Accountable government through transparency.

Crown agency expense reports cleaned up before release.

This was the headline on the front page of Saturday's Toronto Star (Sept 4, 2010).


The headline and the revelatory style of the article made it sound like something foul was afoot because the provincial integrity commissioner is going over each expense report in detail, querying improper expenses and having executives reimburse the agency before any reports are made public. Apparantly Premier Dalton McGuinty said last autum that these would be published starting 1 April. Apparently Kevin Donovan expected these reports to be fully available on 1 April.

Whatever. It works for me. Transparency, I mean. The fact of the matter is that provincial executives are not being allowed to get away with improper spending. Why? Because of transparency, their accountability to the public.

It may be going more slowly than some would like but Dalton McGuinty is actually doing at a provincial level what Stephen Harper said (during his election campaign when he first defeated the Liberals largely on this issue) he would do federally but isn't even bothering about going through the motions of doing: introducing accountable government through transparency.