You spent $14.5M on a book fair. Was it worth it?

The days of “results achieved: not applicable” on federal government spending need to end.

Last year, Scotiabank issued a report outlining how high federal government debt spending levels contributed to Canada’s inflationary crisis. In turn, Canada is experiencing the pain of record interest rate hikes and an overall affordability crisis. The Scotiabank report also stated another obvious fact: reducing excessive federal government spending would help combat inflation. 

In this context, and deeply sagging polls, it stands to reason that the federal government should be asking itself if it is getting value for money on program spending and making changes wherever the answer is no or nebulous.

But to assess whether or not program spending is achieving a goal, there would have to be some sort of goal to measure it against. And therein lies the current rub. The Liberals have governed in a way that makes it exceptionally difficult to measure the results of an alarming amount of Canada’s current federal grants and contributions because a significant amount is handed out without the requirement to achieve measurable results.

A small but glaring example of this has been laid bare in a Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) report that was released today after nearly a year of research on my part on what outcomes an eyebrow-raising federal government fund achieved for you, dear reader.

Bear with me.

At my behest, the PBO reviewed and subsequently issued a report today on the government’s Creative Export Strategy, a fund that previously housed something called the Mission Cultural Fund. There’s not a lot of public details about what precise goals these funds were supposed to achieve, which was problematic since the Mission Cultural Fund, in particular, had hit the news for paying for things like flying a chef to a banquet in the Dominican Republic and a sex toy exhibit in Germany. In response to these reports, I asked the government for more details. When Liberals denied me access to that information, I requested that the PBO investigate further.

Today’s report by the PBO found that, over the last several years, of the $125.9 million spent via the Creative Export Fund, Global Affairs had trouble providing essential information regarding spending and instead chose to reveal only “high-level” details. The report also found that only about one-third of past spending was tracked to a specific location, meaning it was hard for the PBO to determine what had been spent and where. Worse, the PBO found this lack of information was coupled with a disproportionately high amount of the fund going to administrative overhead.

The upshot? After six months of review and formal inquiry by me as a Parliamentarian, and a formal Parliamentary Budget Officer review, there’s still little clarity on what the government used these funds for, what criteria (if any) were used to choose how the funds were spent, and whether or not any tangible results from the funding were achieved.

These facts raise serious question. How is Parliament, and in turn, the Canadian public, supposed to evaluate the opportunity cost of spending these funds, particularly in light of the inflation crisis, if the government isn’t forthcoming with these most basic details? And even in cases where there are some details on how the money was spent, how can the taxpaying public assess whether or not there was a more effective way of spending the funds if the government doesn’t use any selection criteria or require (or report) any measurable outcome?

Take, for example, one expenditure the PBO was able to identify in his report: spending $14.5 million for the federal government to have a presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In theory, there should be some public record of what the government hoped to achieve with this expenditure and whether or not they achieved these goals. However, precious little of this information is publicly available, if it exists at all. Heritage Canada’s departmental performance reports only refer to the spending in the vaguest of terms, saying that the expenditure “resulted in a diversified trade, literary and cultural program” but presents exactly zero examples to prove that (potentially bullshit) statement. A government landing page for the event states that the expenditure was supposed to “increase(d) published works rights sales,” but it doesn’t state for whom or how. Worse, in that same report, under a table that lists program expenditures with a column that includes “actual results achieved,” the entry for results achieved in a row entitled “creative industries are successful in global markets” reads “not applicable.” 

Said differently, to date, information has yet to be made public on who decided to make the book fair expenditure, why it was made, who was selected to attend and why, or what specific material outcomes were achieved, if any were achieved at all.

This lack of information contrasts with public media records about Canada’s attendance at the book fair, which yield decidedly less than glowing reviews. Governor General Mary Simon’s trip to the event made headlines for spending over $700K on questionable items. On the sidelines of the event, former Liberal leader turned special envoy Stephane Dion spent nearly $20k on a swish $250+ per person dinner for 77 people. These stories, and the lack of transparency on selection criteria or outcomes, come after a 2018 Senate Committee hearing that discussed the book fair that included a conversation about how the fair had “lots of parties” (full transcript linked here).

These observations aren’t to say Canadian writers, as with workers in any other industry, aren’t worthy of government support and attention. Writers are essential to our economy and help shape Canada’s cultural fabric and identity abroad. But how we support them, or any other worker, should be a matter of debate. For example, how did spending $14.5M on sending a tony delegation to the Frankfurt Book Fair serve Canadian writers better than, say, giving $100k to 145 writers for a year to produce and market their craft? Because the Liberals put zero criteria or metrics in place, we’ll never know.

Also, the lack of metrics means there’s little protection for the Liberals to stop speculation about what the motivations behind the expenditures actually were. The Mission Cultural Fund and its umbrella corporation, the Creative Export Strategy, appear to have become heavily focused on highly opaque spending in Germany around the same time that Stephane Dion was unceremoniously dumped as Minister of Foreign Affairs by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and appointed as Canada’s ambassador. Without transparency and defined metrics to prove otherwise, the Liberals open themselves up to speculation that they spent a shit-tonne of Canadian taxpayer money via this fund to ameliorate potential demotion-related butthurt their former party leader by giving him a lot of shrouded-from-scruinty wherewithal with which to host fancy parties.

But I digress.

The real problem here is rooted in the reality that every Canadian now faces. The inflation and housing crisis means our kids presently face a less prosperous future than previous generations. Canada is facing multiple related crises - homelessness, addiction, and crime. This reality means that any money the government spends should have clear, defined outcomes and should be highly defensible to the Canadian public. If expenditures can’t be defended and they’re not yielding material results, they shouldn’t be made. 

By withholding spending information from Parliamentarians and the public, or making billions of dollars of expenditures without defined and measurable criteria in place to begin with, the Liberals are nurturing a culture within Canada’s public service that spending is a metric in and of itself, that tangible results don’t matter, and that the efficacy of program spending should never be questioned. There’s really nothing different between that approach and shoveling money off the back of a truck.

That’s not how it works in the real world. It should be no different in government.

Newly minted (and arguably demoted) President of the Treasury Board, Anita Anand, was recently given the hopeless task of finding a minuscule amount of savings in the vast ocean of Liberal deficit spending, with a cabinet used to making requests for billions with no strings attached.

Godspeed to her and to the rest of our country.