Ignatieff’s missed audit opportunity
National Post – May 22, 2010
Editorial

Several months ago, Pierre Bourque, whose website Bourque.comis among the most influential news agglomerators in Canada, stopped referring to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff by his common nickname – Iggy – and started calling him "Iffy," a reference to both Mr. Ignatieff's indecisive nature and his tenuous grasp on the job of Top Grit. Anyone needing an example of why the change fits need look no further than Mr. Ignatieff's response this week to the mounting MP expense-audit issue on Parliament Hill.

In a nutshell, Mr. Ignatieff said he doubts Canadians really want a detailed look at MPs' expense accounts; but in case they do, he thinks a high-level meeting will scratch their itch. Auditor-General Sheila Fraser and the House of Commons Board of Internal Economy (BOIE) should sit down for a heart-to-heart and let Ms.

Fraser explain "what she wants to do," Mr. Ignatieff suggested.

Have a meeting? Explain what she wants to do? Is he kidding? Ms. Fraser sent a request to the BOIE 10 months ago laying out precisely what she wants to do. She wants to look at MPs' individual expenses and decide whether taxpayers are getting good value for their money. It's not a difficult concept around which to wrap one's mind.

"I understand what Canadians are saying. They want accountability and transparency," Mr. Ignatieff told a news conference on Wednesday in Calgary, "but I don't think they want us to be going through our receipts for this meal and that meal."

Actually, we're pretty sure that's exactly what Canadians want.

A month or so ago, maybe not, but now that MPs have put up such a brick wall around their spending, the only action that will satisfy a growing number of taxpayers is a line-by-line accounting of the $130-million our elected representatives spend each year on staff, dining out, jetting about the country and entertaining constituents, interest group activists and lobbyists.

But here is the real howler from Mr. Ignatieff's interview: We Canadians probably don't really want full accountability from MPs because it would cost too much. "There is accountability that is in itself a waste of public money. Do you understand what I am saying?"

In the midst of an embarrassing national debate about parliamentarians' overinflated sense of their own importance, Mr. Ignatieff is presuming to tell taxpayers what kind of accountability they really want – and insisting it's not the kind they think they want. It's little wonder that Allan Gregg of Harris-Decima polling told the Canadian Press that the public may have begun buying into representations of Mr. Ignatieff as an "out of touch, effete, Central Canadian snob."

To be sure, the Tories smell just as bad on the audit issue. They have more members on the BOIE (four) than any other party (the Liberals have three, and the NDP and Bloc Quebecois one each). That the board refused Ms. Fraser's audit request is as much a Conservative decision as an opposition one.

The same day Mr. Ignatieff made his remarks, federal Tory Environment Minister Jim Prentice insisted a performance audit of MPs' expenses was unnecessary because they are already being audited internally and everything is just fine. "There are a set of rules and the expenses are scrutinized through the Board of Internal Economy. We have a system that has been working." Working for whom, though?

Thursday, Government House Leader Jay Hill, who also sits on the BOIE, insisted "media misinformation" about expense scandals in the British Parliament and the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly had whipped up an unjustifiable public "hysteria" over the need for an audit. "We are held accountable," he said dismissively. "It's called an election."

Nor are the NDP immune to infuriating remarks. This week, New Brunswick New Democrat Yvon Godin wondered smugly: "Who is [Ms. Fraser] to tell me the value of the money that I will spend?" He felt he owed accountability to no one "except for the people who put me there" (whatever that means).

The tragedy of it, for Mr. Ignatieff, is that this is one of the few issues on which he truly did have an opportunity to stand out as a man of both principle and the people. Instead, he just went with the herd.

Unlike Afghan detainees and the Rahimelena debacle, there's no grey area here: Mr. Harper and his sour-faced gang of audit-blockers are dead wrong. At a time when Mr. Ignatieff's days as Liberal leader are starting to seem numbered, this could have been a game-changer had he realized the stakes at play.