In our view, a central element of the federal Accountability Act should be to increase the transparency, disclosure, and powers of the Auditor General to review contracts with third parties. This was the essence of the sponsorship scandal: a political party's abuse of public funds channelled through private contracts, often with crown agents of the government, for private partisan purposes. Public accounts, budgets, estimates, departmental reports, and the Auditor General, as well as the proposals in the Accountability Act, provide significant accountability and details on how funds are spent within government. Citizens also deserve to know how their funds are spent by private companies.
Instead of proposing to improve accountability by substantially increasing transparency, the proposed Federal Accountability Act has adopted an approach more like “father knows best”, by increasing the powers of and the number of oversight bodies rather than substantially increasing the transparency of government. These proposals would not necessarily prevent further abuse and scandals from happening, particularly in relation to government contracts with private companies.
The proposed Federal Accountability Act has major loopholes that would exclude contracts for goods and services from review by the Auditor General, not allow individual citizens to lodge complaints with the proposed procurement auditor, not enshrine the current practice of proactive disclosure in legislation, and not address the recommendations of the Information Commissioner regarding disclosure of details of government contracts with third parties, or even meet the principles established in courts over this information.
We have prepared and distributed four sets of specific changes. They are simple and they are fairly straightforward, but they go a long way to increasing accountability for all government spending. These are certainly not the only changes that should be made. We support the proposals made by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, and you've also heard a lot of other proposals.
I can go into these in more detail later, if you would like. I've distributed them.