Rob Antle has it in Saturday's Telegram.
Insipid sameness, as some pretentious columnist called what's in the Telegram, turns out to be the sort of robust journalism the equally pretentious paper that prints her column just can't seem to produce. Can't produce, no matter how many times its editor claims to be doing just that.
Gimme insipid any day, if the alternative is pretentious blather.
If one article wasn't enough, there's also an excellent article by Antle in the Lifestyles section that describes the circumstances surrounding the changes to the internal economy commission legislation in 2000.
Antle gives us as much detail as we could expect in these two articles and there can be no excuses for people accepting the simplistic version of events tossed out from politicians anymore.
Still, there are four points Antle hasn't tackled in these pieces.
First, there's the curious saga of ejecting the Auditor General from the legislature in 2000. Antle notes "[Danny] Williams, leader of the PC party, was against it [barring the Auditor General from the legislature's accounts], but was not a member of the IEC."
That's true. The Leader of the Opposition is not a member of the commission; nor is the Premier. But in both cases some of the most senior members of the cabinet and the opposition caucus sit on the legislature's executive committee. Their job is to reflect the views of their caucus members and ultimately their respective bosses. It shouldn't matter that Danny didn't sit on the IEC; if he had a grip at all on his caucus he ought to have been able to handle this differently. That's especially the case of point supposedly so central to Williams' pledge of accountability and transparency.
Skip ahead to April 2004 and the Internal Economy Commission allowed the Auditor General to review the legislature's books once again. Williams takes credit for the move, but he wasn't on the commission as Premier any more than he was as Leader Op.
There's much more to this story that hasn't been told. It may never be told, but the version presented, even by Antle, doesn't explain how Williams could triumph at one point - supposedly - despite having failed earlier.
Antle doesn't explain the May 2004 bonus which Williams knew about at the time it was issued and, implicitly sanctioned. He couldn't be powerful at one moment and impotent the next without some better explanation than the one offered so far. Actually there hasn't been an explanation of this local version of the magic, reversing bullet.
Second, Antle notes changes made to the legislature's administration after April 2004. He points to cuts in allowances. Sadly, he doesn't explain how it could be that while members' allowances were cut, overspending on the budget line item that covers those allowances ballooned. According to the government's official, audited financial statements the legislature overspent its allowance line item by a total of almost $1.0 million in FY 2004 and FY 2005. The Auditor General's reports to date have only accounted for about $200,000 of that amount.
Third, Antle says that "Auditors found a 'significant spike' in overspending after the decision to bar them in 2000." The Auditor General may claim there was a spike in that year, but the Public Accounts - audited by John Noseworthy's staff and that of his predecessor Beth Marshall - showed a consistent pattern of overspending in the allowances line item from 1998 to 2005.
As the red line shows in the table above, the spike in spending occurred before the AG was barred, i.e. in FY 1999, tamped down for two fiscal years - after the AG was blocked - and then started its upward trend in 2003. That upward trend continued in 2004 and grew higher in 2005 in plain view of the Auditor General. The yellow line in the table above represents the amounts identified by the Auditor General. His numbers may confirm his own theory, but the facts contained in the Public Accounts say something completely different. Sometimes people see what they look for, rather than what was. The "what was" may raise other questions that some would find uncomfortable.
The fourth point Antle hasn't touched is about the comptroller general. The version of events offered by both the current administration and the Auditor General is that the government's chief financial officer could not see what was going on in the legislature since the claims his office received in order to generate payments did not contain receipts.
This defies even a layman's reading of the Financial Administration Act, let alone beggar's the belief of anyone even passingly familiar with how things work inside Confederation Building's East Block.
Simply put, there's no way to run over a line item in the budget - especially by the $3.2 million total shown in the Public Accounts - without the guy who writes the cheques knowing about it. If he knew, then others knew or ought to have known.
Antle's last comment is well taken: "To appreciate why those changes are necessary, it’s important to remember how they were done in the past."
The difficulty is that even after his yeoman service in two fine articles, there are still crucial pieces of information missing.
It would seem that the only way to get to the bottom of the whole matter is through a properly constituted public inquiry.
