-too much power is concentrated in the PMO
-officers of parliament are unaccountable
-the role of ministers has been eroded; ministerial responsibility doesn't really exist any more (i.e. don't have to quit if there is a big mistake made in the department they manage), and senior public servants can go to the PMO to get things done instead of through ministers
-the answer (which I discerned from this other op-ed of his) is giving bureaucrats more power to challenge government policy, and a big point for him is bureaucrats are less anonymous now that access to information legislation can reveal their identity (though I think it is hard to say if that anonymity matters)
I'm not sure how much flesh he has on this skeleton. What examples does he have of a decision or policy which has gone wrong and would have been done right following his prescription? There is a lack of specifics here. If the answer is to read his book to find out I think that is a cop out. If he's got a clear idea he should be able to articulate it in an op-ed. If, as it seems from the last excerpt included below, he thinks MPs and committees should be given a stronger role, that may be true but consider how dysfunctional the current committee construction is. For instance the one Art Hanger chairs where he continually walks out of meetings, merely because he doesn't like what the opposition parties want to discuss, arrests all committee work and effectively paralyzes the committee over a purely partisan squabble. That suggests committees and MPs, as things are currently set up, would be no panacea.
In short I think he may be on to something problem-wise, but has a ways to go in formulating a solution.
Excerpts:
For the most part, they [Officers of Parliament] are answerable to themselves alone. John Reid, a former information commissioner lamented in public that, when it comes to their own accountability, MPs all but ignored them. They have an oversight function, but always from a narrow perspective, and no one is charged with providing a broad overarching perspective. The result is that those in government have several independent voices constantly looking over their shoulders from different and at times conflicting perspectives (for example, privacy versus access to information)....
PATCHWORK
Instead of recognizing that our machinery of government is structured for a world that no longer exists, we keep patching things up, thinking the next patch will finally fix things for good. We have, over the past 25 years or so, introduced access to information legislation and measures to protect whistleblowers, and added several new officers of Parliament. By one count, we now have 11 such officers, including the newly created Parliamentary Budget Officer to "ensure truth in budgeting." This suggests that public servants can never be as credible as officers of Parliament. The message can hardly be lost on officials in the Department of Finance. In addition, officers of Parliament have been created without clarifying how they fit into the constitutional framework. Parliament itself appears to have lost its way, and its decline has been well documented.
...
One senses that much of Parliament's decline has been self-inflicted. Carolyn Bennett and Deborah Grey said as much in 2003, insisting that Parliament "no longer contributes meaningfully to policy debates" and that it had even "lost its forum quality." If MPs do not start to heal their own institution, then the message of the former British prime minister John Major that "the timbers which support Parliamentary government are weakening and diseased and are in danger of collapse" will resonate more and more, not just in Britain, but also in Canada.
