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OVERSHADOWING PARLIAMENT: The federal auditor general is a more effective critic of government than the official Opposition.

Article Excerpt
BY PETER STOCK

Garry Breitkreuz has been a tireless critic of waste and mismanagement at the federal firearms registry since the program was launched in 1997. The Canadian Alliance MP has placed an unprecedented 300-plus access-to-information requests. To no avail. Only this December did taxpayers learn that they were on the hook for a billion-dollar overrun, thanks to the registry. The source of that information was the federal auditor general, Sheila Fraser, whose power extends far beyond mere elected Opposition officials.

The Chretien regime's stonewalling of Parliament concerning the gun

program's cost was completely ignored by the media. When Ms. Fraser pried out the truth, newsmen refrained from giving an iota of credit to the Alliance, even though Saskatchewan MP Breitkreuz had guesstimated the billion-dollar figure as long ago as 2000. Nor is the Alliance the only opposition party whose efforts and public credibility have been overshadowed by the more mightily empowered auditor general.

The Bloc Quebecois spent much of the spring of 2002 questioning Liberal ministers and MPs over their close personal relationships with the owners of Groupeaction. This advertising firm had obtained federal contracts worth millions of dollars. In May 2002, Ms. Fraser reported that senior civil servants in the federal public works department "broke just about every rule in the book" in awarding those contracts. As she called in the RCMP to investigate, the scandal became national news.

The auditor general's willingness to generate such shock waves over the past two years has led to complaints that the Chretien appointee is politicizing her office. In the wake of the Groupeaction revelations and the Cabinet shuffle which resulted, Oshawa-area Liberal MP Dan McTeague complained, "We want to make sure that going and doing her job is different than going on a witch hunt." Mr. McTeague's boss Jean Chretien appointed Ms. Fraser to her ten-year term.

Sharon Sutherland, a parliamentary specialist with the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University, agrees that the auditor general has become a form of political figure. She blames...

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