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Responsible Government: an introduction NORMAN WARD 'Responsible Government' has assumed a special symbolic and historical significance in Canada which can obscure its practical meaning. In reality responsible government has changed greatly over time, and is still changing. Precisely when 'accountability' entered our vocabulary as a necessary aspect of responsible government cannot now be determined, but it too no longer means what it once did. The day is long gone when a Prime Minister can say, as Sir John A. Macdonald once did, "I think that in the distribution of governmental patronage we carry out the true constitutional principle. Whenever an office is vacant it belongs to the party supporting the Government, if within that party there is to be found a person competent to perform the duties. Responsible Government cannot be carried on on any other principle.''1 When Macdonald wrote those words in 1871 the only auditor who examined the young Dominion's books was also Deputy Minister of Finance, and thus sat in judgment on his own activities. Clearly responsible government was at Confederation a relatively simplistic concept:_ ministers were in charge of everything, including the public service, and therefore responsible for what they did. -The extent of the changes that have occurred since then can be seen in sharp relief if one considers the relevant literature of the past two decades . The landmarks include the Report of the Royal Commission on Government Organization, which produced five volumes in 1962-3; the last of them contained a pertinent observation: "The upper limits of the burdens which can be borne by a minister, although indefinite, is nonetheless absolute, rooted as it is in human capacity and endurance - themselves not limitless qualities.''2 The Auditor General of Canada, among others, Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. 2 (Ete 1979 Summer) made it his duty to follow up the royal commission 's recommendations related to his functions , and under Maxwell Henderson the Audit Office became a remarkably lively element in the public debates of the 1960s, since the Auditor's conceptions of the true meaning of responsible government did not happen to coincide with the government's. The House of Commons' Standing Committee on Public Accounts was inevitably drawn into the conflict, and some of its reports of the time offer an accompanying obligato to the duet between the Auditor General and the minister in charge of the Treasury Board. Taking a lead from the Auditor General, one of the opposition members most interested in having the House of Commons properly discharge its role in holding the executive responsible, Mr. G.W. Baldwin, moved in March of 1972 ''that this House condemn the government for its mismanagement and waste of taxpayers' money and urges that parliament take steps to exercise greater scrutiny and control over estimates and expenditures."3 When that motion was introduced the incumbent Auditor General was within months of retirement, and one of the first actions of his successor, J.J. Macdonell, was to announce, after consultation with the chairman and vice chairman of the committee on public accounts and with the endorsement of the President of the Treasury Board, the creation of an Independent Review Committee on the office of Auditor General.4 The Committee, undertaking a study never before attempted at an official level, reported in 1975, and its key recommendations were incorporated in a new Auditor General Act proclaimed on August 1, 1977.s The preceding paragraphs are intended to emphasize that with the enormous growth of governmental activities since 1867, with annual deficits now exceeding the total expenditures of not so long ago, responsible government has come to have a special meaning where finances are concerned . Unlike its nineteenth century predecessors, every new House of Commons now meets with its members, whatever their views on policies, already committed to regular outlays of hundreds of millions of dollars for such matters as family allowances, which are not voted on in annual 3 budgets at which MPs at least get a look, but built into statutes. Expenditures of that type became possible once governments began to learn that they could, through direct taxation, exercise considerable control over revenues as well as expenditures . We have indeed...

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