Taxpayers, journalists and opposition politicians need every tool at their disposal to hold the government accountable and find out how taxpayers’ money is being spent.

The Saskatchewan government is failing on key areas of accountability to taxpayers. It’s not posting the itemized receipts of politicians and top bureaucrat expenses. And when taxpayers look for records themselves, the freedom of information system doesn’t have enough teeth to deliver them.

In Saskatchewan, the premier and cabinet ministers currently post semi-annual expenses online. These statements show the purpose of the trip and totals of broad categories of spending.

For example, Premier Scott Moe took a trip to Mexico last year. That trip cost taxpayers $25,738. The costs included as $11,507 in airfare, $7,764 in accommodation, $2,262 in meals. But the statement only shows totals, not the itemized receipts.       

Now, these could be completely justifiable expenses. There are reasons for politicians to travel. But without the receipts, taxpayers have no way of knowing if Moe and his staff billed them for rooms at a Ritz-Carlton or the local Motel 6.

And that’s the problem. The only way for a taxpayer or a journalist to access the fine details is to send a freedom of information request to the government. That’s the procedure for asking the government for documents it doesn’t usually share publicly.

But this freedom of information system has its own set of problems.

You could be stuck waiting more than a month for the information and you may be hit with fees to get information that taxpayers should be able to see for free.

Freedom of information requests are important because they dig up the numbers that politicians aren’t showing taxpayers. Without freedom of information requests, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation wouldn’t have been able to find out that the City of Saskatoon wasted more than $300,000 coming up with the name Link for its new bus line.

But right now, the government faces zero consequences for failing to follow the rules.

If the government isn’t following the law and providing information, you are forced to file a complaint with the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner. That’s the independent official whose job it is to make sure the government is being transparent.

If the commissioner finds that the government is breaking the rules, and, for example, not providing expense receipts for trips, there are no real consequences. The commissioner can’t force the government to follow the rules.

Saskatchewan’s former commissioner explicitly asked the government to improve this and follow what other provinces are doing – allow the commissioner to make legally binding orders.

The federal government and the governments of Alberta and Quebec all allow their commissioners to order the government to follow the rules. Saskatchewan needs to do the same.

Right now, the government only fully follows less than half of the commissioner’s recommendations. The government totally ignores about 10 per cent of the recommendations.

The government gets thousands of freedom of information requests a year. What information isn’t the government providing when it fails to follow the commissioner’s recommendation?

The commissioner needs the ability to make legally binding orders. An enforcement system that the government can choose to ignore isn’t worth the paper it's written on.

The NDP introduced a bill last year that would have changed this. The bill amended the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to allow the commissioner to make legally binding orders. The bill never became law.

These changes help taxpayers hold politicians accountable, and it stops politicians from wasting money in the first place because they know they will have to post the receipts or have the information available through a freedom of information request.

Taxpayers pay the bills and deserve to see and scrutinize how their money is being spent. That starts with the Saskatchewan government posting detailed receipts for politician expenses and empowering the information commissioner to force the government to follow the law.