Stephen Harper created the office for the Parliamentary Budget Officer as part of the Library of Parliament with the intent of creating an office to do independent reports on the nation's finances and government policies.
The intent was to mimic the American Congressional Budget Office, but as usual, a Canadian government just couldn't get the job right. Now, by that I mean they refused to create a truly independent office.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
In the United States the President of the Senate, that's the Vice President and the Speaker of the House pick, as required, will pick a new Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
That's it. They pick a person and that person takes on the job.
Their mandate is to hire and maintain staff that are to be nonpartisan. Just to illustrate that last part, CBO staff cannot be a registered member of a political party. If they join a party or engage in any partisan activities, they get fired.
Finally, they are given a budget, and they have their own offices, and they carry out their mandate.
What is their mandate? Simply, they evaluate the spending of the American Federal Government and conduct studies on the effect of government policy and proposals on the budget and economy.
The CBO is considered so sacrosanct that no party has tried to tamper with it.
What Canada needs:
That is what Canada needs for its Parliamentary Budget Office. What we need, in addition to what we have now, is an All-Party Committee to pick a single director from a list of people that have the required expertise and have never been a member of a political party, never donated to a party, or engaged in any kind of partisan activities. That director can serve a fixed term or until they retire. There are options to consider.
Then we just need to give them a budget that is mandated in law to rise every year with inflation, that includes annual funding for any capital expenses.
Here is what the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) must not be:
It must not be an office to hold the government or Parliament accountable. That is the job of everyone else.
When the PBO starts holding people accountable it is taking sides and that is the enticement for political parties and governments to consider the option of undermining the office's neutrality.
This is why the Congressional Budget Office in the US works so well. It doesn't take sides. It produces reports and projections and then makes them all public. It doesn't take sides.
It doesn't say this plan would be bad and it doesn't say this policy is good. It leaves that to the reader to come to their own determination if plans, proposals, spending, etc is good or bad.
Often the same report will be interpreted as good and bad by whoever looks at it and that is because rarely do proposals in government produce overwhelmingly bad outcomes.
Look, I'm not going to talk about the disastrous Big Beautiful Bill because that was universally panned and was purely partisan garbage.
Don't look to the Parliamentary Budget Office as a watchdog
We need researchers producing non-partisan reports on the finances of the nation. We need that kind of information because that is the kind of information we can trust.
If we have good information we can trust, then hopefully the electorate and its political leaders will make better decisions.
I don't want another watchdog. I want good data.
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