Who's Accountable?

The underground royal commission Report examines in detail two fundamental crises that have a profound affect upon the future of Canada. We are not paying our own way in two important respects. We have built up huge government debt and unfunded liabilities to support a wide range of social programs and regional development programs, expecting future generations to pay for this. And we have let our military preparedness decline, paying for this with our soldiers’, sailors’, and airmen’s safety, and expecting our allies to assume most of the load for collective security.

How did it come to this? Who is in charge? Who is accountable? Was Parliament doing its job in representing our best interests in the policy decisions that led to the situation described above? What the underground royal commission found was that the relevance of Parliament has declined precipitously over the past four decades. We lack the necessary checks and balances to reign in executive power, to provide balanced and reasoned debate and decision-making, to prevent poor public policy-making and, most importantly, to hold government accountable for its decisions and actions. The fundamental problem is that Parliament is supposed to control government. Instead, government controls Parliament…..the balance has been lost, and effective Parliamentary oversight of government has been lost.

We mentioned earlier that once Parliament no longer examined and approved government spending Estimates in the Committee of the Whole, it lost its most important mechanism for holding government to account. It amounted to handing the executive a blank cheque to spend as they pleased. Since that point in the late 1960s, we have moved to much more of an executive-centred political system, and away from a legislative-centred system. The powers of the executive far out-strip the powers of the legislature.