This morning I wish simply to put before you the concept and logic of public accountability and how it can increase fairness in society and citizen trust in authorities. Without that trust, society doesn't work properly.
My aim is to try to show you how you can act to prevent harm and injustice, such as the lethally contaminated blood of the 1980s or the management control failures in HRDC in sponsorship. Audit and commissions of inquiry are after the fact, when it's too late.
I have been a rigorous student of public accountability for 15 years. I was the author of this book on the subject in 2002. I was a principal in the Office of the Auditor General for 18 years. My MBA is in organizational behaviour, which is about cause and effect in management processes. In the audit office I served as the Auditor General's parliamentary liaison officer to the public accounts committee, so I know pretty well people's roles and duties.
If we turn to the concept of public accountability and why it's a society imperative, let's assume for a moment that we don't know the difference between conduct, responsibility, and accountability. A simple logic sequence may help us. If an executive government intends something that would affect the public in important ways, in fairness it should tell the public what it intends and why it intends it. This means accounting to the public. An obvious example is a government policy initiative.
Next the executive government should publicly explain its intended performance standards to clarify what it intends to achieve. Hospital emergency waiting times are an example.
Then we want to know whether the government thinks it has met agreed performance standards, and we want to have the government tell us the outcomes from what it did and how it applied the learning available to it. These affect trust in competence.
Then we apply the precautionary principle: we ask for an audit of the fairness and completeness of what the government reports. The combination of these accountings plus audit helps us determine our level of trust in government because we know better what the government intends, why it intends it, and what it's actually doing. MPs can then better control what's going on, and citizens can better see the role of the MP in holding to account.
Accountability does not mean responsibility, the obligation to act, and it doesn't mean conduct, the actual doing of something. The mid-1970s independent committee on the mandate of the Auditor General of Canada authoritatively defined accountability as the obligation to report on responsibilities.
Public accountability isn't new. It has been a mainstay in the business world for centuries. The public accounts of Canada are a governmental offshoot of financial reporting. One reason you're not already steeped in public accountability is that authorities don't like to account unless they're made to--corporations were--so you had nothing to work with. Executive governments have thus far controlled whether standards for accountability reporting get legislated; thus far, they haven't been.
But first we need a useful and comprehensive definition of public accountability to work with, and here's what I have proposed: 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. If you feel you have to go into four-wheel drive to absorb that, don't worry about it. I'm writing it so that it's unassailable to the barracuda critics, mostly academics.
Then you can ask what the benefits of public accountability are. First, MPs and citizens get information they need but wouldn't otherwise have. Access to information requests are no substitute, and weren't meant to be.
Perhaps even more important, the obligation to account publicly, as long as it is audited for fairness and completeness, exerts a self-regulating influence on officials, and this self-regulating influence works in the public interest.
The requirement to account is unassailable because it's non-partisan. It does not tell anyone how to do his or her job; it's simply an explanation requirement. It does not ask for any more information than officials need in any case to do their jobs properly--and what they know, they can report.
My last comment is on legislating accountability. If we're serious about something, we legislate it, but a bill entitled “accountability” that isn't about accountability allows people to continue confusing responsibility conduct with accountability. That means we won't get full and fair public accounting for responsibilities.
Moreover, adding more and more monitoring, policing, and audit instead of accountability obligations will likely turn off good people from entering the civil service, people who would otherwise willingly account for their performance as a self-control, if they knew their accounting would be used competently and fairly.
There is one thing your committee could recommend that doesn't mean adding accountabilities across the board in Bill C-2. In whistle-blower protection, which takes up 32 pages of the bill, you could recommend a short provision that ministers and deputies report annually to the House their own protection performance standards and whether their claimed protection is actually working.