Insights

A popular exemplar of wasteful government expending is former International Development Minister Bev Oda reimbursed $16 for a glass of orange juice purchased at London’s swanky Savoy hotel. The fact Oda was in London to attend a conference on immunization for children in developing countries, and that she submitted thousands of dollars in limousine receipts as well, only fuelled the fires of outrage even further. The incident made Oda a laughingstock and severely undercut Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s claim of austere, sensible government spending.

The lessons of this episode are simultaneously obvious and counterintuitive. On one hand, every decision a public administrator takes should come with consideration of safeguarding the public purse. These are, after all, not their funds. This money comes from the hard-earned incomes of granddads and single moms and everyone else who pay taxes. Contra the civil servant who once told me “it’s just money”, everyone from frontline administration staff to Ministers of the Crown should proceed with the question ‘what if this choice was to become a newspaper headline’ at the back of their mind. In other words, if you see $16 orange juice on the menu, you are a fool tempting fate if you don’t order the water.

The story doesn’t end there, however. Expensive orange juice is clearly a red flag: don’t do it; don’t order it; be sure to bully those who do. And in that way, punishing those who do—and get caught—helps keep hold everyone else’s feet to the fire. But the story must not end there, for if we obsess and hunt for similarly egregious $20 items alone, we fail to question the wisdom of the broader program or project or strategy more generally. Capital spending is notorious for this, with opposition members and media salivating over construction delays and specific design choices, rather than debating the rationality of the project in the first place. Against a total project cost in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars the $16 orange juice soon becomes pretty unimportant. In the end, it is far more important to get the big-picture decisions right.

The hidden lesson is that a good critic harnesses the orange juice warning into a broader assessment of whether or why the individual should have been buying that orange juice in the first place. Without this connection it is far too easy for defenders of the public purse to get lost and fail to see the forest for the trees.