The article was to point out publicly to Senators what they could do for government public accounting, and was titled The Senate Can Cause Government to Account: Will It? The title given it by the Hill Times was inappropriate.

Both the House of Commons and Senate committees on Bill C-2 (the Federal “Accountability” Act) had it explained to them by the Hill Times 22 May 2006 that its title was fraudulent. There is nothing in the Bill on the requirement to account and the Conservatives in their election campaign knew it. Thus Mr. Harper’s government portrays itself to Canadians as serving accountability while acting to kill it off by having people think that accountability is conduct. Lately the press has sensibly shifted to calling it an ethics Bill, since it is about rules of conduct, not accountability.

Public accountability is 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. Responsibility is the obligation to act, whereas accountability is the obligation to explain — to report. Holding to account means exacting the needed accountings and doing something fair and sensible with accountings given in good faith.

For government policy, accountability means the obligation to publicly explain the achievement intentions and the rationale of the intended policy — which includes explaining why plausible policy intentions are not being pursued. It then means explaining the government’s intended performance standards and reasoning that clarify policy or regulatory intentions. Drugs safety and protecting the environment are good examples.

The benefit of officials having to publicly account is not just that elected representatives, senators and citizens get useful information they wouldn’t otherwise have, to decide their trust in government (access to information requests were never meant to substitute). The obligation to account publicly — if it is publicly audited for its honesty — causes a beneficial self-regulating effect on the conduct of those with the responsibilities. My next door neighbour’s dog knows this.

As a witness on accountability before the Senate’s C-2 committee, I was asked whether the Senate should hold up the Bill because of its misleading title. Obviously not. The PM would simply tell Canadians that the Senate was preventing him from installing the conduct rules that Canadians wanted, and back it would go to the Senate for passage. Amendments to the proposed rules are a different subject.

Knowing what public accountabilty is and is not, the House and Senate can legislate true government accountability. Each of the House and Senate committees were given the basics of a proper Government of Canada Public Accountability Act. But few would put money on the House acting, it being so used to supplication rather than reasonable citizen expectation. It will take citizens being educated and motivated enough to hold their MPs relentlessly to account to produce adequate public accountability legislation as a House initiative. But the Senate is another story.

Senators, less partisan, can simply tell the House that a Bill coming to them will be refused if it comes without an adequate standard public accountability section setting out, for each important responsibility assigned by the Bill, who is to account publicly, when and to what standard of accounting, for the discharge of what responsibilities. There are no legal or persuasive external constraints to the executive government creating reasonable public accountability obligations. The Senate C-2 committee knows this.

Senators would first decide what they mean by public accountability and the basic standards for public accounting that they think citizens have the right to see met. A public accountability committee of the Senate would then expose these to representative citizens for challenge. The public would totally support this Senate initiative to make itself more useful and credible to Canadians. Public accountability isn’t some particular government’s policy; it’s a non-partisan social imperative. The accountability obligation tells no one how to do their jobs, being simply the requirement to explain, and adequate public accountability is a pillar of the concept of democracy. No public accountings meeting a standard, no democracy — and no citizen trust in the executive government. We all know what denial and blind trust bring us.

The fairness and completeness of public accountings apply to both ministers and deputy ministers for their respective commonsense responsibilities. Ministers stay ultimately accountable because they decide the quality of their deputies for deputies’ management control responsibilities.

If the Senate found public accountability provisions deficient in a Bill, the Senate would tell the public why it was withholding approval. Citizens will understand the implications of refusal to supply full and fair accountings. An example is whistleblower protection. So long as the protection Act fails to include the provision that the responsible minister and deputy minister will publicly state (a) their respective performance standards for actual protection of whistleblowers (those acting as the last-resort public accounting suppliers), and (b) whether they think they met the standards, we can’t expect a protection Act to do its job. (The House and Senate C-2 committees know this, but apparently did not ask for this amendment in C-2’s coverage of whistleblowing.)

We can have all the conferences we want that include “accountability” in the title yet which talk mainly about different responsibilities. Back-bench MPs, Senators and citizens still won’t get practical help on how to actually hold the executive government to account day-to-day — how to exact the needed public accountings. Government officials will legitimately distrust the intentions of politicians until the legislators show that they will use government accountings fairly.

If we are really serious about something we legislate it. The way forward is clear for the Senate if it wishes to force reasonable public accountability as the law. Within a year from now we will know how serious the Senate is, and we will know whether both chambers have evaded true public accountability.

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