Former Parliamentary Budget Officer on youth, press and taking risks

Jane Lytvynenko
CUP Ottawa Bureau Chief

OTTAWA (CUP) — Kevin Page created and headed the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) for five years. The PBO published reports on government spending, taking headlines on more than one occasion. Since then Page has teamed up with the University of Ottawa to create Canada’s first school of government. Jane Lytvynenko spoke with Page on the phone from Ottawa.

As PBO you took on the government and kept it accountable in many ways. What was it like to work under such immense political pressure?

For me the difficult thing was setting up the office and figuring out how to deliver on our political mandate. … I was given a certain amount of money by Parliament and by Canadians to deliver announcements on the economy, the nation’s finances. It was a big mandate and not a lot of money so the big challenge was putting together a business model and bringing on a team that could deliver. In an environment where you don’t really have a culture of analysis and publication, an environment where a lot of financial information wasn’t getting to Parliamentarians before they voted, that created some difficulty.

There was political pressure afterwards but we felt like we were in a good high ground with respect to our operating principle. … It was difficult but like this great quote from Abraham Lincoln says, “First you have to decide where to plant your right and left foot. Once you’ve done that, you hang on.” … We didn’t loose sleep over the political pressure, what worried us was getting the product out the door.

After being such an infamous public figure you decided to set up office at the University of Ottawa and go into teaching, how come?

When I was finishing up my five years as the PBO, I had the great pleasure of meeting the University of Ottawa president Mr. Alan Rock. He asked me if I’d be interested in coming to the University of Ottawa and talked about possibilities of spending time with students and sharing knowledge I’ve accumulated over the past number of years, including being Parliamentary Budget Officer. He pitched to me his idea of creating a school of government, which I found very interesting. It’s another opportunity to build an institution in Canada.

What role do you think the youth in Canada are playing today, specifically in politics?

I think whatever role they play, they need to increase the role. I think they need to increase the role because my generation has not done such a great job at building institutions, at addressing long-term policy issues. … The almost tearing down of the Senate, and a House of Commons that hasn’t been high-performing over the past number of years and lack of discussion on policy issues. I think the youth have this opportunity — to quote Albert Einstein, “In the middle of difficulty you find opportunity,” — to take a look at this as an opportunity to rebuild institutions … and look at these bigger issues.

I love quoting Warren Buffet, “The time to buy is not when the market is at it’s peak, it’s when the market is at it’s low.” The markets are at their low right now, so we have this opportunity to investigate these long-term issues and rebuild institutions. It’s a good time to become a public servant because you can have a big impact.

What should youth or students be doing right now?

There was an article in the [Ottawa] Citizen [recently], it was this lady that won a Nobel Prize for peace in the late 90s. She said something like, “People need to organize.” … She talked about people needing to get engaged. One of the fears I have is the fear of indifference. That it doesn’t matter, we get cynical about what we see on TV, the Senate spending scandal issue, or the speech from the throne that really didn’t deal with a lot of long-term issues and doesn’t really talk about the environment, doesn’t talk about healthcare, doesn’t talk about fiscal sustainability. It’s focused more on the short-term.

These are all opportunities for student to gather and organize and get involved in discussion and political debates. We’re two years from the federal election, the time is now, not in the fall of 2014 or the winter of 2015. Use social media to speak to political leaders and tell them, “These are the issues that matter.”

I find that there is interest, there is hope and the students are incredibly bright. They are not happy about what’s going on in these institutions and the lack of vision. They know they need to create these forums and to make influence because there’s opportunity to have an influence.

Do you think the student media have a role to play in politics today?

Absolutely. … The media plays a fourth estate-type role in keeping us all accountable. We felt that way when were building the Parliamentary budget office. We needed to speak to Parliamentarians, to connect Parliament better, be open to the media and we were dealing fairly complicated concepts …  but having that experience, being in front of people like yourself and others who ask questions we had to ask ourselves, “How do we make this real for Parliamentarians and Canadians? Why should they care about these numbers and these concepts and the numbers that are behind them?”

I found from my personal experience the media was very open and they wanted to know and have a better understanding how budgets work, how the studies take place. … We saw this as a part of the messiness of democracy it’s a part of the debate we want to have. … The media in our case was an absolutely necessary vehicle to communicate what the government was up to.

The student press is often overlooked by government officials or not taken seriously. Do you have any recommendations on how we can bridge that gap and talk to government officials about issues that matter to students?

It’s inevitable that the influence of student press is going to rise. There are mediums that now exist, like the social medium, that have shown it can have a major impact on the electorate. They can put significant pressure on our political leaders. Nobody understands this medium better than you and your generation. This is a huge opportunity to strengthen democracy with tools that never existed when I was in university in the late 1800s. Actually it was more like the 1970s.

Some of it is elbowing your way into the conversation and there is strength in numbers. [This means] using social media to create this strength in numbers, doing your homework which is absolutely essential from my experience as the PBO. Make the effort to connect; ask for meetings with that political leader, ask to interview Justin Trudeau or Thomas Mulcair or the Prime Minister or Mrs. May and others. Bring your ideas to that kind of table.

… It’s another reason why I feel so lucky to come to the university. I’m surrounded by all this energy, people want to make the world right, they want to be inspired. We want to make sure we don’t get defeated by indifference and cynicism. We need to tap that energy and inspiration to make the world better.

Do you have any advice who wants to challenge the status quo like you did?

Did I challenge the status quo? I was very fortunate to be given the opportunity where I could create something new. I was very fortunate to work with people who felt the same way. There was great advice I got from a former boss of mine. He said, “There’s no risk-free risk.” … There are possibilities of failure all around you, but if you go back to, “What is the higher purpose?” that becomes very motivating. At the PBO, to get back to Lincoln, we thought that our feet were planted in a very good spot and we just had to hang on as long as we could. …

Be yourself, do things you think are important, don’t be persuaded by people who tell you that what you’re doing is wrong. I think that we’ve probably put too much emphasis on a delusion called security. Seven years ago I lost a son, he was 20 years old at the time, he would have been 28 last Friday. I have two other kids. What he taught me was that there is no security in life, which was a key lesson for me. Then the issue was, “What are you going to do? What is your contribution? How do you be true to yourself?” … Don’t worry about failure, keep moving forward. There will be opportunity to make a difference, cease it as best you can. If it doesn’t work out, fine. At least you tried.