Why the Parliamentary Budget Officer needs a few mental health days

The Parliamentary Budget Officer recently released a paper explaining why it doesn’t actually cost the government anything when civil servants take sick leave. His conclusion was, IMHO, so bizarre that I felt compelled to devote my latest column for the Ottawa Citizen and other Postmedia papers to dissecting it. My conclusion, which I was too polite to express this way in the column itself, was that the only way that it can cost nothing extra if public servants are absent is if they’re not doing anything when they are there. Somehow I don’t think that’s what the fans of the PBO’s paper had in mind as a conclusion….