Ontario Liberals mark their territory to keep budget watchdog at bay
Premier Kathleen Wynne says her government is within its rights to withhold information from the new budget watchdog.

thestar.com
July 9, 2015
By Richard J. Brennan

Premier Kathleen Wynne says the new budget watchdog should understand his leash goes only so far.

“We can have this conservation over and over and over again. The fact is the legislation agreed upon by all (three) parties precluded access to cabinet documents,” she said Thursday.

Wynne was reacting to the fact that Financial Accountability Officer Stephen LeClair, who office is only months old, has already hit a bureaucratic wall in his efforts to probe the government’s controversial decision to sell off 60 per cent of publicly-owned Hydro One for up to $9 billion.

“The financial accountability officer would have known when he came into this role that cabinet documents were not part of the disclosure,” said Wynne, who was at the Climate Summit of the Americas at the Royal York to sign the “first-ever” Pan American action statement on climate change.

Critics say they fear the government will cast a wide net of cabinet confidentiality effectively muzzling Ontario’s first financial accountability office.

“It is of great concern for us that the premier would fall back on cabinet confidentiality when this is a public asset owned by the people of this province and especially when this government has demonstrated a level of mismanagement that has never been seen before in the history of this province,” said NDP MPP Catherine Fife.

The NDP made the creation of the financial accountability office - modelled after Parliamentary Budget Office - a condition of the party supporting the then minority Liberal government’s 2013 budget.

Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown accused Wynne and her government of playing procedural tricks to avoid public scrutiny.

“The reality is Premier Wynne promised to run a transparent government and every occasion where she has been tested on her word she is failing...Ontarians deserve transparency and they deserve oversight and they are not getting it,” Brown said.

As an independent officer of the legislature, it is LeClair’s role to prepare an independent analysis for the legislature about the state of the province’s finances, and in this case fiscal impact of divesting up to 60 per cent of Ontario’s Hydro One equity holdings.

On May 15, LeClair sent a letter to the deputy ministers of finance and energy asking for the following information: “Data, information and related assumptions that support the government’s valuation estimate of Hydro One, as well as any information that explains the government’s assessment of the fiscal impact on the Province of Ontario’s financial statements.”

He was subsequently told to forget it and that any advice, analysis and recommendations prepared for the Treasury Board and cabinet are off limits to his office.

When it was suggested the office was set up for failure, Wynne said, “I think that’s a very pessimistic view of the situation...of course he will have information” just not what he’s looking from cabinet.

“We will look forward to working with the financial accountability officer. He’s working with the ministry (of finance) right now and I know he will be briefed on the information that he can be,” she said.

LeClair, a career bureaucrat, told the Star he will do his report - which could possibly be done in time for the MPPs’ return to Queen’s Park in September - with or without cabinet information. But he added he will be sure to tell Speaker Dave Levac he was hampered by the government claiming cabinet secrecy.

“Providing timely and relevant analysis to the legislature is my primary objective. The degree to which this is possible depends, to a large extent, on free and timely access to quality information held by government departments,” he said in his letter to the two deputy ministers.