Down the Road Never Travelled

David Robinson is an associate professor of economics at Laurentian
University.

This is my nominee for the most useful public-policy book of the year.
Down the Road Never Travelled is an engaging narrative about finding out
how bureaucrats and politicians handled the $8-billion-plus Canada Works
program. Getting the story shouldn’t be difficult—the program was
approved by all three levels of government, and politicians at all
levels participated in the decisions. The Treasury Board even paid
Statistics Canada $39,000 to come up with estimates of the number of
jobs created. The setting for this laudable quest is Canada’s open and
transparent democracy. It turns out to look like a smiley version of
Kafka’s castle.

The author finds that no one can tell her how our money is spent, and
she show us clearly that there is no real accountability. Although the
program was popular with politicians, decisions were made arbitrarily
and without sensible criteria for projects. In the end, we will never
know if the money was well spent. One startling general insight emerges
as the story unfolds. Shared-cost programs may be undermining the basis
of our federal systems. They clearly undermine the basic principles of
accountability.

The book is not an exposé of a particular party or government; it
begins as an investigation of a specific program. The investigation
reveals a fundamental problem for any democracy—and one that gets more
difficult as government grows and society gets more complicated.
Fortunately the author is invariably good-humoured and, though the style
is deceptively informal, the writing is clear and the observations are
sharp. Anyone running for office, studying Canadian politics or public
economics, or just wanting some insight into the scandal that passes for
accountability in government spending should read this book.