Premier Christy Clark has answers. Lots of them. However, few of them make sense. More worrisome still, the premier seems prepared to ignore the facts and, instead, just continue to press ahead as though all was right with the world.
Case in point is her government’s insistence on establishing a municipal auditor general. Note to readers at the outset: this idea of having a municipal auditor general has its roots in a long-suffering campaign led by the likes of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (and I’m sure more than a handful of staff at the Fraser Institute), which is keen to foment a tax revolt at the local level. However, based on the results of the November 2011 municipal elections, that campaign has suffered yet another setback as voters simply didn’t buy the CTF’s claim that municipal spending is a problem. Quite the opposite – in the Lower Mainland, for example, mayors who stood shoulder to shoulder in September and called for a gas tax to pay for the Evergreen Line expansion were re-elected in November by voters who not only appreciated the honesty of their call, but also recognized that the tax was going to finance a much-needed service.
In the lexicon of CTF, all of the above is heresy. Tax increases? Never. Tax levies to pay for public services? Say it isn’t so.
Certainly a teachable moment for the entire BC Liberal caucus. I hope they were taking notes.
But teachable moments require attentive students, and both Premier Clark and her BC Liberal caucus have a tough time with that concept as their dogged determination with the municipal auditor general initiative proves all too well. The first issue that the premier has never been able to address is “what is the problem for which this initiative is a fix?” Municipal governments can’t run a deficit. So, an auditor general is not about “slaying deficits.”
Municipal governments are incredibly transparent. Don’t believe me? Go to a local municipal council meeting. Better still, turn on your local community cable channel and you get to see your council in action. I’ll admit that it might not make for riveting TV drama, but whether you’re there in person or watching from home, you get to hear exactly how your city or town is run.
Every municipal council also produces an annual audited financial statement. Independent auditors review the books and give their opinion, the same process that any corporation would undertake to satisfy shareholders that the accounts are a true reflection of the entity’s financial status.
If all of this sounds like it would make the work of a municipal auditor general redundant, you’re right. Unfortunately, in the hard-to-understand world of the current provincial government, those facts don’t hold much weight. What does hold weight, however, is that with a municipal auditor general reporting directly to the finance minister, the potential to run roughshod over municipal governments is significant. Without any justification other than a whim on the part of the minister, a local government could be subjected to the onerous task of having further scrutiny on what has already been scrutinized by local voters.
For groups like the CTF, that kind of roughshod helps in their efforts to portray municipal spending as some kind of crisis. Again, the facts simply don’t support the CTF’s claims, but that isn’t about to deter the CTF from making the claims anyway.
Most municipal spending is on policing and citizen services. CTF’s claim that administration costs are growing is just plain wrong. Those costs have been declining over the last two decades as a percent of total municipal budgets.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, someone once said. The premier and her friends in the CTF are following that axiom to the letter. What they fail to realize is that municipal voters have tuned them out. •
