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This year’s auditor general’s report made for unusually sombre reading. Auditor general’s reports are never exactly light-hearted romps, concerned as they are with the many ways governments find to make a pile of the money they have taken from us and burn it.

But the theme of this year’s edition was not merely the undiminished bedlam in the public sector but, it seemed, the sheer futility of any attempts to fix it, or even monitor it. To be perfectly frank, I am a little concerned about the AG, and hope someone is checking in on him.

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Every year, Michael Ferguson writes, disconsolately, “we see government programs that are not designed to help those who have to navigate them, programs where the focus is more on what civil servants are doing than on what citizens are getting, where delivery times are long, where data is incomplete, and where public reporting does not provide a clear picture of what departments have done.”