Ottawa

The auditor general on cyber security, veterans and national finance

"Canadians do not have all the relevant information to understand the long-term impact of budgets"
Auditor General Michael Ferguson speaks about a report on the Administration of the House of Commons and Senate in Ottawa, ON Wednesday, June 13, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

The fall report of the Auditor General has been published here. In it, he covers, among other things, cyber security, veterans and the government’s fiscal projections.

While Finance Canada prepared a draft report in 2007 on the long-term fiscal sustainability analyses that the government committed to issuing that year, the analyses were not published; nor has any report on long-term fiscal sustainability been published since then. While long-term fiscal sustainability analyses have been regularly prepared since 2010, they have not been made public. This lack of reporting means that parliamentarians and Canadians do not have all the relevant information to understand the long-term impact of budgets on the federal, provincial, and territorial governments in order to support public debate and to hold the government to account. Many of the countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) already publish reports on their long-term fiscal positions.

The CBC looks at the cyber security findings. The Canadian Press looks at veterans and savings from changes to Old Age Security.