Two ministries claim the caribou file, and neither will say who signs
Recovery spending is announced annually and audited never. A one-line answer in estimates showed why.
It took a single question in budget estimates Thursday to expose the caribou file's quiet structural problem: two ministries both claim it, and neither will say whose signature ends an argument.
The exchange ran four minutes. The critic asked which minister is accountable for the southern mountain herds' recovery targets. The first minister said the targets are "a shared priority led by our colleagues." The second, an hour later, said the same sentence with the ministries reversed. Hansard now preserves both, eleven pages apart.
The arrangement matters because the money is real — nine figures over a decade, announced in instalments that each ministry counts toward its own totals — while the results are audited by nobody. Herd counts are published by one ministry, habitat decisions signed by the other, and the penning and predator programs float between them on year-to-year agreements.
A former deputy, asked how the file ended up shaped this way, offered the institutional answer: "Files that can only produce bad news are the ones nobody consolidates. Shared accountability is how a government whispers that it expects to fail."
