this commitment. Candidates will sing their leaders’ songs because there will be tacit agreement across the board not to commit to standards in accountability. Making this happen will require voters to overcome Pogo’s “We have met the enemy and he is us” and to ask their candidates what they think accountability means, compare the responses to a commonsense concept of public accountability, and ask them whether their caucus will work to install it in the law — and if not, why not.

Henry McCandless was a Principal in the Office of the Auditor General of Canada and is the author of A Citizen’s Guide to Public Accountability: Changing the Relationship Between Citizens and Authorities (www.accountabilitycircle.org).