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Liberal fiscal plans less transparent than under Harper, Kevin Page says
Kevin Page, Canada’s former parliamentary budget officer, says the Liberal government is even less transparent on fiscal matters than their Conservative predecessors. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
Canada’s former parliamentary budget officer says the Liberal government is even less transparent on fiscal matters than the Conservative government it succeeded.
“I don’t think it is [more transparent]. The documents — they’re not better from a government that promised to be better, more transparent … there’s no more information, perhaps even less information, than what we got from the previous government,” Kevin Page said said in an interview CBC Radio’s The House.
“I don’t think we’ve seen the transparency yet,” he said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on a pledge to run three “modest” deficits of no more than $10 billion a year. But Finance Minister Bill Morneau released his second fiscal update this week ahead of the March 22 federal budget, and his figures show it will be much higher than that.
The deficit will balloon to $18.4 billion in 2016-17 and $15.5 billion in 2017-18 — and that is before any new spending Morneau outlines in the March budget. Those numbers are drastically different from the $3.9-billion and $2.4-billion shortfalls forecast just three months ago.
“A less ambitious government might see these conditions as a reason to hide, to make cuts or to be overly cautious. But our government might see that the economic downturn makes our plan to grow the economy even more relevant than it was a few short months ago,” Morneau said Monday.
Page, who frequently squared off with the previous Conservative government over their fiscal secrecy, says his concerns about transparency stem from a lack clarity around the deficit figure.
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Civil Service Infected by Culture of Intimidation, Say Former Top Bureaucrats
Civil Service Infected by Culture of Intimidation, Say Former Top Bureaucrats
Kevin Page and Linda Keen say their experiences show need for reform.
No matter who forms government after Monday’s election, they need to move quickly to end the culture of intimidation, inefficiency and top-down management that infects Canada’s public service, say two former top bureaucrats.
Former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page and the former nuclear safety watchdog Linda Keen agree the public service needs major, quick reform.
Page was the independent budget officer from 2008 to 2013 and worked in the federal civil service for 27 years in various departments. He said many current practices need to go.
Too many people are being appointed to powerful positions with little or no experience in a department, he said. “These people are moving paper around as opposed to engaging and providing fearless advice to cabinet ministers.”
And though many civil servants may be proven performers, many appointments to top jobs are made based on relationships and networking instead of looking for the best candidate, Page said. He too was guilty of this, he acknowledged.
That’s resulted in civil servants more concerned with keeping deputy ministers and MPs happy and delivering services however the government wants instead of providing alternative, more effective solutions, he said.
Often agencies like the Privy Council Office are calling the shots, Page said, and department heads aren’t really able to fulfill their responsibilities. The control extends to trying to intimidate civil servants during meetings, he said.
“You could see the steering and control that was taking place,” Page said. “It wasn’t a one-on-one relationship with a deputy minister in an aligned department. The central agencies were playing on the control issue.”
The public sector bonus system can also be used to ensure deputy ministers’ willingness to do the government’s bidding, Page said.
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Is Canada Next? Recession Is “Quite Contained”
Is Canada Next? Recession Is “Quite Contained”
“In the current context, if you look at the growth numbers, the recession is effectively in the goods sector, it’s in the oil industry, it’s weak growth in manufacturing, weak growth in construction,” explained Kevin Page, Canada’s former parliamentary budget officer, a watchdog role charged with analyzing the state of the economy and government finances.
“It’s quite contained,” he told CBC radio, with an eerie echo of the Fed’s description of the US housing bust in the early stages of the Financial Crisis. There’s “still lots of growth in the service sector,” he said.
That’s what everyone is hoping. And it would just be a technical recession – two consecutive quarters of negative growth – rather than an official recession.
There wasn’t a lot of room for optimism. The economy shed 6,400 jobs in June, according to Statistics Canada, with gains in full-time jobs and losses in part-time jobs. The unemployment rate remained at 6.8%, same since February. But there are numerous indications that contractors, which do much of the work in the oil patch, are still working, but a lot fewer hours, and that this deterioration, in Calgary for example, hasn’t been fully captured by unemployment statistics.
“If you look at the job picture, it’s gotten progressively weaker through the summer,” Page said. “I think that would be a concern for the government and a concern for the overall strength of our economy.”
“The economy’s weak, you can’t deny that,” Page added. “It will be pretty hard for Minister Oliver to keep that line that we’re not in a technical recession.”
Which is exactly what Finance Minister Joe Oliver has been “adamant” in denying, according to CBC. He referred to the 96,000 full-time jobs created so far in 2015 and cited, of all things, the IMF, which “confirmed what I and numerous independent analysts have been saying – the Canadian economy will grow this year.”
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Canada’s technical recession ‘contained,’ says former PBO Kevin Page
Ex-parliamentary budget officer says there is ‘still lots of growth in the service sector’
Although Canada is in a likely technical recession — defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth — it’s a recession that is contained, says former budget watchdog Kevin Page.
“In the current context, if you look at the growth numbers, the recession is effectively in the goods sector, it’s in the oil industry, it’s weak growth in manufacturing, weak growth in construction,” said Page in an interview on CBC Radio’s The House.
“It’s quite contained. There’s still lots of growth in the service sector.”
But Page, who served as Canada’s first parliamentary budget officer from 2008-2013, cautioned against reading too much optimism into the numbers.
The Canadian economy lost 6,400 jobs in June as gains in full-time work were offset by losses of part-time jobs, according to Statistics Canada.
The jobless rate stayed steady at 6.8 per cent, the same level it has been at since February. It was a better showing than what a consensus of economists were expecting, which was a loss of about 10,000 positions, but Page said the pattern remains one of shrinking growth.
“For the second quarter we had net job creation of more than 30,000, but if you look at the trend in June we actually declined,” he said.
“So if you look at the job picture, it’s gotten progressively weaker through the summer. I think that would be a concern for the government and a concern for the overall strength of our economy.”
“The economy’s weak, you can’t deny that. It will be pretty hard for Minister [of Finance Joe] Oliver to keep that line that we’re not in a technical recession,” Page added.
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