The Liberal government has named senior public servant Annette Ryan to serve as the new parliamentary budget officer (PBO).
Ryan currently serves as a deputy director at Fintrac, Canada’s financial intelligence unit and anti-money-laundering agency, where she has worked since late 2019.
Wayne Long, the secretary of state for financial institutions, told the House of Commons on Monday that the government was nominating Ryan for a term of seven years.
Ryan has held a number of senior positions across government, including as associate assistant deputy minister for Finance Canada and chief economist and director general of economic research and policy analysis for Industry Canada.
She earned a bachelor of arts from Acadian University in mathematics, and a master’s in economics from the University of Oxford, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Before Ryan can take up the new post she first must be confirmed by a vote in both the House of Commons and the Senate.
PBOs can serve a maximum of two seven-year terms in the role, but previous people who have held the position did not serve more than one term.
The last permanent budget officer, Yves Giroux, ended his term in September of last year. On his last day in office the Carney government announced PBO official Jason Jacques would serve as the interim PBO for six months.
While a permanent PBO must be approved by Parliament, an interim PBO can be installed directly by cabinet through a governor-in-council appointment for an unlimited number of six-month terms.
Jacques, who has worked in the office since the first PBO was appointed in 2008, returned to his role as the institution’s director general of economic and fiscal analysis on March 2.
His tenure got off to a bumpy start when he was criticized for a controversial appearance before a parliamentary committee in September when he described the health of Canada’s federal finances as “stupefying,” “shocking” and “unsustainable.”
Kevin Page, Canada’s first PBO and the president of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa, reacted passionately to Jacques’s language, telling CBC’s Power & Politics a few days later that Jacques was “just wrong” and his musings were “not consistent with the numbers.”
When the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued its report on the PBO last month, it pointed to that performance as evidence that the PBO needs to improve how it communicates its findings going forward.
Budget watchdog calls federal spending ‘stupefying, shocking’
Jacques told CBC News that his language in that hearing distracted parliamentarians from the message he was trying to convey. He later softened his language in his analysis of November’s federal budget.
While the OECD criticized the PBO’s communications, it still ranked the office best among the 35 countries it examined.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who had been made aware of Ryan’s nomination last week, said Monday that Jacques should have been made permanent instead of being fired for telling the truth.
“Mark Carney is trying to muzzle the Parliamentary Budget Office. We have a highly qualified parliamentary budget officer who is calling out Mr. Carney,” Poilievre said Monday. “And then all of a sudden, after only months in the job, [Carney] is throwing him out.”
Page, who worked with Ryan at the Privy Council Office, disagreed with that assessment — telling CBC News that “Ryan is an excellent choice.”
Calling Ryan “a well-known and highly regarded public servant,” Page said she is “an independent thinker with backbone to support the values and analysis of the office.”
