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Betraying the trust

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It's known as "blowing the vote" and is almost the worst thing public-service managers can allow to happen. You blow the vote when you exceed your department's annual budget that had been voted upon by Parliament.

There is, though, one thing worse than blowing the vote: covering it up. Yesterday the auditor general of Canada, Sheila Fraser, said the former Liberal government did just that, presumably in an effort to avoid embarrassment over grotesque cost overruns associated with the gun registry. Any doubts Canadians had about voting out the Liberals should be erased now that Ms. Fraser has shown that the Liberals betrayed the public trust.

In the fiscal year 2003-04, the Canadian Firearms Centre -- the body overseeing the controversial rifle and shotgun registry -- was hugely overbudget. So the government fiddled with the books. Using accounting sleight-of-hand, the government concealed the overruns by hiding them in future budgets.

Ms. Fraser accused the government of "misinforming" Parliament, which is perhaps a too-polite way of putting the matter. "Pulling an Enron" might be more accurate. It's rare when a department blows the vote, but even rarer is the attempt to mislead Parliament. Former privacy commissioner George Radwanski tried to mislead Parliament, and we all know what happened to him.

The Liberals had invested huge political capital in the gun registry, and it's hard not to feel that political calculations were behind the funny accounting. Yesterday's revelations are simply another instalment in the long, unhappy history of the failed registry. Designed in haste, the registry was expected to prevent gun violence in Canada. Of course, it could never fulfil those expectations, not when so much gun violence -- especially the high-profile gun violence in the big cities -- is the product of illegal guns.

Early promises that the registry would cost only a few million dollars were ridiculous. The total is almost $1 billion and counting. Plus, the registry's computer system is an ineffective, expensive mess.

It was for the sake of preserving this badly conceived, doomed program that Liberal politicians broke the rules of Parliament when they signed the estimates?

As Ms. Fraser has noted, it is a very serious matter to violate the rules governing how public funds are spent. The entire system of federal spending is built on truth and trust -- a contract between citizens and their government. When a federal department is going to exceed its voted upon allotment it must return to Parliament, like Oliver Twist, and ask for more. That did not happen in 2003-04 in the case of the Canadian Firearms Centre.

Ms. Fraser is not calling for a police investigation, in part because the documentation that might suggest something sinister was not kept. In key meetings, no minutes were kept and no names were recorded. Still, the sorry episode is something for the Commons Public Accounts Committee to investigate. Public faith in the proper operation of government must be restored. Once again the Canadian taxpayer is wanting someone to be held accountable.