Yves Giroux told the committee it’s ‘not that frequent’ that a government department asks him not to release a ‘purely … internal analysis and internal data’
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OTTAWA — Canada’s budget watchdog said he is not being “muzzled” by the federal government and that prior comments suggesting that was the case were limited to the economic analysis of the carbon tax that his office was forbidden to disclose.
Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Yves Giroux has been in the spotlight since he effectively said his office was under a “gag order” to not talk about the government’s internal data on the carbon tax. Those numbers were finally publicly released last week.
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They showed that the federal price on carbon will impact the country’s gross domestic product by $25 billion, or 0.92 per cent, in 2030, but that it would also bring down greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 80 million tonnes during that time.
On Monday, Giroux and some of his staff were invited to the House of Commons committee on government operations to talk about supplementary estimates.
Liberal MP Charles Sousa wasted no time in his first round of questions and asked Giroux if he was “being gagged by the Government of Canada.”
“It’s a question that was asked to me in another committee and I answered in my second language. It probably led to an incomprehension on my part,” said Giroux, in French.
“The government is not muzzling me. Obviously, I was making a reference to data that was provided to me and my office that the government or Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) in this case explicitly forbade me to disclose,” he added.
Giroux further explained that was never “muzzled” by the government — and that it never directed him or censored him in any of his reports.
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Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer said he wanted to correct the “misinformation” from Liberals and read the letter from a senior public servant sent to PBO requesting that the internal data be used for the watchdog’s “internal purposes only.”
“Is this normal? Do you often receive requests from government departments not to release or publish information that they provide to you?” asked Scheer.
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Giroux said that those requests are common, especially when they relate to national security issues or commercially sensitive data, such as subsidies for battery plants, “but when it is purely an internal analysis and internal data, that’s not that frequent.”
Throughout the meeting, Liberals and Conservatives each attempted to make the PBO and his staff repeat their preferred conclusions of the watchdog’s prior carbon tax reports.
Liberals asked Giroux to say that eight out of 10 households are better off with the carbon tax — which the PBO said is the case looking only at the fiscal impact — whereas Conservatives insisted he say that most will be worse off including economic impacts.
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In response to recurrent criticism that the PBO failed to take into account the costs of climate change, Chris Matier, the PBO’s lead on the file, underscored that their office was not trying to undertake a cost-benefit analysis nor is it their mandate to do so.
“We really don’t want to appear as being partisan by only looking at certain benefits or only certain costs, nor do we want to be perceived as the arbiter of whether this policy should or should not be implemented,” said Matier.
In the partisan game of push and pull, Giroux said he agreed with the “widespread consensus among economists” that carbon pricing is one of the most efficient ways to lower emissions, but also that Canada will feel the effects of climate change regardless.
“I’m not a climate scientist, but based on the scientific consensus, (the world) needs concerted global action for climate change to stop getting worse. So, Canada acting alone is not sufficient,” he said in response to Scheer.
The PBO has been heavily criticized for the past three weeks for failing to proactively disclose that his office made a modelling error in its past two reports on the carbon tax which mistakenly included consumer carbon pricing and industrial pricing.
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Giroux told the committee that several parliamentarians, ministers’ offices and climate action groups inquired to his office about the note published on April 17 on the PBO’s website, so his team thought it had managed to get the message across.
“Given the nature of the questions and their provenance, we were under the impression, erroneously, it seems, that many people were aware of this,” he said.
Giroux promised an updated version of its carbon tax analysis in the fall. It is in that context that his office reached out to Environment and Climate Change Canada to request its estimates of the economic impact of carbon pricing, including on the national GDP and investment and labour income.
The data was sent to the PBO on May 14 with a letter from Environment Deputy Minister Jean-François Tremblay asking the budget watchdog to “ensure that this information is used for … internal purposes only and is not published or further distributed.”
Giroux revealed the existence of the government’s internal numbers at a finance committee meeting on June 3, while saying that those numbers essentially confirmed his office’s conclusion that the carbon tax would negatively affect the Canadian economy.
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When asked by Conservative MP Marty Morantz if the government “put a gag” on the PBO to not talk about the government’s own data, Giroux said that was his “understanding.”
The Conservatives went on to say that the Liberals put a “gag order” on the PBO and used their opposition day motion last week to request that the government unleash the data, which it did just moments before Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre started talking.
Poilievre took the credit for the move, saying that the Liberals released the information thanks to his party’s “relentless questioning.”
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