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The reason? The government had certain “contractual obligations” to its unions, requiring it to give notice to those affected before releasing such data to the public. Shortly afterward, he received a letter from the Clerk of the Privy Council, Wayne Wouters, informing him that he would not be receiving the information he had requested. Article content Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. So, on April 12, the PBO sent a letter to the deputies in charge of 82 federal departments and agencies, requesting such information “pursuant to statutory authority under section 79.3(1) of the Parliament of Canada Act” (the part about “free and timely access”).
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How much of these, Page wanted to know, would be achieved by reducing costs, and how much by reducing services? How would federal employment be affected in either event? In other words, what did the budget mean by “efficiencies”? This would seem useful information for Members of Parliament considering their vote, assuming - you’ll indulge me here - MPs do indeed consider their votes. More recently, the PBO (Kevin Page is his name) has been trying to get government departments to explain how they plan to achieve the $5.2-billion in largely unspecified “efficiencies” pencilled into the 2012 budget. For the crime of having been right, the PBO was subjected to a volley of ministerial insults, while the department pretends to this day not to have understood the office’s clearly stated requests. These figures, on which the last election was fought, were later shown to understate the true costs of the jets by at least 40% and probably 60%, in violation not only of Treasury Board rules but the department’s own stated policies. When, for example, the Department of National Defence at last consented to share the cost of the F-35 fighter jet purchase with the PBO, it provided only the most rudimentary figures, without any indication of how they were arrived at. Time and time again, rather, he has been given the back of the government’s hand - stonewalled by the bureaucrats, ridiculed by the politicians, and lied to by both. The reality is that the PBO has been given anything but the “free and timely access” that Parliament demanded. The officer specifically authorized to gather information on spending from government departments is guilty of “overstepping” for attempting to do precisely that? The Act further instructed deputy ministers that the PBO was to be given, on request, “free and timely access to any financial or economic data in the possession of the department that are required for the performance of his or her mandate.” Two exceptions were made: one for personal information, that is “information about an identifiable individual,” and the other for Cabinet confidences, such as minutes and briefing notes. This mandate was entrenched in law in the Parliament of Canada Act soon after. The PBO’s purpose would be “to provide objective analysis to Members of Parliament and parliamentary committees concerning the state of the nation’s finances, trends in the national economy, and the financial cost of proposals under consideration by either House.” The idea was front and centre in the Conservative platform for the 2006 election, as part of its proposed Federal Accountability Act. So was born, so to speak, the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
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