Budget cuts at watchdog offices part of ‘systematic attack’ Opposition says

OTTAWA — Nearly every federal watchdog office is having its budget cut, according to federal spending plans.

Each of Canada’s eight independent officers of Parliament is tasked with protecting one democratic pillar, safeguarding values Canadians prize – whether it’s fair and democratic elections, access to internal government documents, transparency in government spending or the right to privacy.

Many of them have also butted heads with the federal Conservative government – whether through damning reports or a court case.

Seven of those offices will have to defend those values with a decreased budget in 2014-15. Only the Office of the Lobbying Commissioner is seeing a slight increase in its overall estimated spending.

READ MORE: The Hounds of Parliament: an interview series with Canada’s 8 independent watchdogs

“I think these watchdogs have proved themselves quite inconvenient for this government,” said NDP treasury board critic Mathieu Ravignat. “I think this is part of a kind of systematic attack in the independence and the resources of the officers of Parliament that are supposed to keep our Parliament and government honest.”

A large portion of the cuts are thanks to one-time funding some offices received to pay for their move to an office complex in Gatineau, Que. But some are also facing cuts to their programs.

The privacy commissioner’s budget for research and policy development is down, as is the budget for public outreach, even as she looks into massive data breaches within the private and public sectors.

The information commissioner’s budget for compliance with access to information obligations is down after she reported that almost every government department was failing to follow the rules.

The conflict of interest and ethics commissioner will have a lower budget compared to last year for administering the act and code she oversees.

And the public sector integrity commissioner will be dealing with a lower budget for his disclosure and reprisal management program.

READ MORE: Privacy law losing relevance, commissioner says

Some of those cuts also flow from government-wide spending reductions launched in 2012, which are still rolling out across federal departments and agencies. But the watchdog offices should have been the last place the government sought savings, Ravignat said.

“When you ask a top public servant to do their job and find savings, they’re going to do it, but that’s kind of like pointing a gun to someone’s head and saying, ‘Find savings,’” he said in an interview  with Global News. “You don’t have much of a choice.”

Some officers, including the ethics and public sector integrity commissioners as well as the auditor general, say since these cuts were either planned or anticipated, they are prepared to deal with them.

Interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier, however, recently appeared before a Senate committee where she outlined some of the challenges her office is facing in maintaining services to Canadians while workloads increase and budgets decrease.

To mitigate the impact, Bernier’s office has sought to better target public education activities and modifying the office’s approach to data breaches: the breadth of measures used to investigate will now depend on the severity of the breach, she explained.

All the while, she is administering a law her predecessor, Jennifer Stoddard, said is losing relevance in an office sorely lacking the bite a watchdog might be expected to have.

READ MORE: The access-to-information system is busting: information czar

Bernier faces an 11.5 per cent decrease in her public outreach program this year compared to what was spent in 2012-13 and a 17 per cent decrease in research on policy development compared to the amount allotted for that last year.

The information commissioner, meanwhile, has never hesitated to shine the spotlight on the problems her office faces, going so far as to say the access-to-information system is “busting;” one federal institution has stopped responding to people using access to information laws, one ministry is still working through a request it said would require more than 1,100 days to fulfil, and complaints from Canadians are multiplying daily.

Her office’s budget for “compliance with access to information obligations” is set to drop six per cent from last year.

Over the past four years, Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault’s budget has dropped roughly nine percent on account of various cuts.

In May, Legault was clear her budget was too low for her office to fulfil its mandate.

“Any reductions to my office’s existing funding envelope will potentially have significant adverse impacts on program results,” she told a House of Commons committee. “if you ask me today if my budget is enough to accomplish my mandate, my answer is no.”

All the cuts mean these officers will have to make tough choices, Ravignat said, when it’s the government that should have been looking elsewhere to save money on its march toward a balanced budget.

“In a fiscally difficult situation, I think you can make different choices,” he said. “You can lower spending elsewhere, you can sell assets, you certainly don’t need to reduce resources where already they have very few resources to do what they’re doing.”