Interim Parliamentary Budget Officer Jason Jacques on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
For nearly 18 years, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has served as a fiscal watchdog, a voice of expert analysis that has served Parliament, the public and – when it has chosen to listen – the federal government.
Until 5 p.m. on Monday, that is, when the six-month term of the interim PBO, Jason Jacques, expired. Now, that fiscal watchdog is muzzled, with the PBO unable to publish reports or accept new requests for analyses from parliamentarians.
Parliament resumes sitting next week, and the Liberals could conceivably move forward with a candidate to replace Yves Giroux, whose term expired on Sept. 2. So what’s an extra week’s delay?
For a start, it’s not a delay of a mere week. The Commons and Senate must still vote to approve any candidate. There will be a delay resulting from those votes, and still more of a delay in the new PBO getting up to speed in their new position.
And the clock did not start ticking on Monday. A vacancy at the PBO was entirely predictable, and preventable. As Mr. Giroux said in an interview on Wednesday, the end date of his seven-year term has been known since the day of his appointment, or at least since November, 2024, when he made his intentions clear to depart the following September.
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That the Carney government declined to have a successor ready to go last summer, or by Sept. 2 or at any time in the last six months speaks to either an astonishing level of negligence or a deliberate indifference, if not hostility, to the idea of scrutiny from the PBO. We would lean to the latter explanation.
The government had a number of options. It could have extended the interim appointment of Mr. Jacques until a permanent successor was confirmed. Or, if that displeased the Liberals, a different interim PBO could have been named.
The decision to leave the office vacant, for however brief a period, is deliberate. And it sends a clear message to any future PBO, that the Carney government is not enamoured of opinions that undermine its – how shall we say – innovative view of public finances.
The PBO has been a thorn in the side of governments since its inception. To a large degree, that is the reason it exists, not as a source of opposition, but an independent source of information that often ends up deflating government narratives.
That was true during the tenure of the first PBO, Kevin Page. In 2011, Mr. Page released an analysis that showed the cost of acquiring F-35 fighter jets was far higher than estimates that the Conservative government had issued. Over the years, other analyses from the PBO have similarly derailed many other government talking points.
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Most recently, the PBO under Mr. Jacques dissected the government’s attempt to redefine a slew of spending as capital expenditures and thereby exclude them from the newly confected budget category of “operating balance.” The PBO’s inconvenient (for the government) analysis punctured the government’s carefully crafted fiscal fantasy of a balanced budget, once capital expenses were set to one side.
Similarly, the interim PBO’s warning last fall of the dangers of the Liberals’ fiscal trajectory was not helpful, to say the least, to the government. Mr. Jacques’s phrasing before a Commons committee – “We are at the precipice” – may have strayed beyond the technocratic tradition of his predecessors, but his analysis was spot on. Absent a major shift in the Liberals’ fiscal plan, the size of the federal debt relative to the economy would rise, not fall, through to the end of the decade. (A month later, the government’s own budget numbers projected the same trend.)
And now, the Liberals are slow-walking the appointment of a permanent head for the PBO. The nature of the delay is not clear, but one thing is for certain: the Carney government has not made this appointment a priority.
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, which issued a timely report card on the PBO last week, flagged the problems with the government’s approach, saying “delays in appointing a new leader and use of interim arrangements can weaken the institution’s leadership and stability.”
Tariffs, the economic shockwaves of military conflict in the Middle East, a likely fiscal update in the spring: There is no shortage of urgent issues for the Parliamentary Budget Officer to address. The watchdog needs its voice back, now.