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Canada’s budget officer
won’t seek new mandate Canada’s
parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page,
who’s clashed with Prime Minister Stephen
Harper over fiscal forecasts, said he won’t
seek an extension of his mandate when it
expires in 2013.
Speaking in an interview at Bloomberg’s
offices in Ottawa, Mr. Page said he’s
lobbying lawmakers to amend his legislative
mandate. The changes should remove his
office from the auspices of the Library of
Parliament, the legislature’s research arm,
and give lawmakers, not the prime minister,
the power to appoint and fire the budget
officer.
“I don’t think it’d be right for me to say
‘This is what it needs to be,’ and then all
of a sudden, I benefit by that,” Mr. Page,
52, said. “It should benefit the next
person. The real beneficiaries would be
Canadians, really.”
Mr. Page was appointed the country’s first
parliamentary budget officer in March 2008,
a position set up by Harper as part of
efforts to make fiscal forecasting more
transparent. His term has been marked by
what Mr. Page called a “rock-’em, sock-’em”
political environment where no party holds a
majority of seats in the legislature.
“I guess I was really naive when I took the
job,” said, Mr. Page, who shaves his head
and relieves stress through jogging, hockey
and punching a speed bag in his garage. “If
I last for five years, that’d be great.”
He has since become one of the country’s
most prominent civil servants by releasing
reports on government spending and budget
forecasts, and appearing at committee
hearings. Now, Mr. Page said he’s focusing
on strengthening the office along the lines
of the U.S.’s Congressional Budget Office.
Election Platforms
“We’re hoping, politically, that we see it
in platforms in the next election,” Mr. Page
said. “We want an independent” budget
office, he said.
Mr. Page’s three decades of public service
include a stint in the mid-1990s estimating
the potential costs of the country’s breakup
if the French-speaking province of Quebec
chose to separate. Quebeckers rejected the
option in a 1995 referendum.
Before coming to power, Mr. Harper had
accused the Liberal government of
deliberately underestimating tax revenue in
order to generate large unanticipated
surpluses. Mr. Harper pledged to create a
Parliamentary Budget Office modelled after
the CBO in Washington.
Mr. Page has often been at odds with mr.
Harper’s government, disputing reports that
the country is on track to return to balance
and questioning the cost estimates for the
war in Afghanistan and tougher crime
legislation. In March, Mr. Page said the
government hasn’t been “prudent” in its
budget forecasts.
His comments didn’t go unnoticed. Canada’s
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty responded by
saying that Mr. Page “is usually wrong.” Mr.
Flaherty’s spokesman, Chisholm Pothier,
later said Mr. Page’s views were “in the
minority.”
Last month, Mr. Page’s office issued a
report on the government’s $4-billion
infrastructure stimulus program that
identified a “noticeable delay” in the start
and end dates of planned projects.
“There’s lots of people within the
bureaucracy that don’t like us,” Mr. Page
said. “We’re kind of naively optimistic
about survival.” |
