Canada’s fiscal situation is dire, with bloated spending, excessive borrowing and growth-stifling taxes. Canadians need a responsible federal budget — if not an A-grade fiscal plan, at least a solid B. It needs to do much better than the D we gave last fall’s fiscal statement.
Here are 10 guides we’ll be following in grading next week’s federal budget.
1. Timely release. On this one, a failing grade is already locked in. The budget arrives two weeks into the 2024-25 fiscal year for which it is supposedly the plan and six weeks after the Main Estimates. That means money is being spent without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
2. Cut the spin and give us the figures. Recent budgets have run several hundred pages, but…
Just over two decades ago, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act put the regulation of corporate compliance on the map. It has since become a governance preoccupation, spawning armies of compliance professionals, commanding a substantial portion of every board’s agenda and costing hundreds of billions of dollars. Elaborate legal mechanisms — such as sentencing guidelines, whistleblowing regimes and personal liability of directors and management — aim at preventing employee wrongdoing and heightening oversight by directors and senior management to ensure internal systems are effective.
The objective — better, more honest governance — is hard to argue with. Yet time and time again we see high-profile firms encouraging, acquiescing in or simply…
The federal expenditure management system looks good on paper. Transparency is served by publication of five-year spending plans for major spending categories in the annual budget and detailed information in the government’s main estimates and departmental plans. Efficiency and effectiveness are served by setting objectives for program spending and requiring departments to report on the achievement of these objectives. This result-based management framework is buttressed by requiring most spending programs to be evaluated on a five-year cycle. Transparency is further served by making these reports publicly available.
Dig a little deeper, however, and the flaws become apparent. The first is incomplete coverage of spending.…
