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Accountability in Crisis: Financialization and the Office of the Comptroller General in Canada
Clinton Free,
Queen's School of Business
Vaughan Radcliffe, The University of Western Ontario
ABSTRACT. For much of the last fifty years, a key platform animating Public sector reform in Canada and elsewhere has been that efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved by adapting management private sector financial management methods and practices. We argue that the recent re-establishment of the Office of the Comptroller General represents a further reinforcement of a program of financialization that has emerged within the Canadian Federal Government. This program is longstanding but has drawn particular sustenance from the recent sponsorship scandal in Canada. We demonstrate that the reincarnated Office of the Comptroller General, re-established amid a rhetoric of strengthening accountability and modernization largely in response to the sponsorship scandal, has a wide-ranging mandate to enhance financial and audit controls, create financial standards, nurture professional development and oversee government spending. We explore some of the consequences of this development.
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