Federal budget watchdog office loses key member – to former watchdog Kevin Page

OTTAWA – A founding member of the federal budget watchdog office has left to join Kevin Page as he builds a new public finance institute at the University of Ottawa.

It’s the first major shakeup since economist Jean-Denis Fréchette was named to replace Page as parliamentary budget officer, whose job is to provide independent analysis to Parliament.

But with concerns mounting about government department stonewalling and office secrecy, insiders say it may not be the last.

Sahir Khan, an assistant PBO who worked at the office since its inception in 2008, joined Page this week as a senior fellow at the university.

He leaves amid criticism that the Conservative government worked to dilute the office after Page by appointing someone with no experience in developing or analyzing budgets.

Prior to his work at PBO which also included expenditure and revenue analysis, Khan was director at the Treasury Board Secretariat and provided advice to the prime minister on fiscal issues at the Privy Council Office.

Page said Khan would have been the right choice to lead the office.

“It was my hope that somebody like Sahir…would become the Parliamentary Budget Officer. But Sahir was passed over for all the wrong reasons,” Page said in an interview.

“They didn’t want anybody with knowledge and experience, who’s actually worked on budgets, that’s done the costing work, that built the office.

“They just said no, we’re going to take somebody who’s never worked on a budget.”

A ‘new era’

Fréchette declined an interview request, and a spokeswoman said he doesn’t comment on private affairs. Fréchette has publicly said it’s a new era for the office and “continuity” is his first priority.

Following Page’s public fight for information and hard-hitting reports on everything from the war in Afghanistan to F-35 fighter jets, the Conservatives said they were looking for someone “non partisan” to take the role.

Treasury Board president Tony Clement has argued the government continues to provide the PBO with information that falls within its mandate. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Page joined the university in July, as a research chair on Canadian government.

Together, Page and Khan plan on building a public finance institute that will work on economic projects for federal, provincial and municipal governments, as well as internationally.

“We talked about the need to build something in the country if the PBO thing doesn’t work out the way we hoped and wanted it to be,” said Page.

Some have likened to calling it a “shadow PBO,” but Page says it will be much more than that.

“The subject matter’s the same but I think the nature of work that we will do could be very different.”

He said he is in discussions with a province on a procurement project, but couldn’t go into details.

Page also gave an example of working with the World Bank on a portal for developing countries to access the methodologies of legislative budget offices from around the world.

Khan has worked alongside Page for the better part of a decade and said his departure is about the need for a change.

“It allows the PBO (Fréchette) the space to define and implement the vision he chooses,” Khan said in an interview.

“We want to use this opportunity at the University of Ottawa to help developed and developing countries build new institutions to serve Parliamentarians and their citizens.”

Since Page left in March, officials at the PBO have taken to filing access to information requests like all Canadian citizens can, because they say they aren’t getting the information they need by direct request from government departments.

Page and NDP leader Tom Mulcair also took the government to federal court to clarify the PBO’s mandate.

The case was dismissed in April on a technicality, but the judge strongly suggested the government cannot deny information to the budget watchdog. Mulcair has also written to Fréchette to urge him to return to court over information related to last year’s budget cuts.

Last Parliamentary session, Mulcair put forward a private member’s bill to make the watchdog a full-fledged, independent officer of Parliament, but it was killed by the Conservatives in June.