Graham Steele is the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Halifax Fairview. He was elected to the Nova Scotia Legislature in a 2001 by-election and re-elected in 2003. He has been a member of the Public Accounts Committee since 2002 and served as Chair from 2003-2005. He is the New Democratic Party's Deputy House Leader.

A Rhodes scholar, originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Graham came to Halifax in 1986 to attend Dalhousie Law School, graduating in 1989. He practiced law here, first in private practice - then as General Counsel to the Workers Compensation Board in 1993.

After further legal studies, he accepted a job as Research Director for the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party Caucus office in 1998.

Graham is a member of the CCAF's Advisory Group on Public Performance Reporting.

REVISITING THE LEGISLATOR'S ROLE: WHO IS WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS?

Discussions about legislators' role in the accountability process often end with a statement of the form “Legislators should do X.” Then everybody goes home, but nothing changes.

Statements like “Legislators should do X” ought to be the beginning of a discussion, not the end. If legislators are not doing what they “should,” why not, and what can we do about it?

My essential point is this: Legislators will do what we “should” when and only when the desired behaviour aligns with our motivations and resources. If you don't take our motivations and resources into account, then all the “shoulds” in the world won't make one bit of difference.

Motivations

No legislator can achieve what s/he wants if s/he is defeated, and no legislator can achieve what s/he wants if s/he returns to the assembly with an insufficient number of colleagues. Re-election matters. It really, really matters. The primary motivation of a politician is to be re-elected.

The desire to be re-elected is not a sinister motive, although it is often painted as such. We live in a democracy. Democracy means the people decide whom they want to make their laws. Being accorded that support, or having it withdrawn, is the legislator's ultimate test. Certainly there is room for politicians to “lead” public opinion, but the politician who disdains public opinion, or waits too long for it to catch up, is not a democrat.

One thing most legislators would agree on is that their accountability work (e.g. sitting on the Public Accounts Committee) will have little or no bearing on their chances of re-election. In provincial and federal politics, other factors - especially the leader and the party - are far more important than anything the local candidate has done, and infinitely more important than anything the incumbent might have done with respect to accountability.

In fact, if I were fully devoted to my own chances of re-election, the single best thing I could do would be to use my PAC briefing books as doorstops, never attend another PAC meeting, and spend all of my newly-found time knocking on doors in my constituency, identifying and working assiduously on local issues.

I do not deny that it is possible to correlate accountability work and re-election. If a legislator becomes an acknowledged expert in a particular subject-area, and is able to demonstrate that expertise in the assembly's accountability processes, and thereby raises his or her public profile, there might then be a connection between accountability and re-election. In my experience, this link is rare, and it is hard, hard work, and it is a route that few legislators are willing to travel.

Can legislators be motivated to do accountability work because it raises their stature with the party leadership? Yes, but only a little.

Accountability work is not highly valued among party leaders. Rather like a school principal, who notices only the best and worst students, party leaders tend to notice a legislator's accountability work only if something goes really well (like an unexpected media “hit” with legs) or really badly (like if the legislator says something stupid that gets reported on the supper-hour news). Otherwise, accountability work slips below the political radar.

Party leaders place higher value on other skills and activities. A party leader will put more value on caucus members who have a solid sense of how a particular constituency feels or thinks; or who understand and can execute on the political dimension of public policy issues; or who can raise money for the party; or who are good communicators. A legislator can do all of these things without doing a stitch of accountability work.

Personal resources

Time

In addition to bringing weak personal resources to the job of accountability, the typical legislator is almost always strapped for time.

Most people don't realize that 90% of my time is spent dealing with “casework,” the many requests we get from constituents for support or advice in their dealings with the provincial government. My assistant and I spend time on social assistance, housing, workers' compensation, residential tenancy, student loan, and a host of other individual issues, large and small, on which my help is sought.

Community issues also require attention: helping find a new home for a large food bank; dealing with opposition to construction of a new apartment building that is partly funded with federal-provincial affordable housing money; asking the provincial environment department to address a serious flooding problem.

Does anyone think that legislators should say “no” to these things, and read their Public Accounts briefing book instead? Or more to the point, does anyone seriously think that they will say “no” when these calls come in? Not likely.

Our time commitments go far beyond casework. So many groups would like us to attend this, support that, speak here, listen there, read this report, comment on that issue. Then let's not forget that legislators have families. We are spouses, children, parents, and grandparents. If we do not represent a constituency in the capital city, we can be away from home for long stretches.

Bringing about re-alignment

The first dimension of change is to ask whether we can positively change legislators' (a) motivations, and (b) resources.

Legislators' motivations are not going to change, and there are severely limited opportunities for changing the personal resources and time they bring to the job of accountability. On this first dimension of change, the most promising avenue is to work on improving staff resources.

In my opinion, the single best thing that Nova Scotia's Public Accounts Committee could do to improve its effectiveness would be to hire one full-time researcher/writer (there is currently none). The PACs with dedicated staff are the most productive and effective. They look at things in more depth, they fashion recommendations, and they follow through on those recommendations.

Yet hiring more staff is a tough sell. Most Canadian governments have come through a decade or more of retrenchment. And don't forget that the norm is for PACs to be controlled by a government majority, who have what you might call a vested interest in making sure the PAC isn't too effective.

Even if more staff isn't possible, a fruitful avenue would be to focus on training existing staff. Staff members often end up being far more knowledgeable and experienced than the legislators themselves. If Auditors General, for example, wanted to offer training to their jurisdiction's Public Accounts Committee, I would recommend that they start with whatever research staff the PAC has available to it.

The second dimension: Re-orienting our expectations

My experience as a legislator, and on a Public Accounts Committee, has led me to the conclusion that most legislators, most of the time, do not have the motivation and resources to do meaningful, substantive, wide-ranging accountability work.

It is no accident that Auditors-General, not legislators, have become the “rock stars” of accountability work. They have not usurped the legislators' role. Rather, there is simply widespread recognition of the fact that the Auditor General is better placed than legislators to be an effective watchdog.

Certainly our legislators can and must continue their traditional role of “shining a bright light” on government by calling and questioning witnesses about significant programs and issues. The public questioning of witnesses by elected legislators, performed with the objective of holding a government to account, is an important democratic event in and of itself; and all the more so in those relatively rare cases where legislators do the job well.

But we need to stop the pretence that legislators are meaningful watchdogs over the whole range of government spending. If that were ever true, it's not true now.

What legislators can do effectively is to oversee other accountability systems. Legislators can “watch the watchdogs” - question them, advise them, challenge them, and provide a public forum for their work. And in turn, the watchdogs could learn an awful lot by taking seriously legislators' capacity to articulate what is important to the people we represent.

This kind of interaction between legislators and accountability systems does currently take place between Public Accounts Committees and Offices of the Auditor General, but it is largely unlegislated, and therefore informal and also variable between jurisdictions and over time.

The Office of the Auditor General may be the best-known watchdog, but it is not the only one. Another fundamentally important accountability process is FOI (freedom of information) legislation.

A central objective of FOI is to hold governments to account by making publicly held information widely accessible. Legislators are well-suited to debating and deciding things like what kind of FOI process we want, whether the regime is being run according to the plan, and if not, what steps need to be taken to improve it.

A third accountability process, but one still in its infancy, is the issuing of Public Performance Reports (PPRs) by units of government. CCAF is leading the way in Canadian research on PPRs, and I commend them for it.

Legislators are key users of PPRs and can play a leading role in setting Canadian standards. Once those standards are in place - in the same way that the CICA and PSAB set national standards for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) - everyone will have better ways of knowing what their governments are delivering.

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