I think that many in the media have now outlived their usefulness. They would do much better hosting a reality show, because clearly few have the ability to think and speak, or think and write; at the same time.
Smarten Up!
There's a reason that the National Post went bankrupt, because they became nothing more than a PR firm for the Reform movement.
This is not about partisan politics. This is about Canadians. We are smart. We know that while we hate to pay taxes, they are the price we pay for the life we have.
If you don't get that, step aside. Consider yourselves prorogued.
Glenn Pearson wrote several months ago, about our current media and their fixation on sensationalism.
I recall when Ignatieff came to London following a visit to Cambridge, in which he stated no leader would be worthy of the name if he or she didn’t place the possibility of raising taxes on a long list of future considerations if a deficit couldn’t be brought under control.
Political staffers mulled around, worried that it would be taken out of context, which it inevitably was. Media had a field day with it. Ignatieff, suffering from a gruelling cold, sat in a chair prior to the event in London and wondered what became of honesty in the public space. The very next day in the House, Conservative members used every possible occasion to ridicule Ignatieff, calling him just another “tax and spend” Liberal. The media ate it up.
Well this week, the same thing happened. Gerard Kennedy was commenting on a poll suggesting that Canadians would support a hike in the GST, and holy cow. The media went nuts. 'Janie no brainie' on CTV is even running an entire segment on it.
She's got guests, including opposition members who are in some kind of trance. Their eyes are rolling in the back of their heads and they're frothing at the mouth.
She's got reporters on the ground with sobbing citizens and Jim Bob who swore he saw a UFO. She's even got a 99 year old man who thought the show was about stepping on tacks, so he peeled off his socks and showed her his scar.
Poor little Janie fainted from the excitement.
GROW UP!
This is what really happened. And Janie if you are having trouble with the big words, please let me know. Fortunately, most Canadians are smarter than this so you can ask any one of us.
It is amazing what some creative YouTube editing, the maturity of a 12-year old and a strong disregard for intellectual honesty can do for you these days.
Tim says Gerard Kennedy, the Liberal infrastructure critic supports tax hikes. But it was the Federation of Canadian Municipalities that released a poll last week showing 70 per cent of Canadians would support a 1 per cent GST increase dedicated to local infrastructure repairs and upgrades with 43 per cent of Canadians strongly supporting the increase. ...
I swear, I just don't know what is going on here. The Reform Conservatives are trying to put their fingerprints on everything, so that there is little separation of the Government of Canada and the Reform Conservative party.
I must admit that I didn't see this one coming though. Apparently the brightest university students who wish to enter the public service must write an essay on the Canada Action Plan first.
Now to write an honest essay they would have to admit that it is looking like the entire program was nothing more than a massive Ref-Con advertising campaign. How could anyone possibly say anything positive about this, when the country's top economists have no idea where our money went?
Ottawa — An elite federal program to recruit the cream of new graduates suddenly wants to know the applicants' views on the government's vaunted Economic Action Plan before they get a job interview.
The Accelerated Economist Training Program invites highly educated people to develop careers in the federal public service, starting at a senior level.
Successful candidates go through two years of training at four departments. They start at about $50,000 a year and after two years can earn over $80,000.
Spaces are in high demand among university graduates.
But this year, for the first time, candidates need to provide more than a list of qualifications and good marks. They also must to write 1,000 words on the federal government's last budget, promoted widely as the Economic Action Plan.
The budget devoted billions to programs meant to lift the country out of recession. It has now become the centre of government advertising and is at the heart of election campaigning and the Conservative party's promotional efforts.
"In 2009, the Government of Canada introduced Canada's Economic Action Plan to help Canada's economy weather the economic storm," says the application form. "In 1,000 words or less, please choose two of these measures and discuss their implications for Canada." Applicants must consider the social, economic or international policy implications of the budget, it says.
Applications need to be submitted by Monday. It's the first time recruits have to submit an essay. It's also the first time recruiting has been led by the Privy Council Office. Treasury Board spearheaded the program in previous years.
"It smells a little bit," said Leslie Pal, professor of public policy at Ottawa's Carleton University.
"It places an unfortunate implication of inviting people to write glowing things about the economic recovery plan."
Pal said he sees no rationale for asking people looking for a job with the government to comment on current government policy, especially when that policy is so contentious.
"I think this is not a good idea."
In the past, selection of successful candidates has been done by a panel of public servants, not politicians, notes Matthew Mendelsohn, director of the University of Toronto's Mowat Centre public policy think-tank.
"I have no indication that they're trying to filter certain people for the public service."
The action plan has been the object of widespread advertising by the Conservative government. Signs promoting the initiative are plastered in front of the thousands of infrastructure projects that have received funding from the plan's stimulus program.
The government has been harshly criticized for spending at least $34 million to promote it, and for allegedly using the budget to further political ends. All four Conservative candidates in byelections set for next week have made the action plan central to their campaigns.
The Opposition Liberals have filed complaints with the federal ethics commissioner over the Conservatives' use of giant fake cheques to promote the funding. The cheques in question have carried the party logo or featured an MP's name emblazoned across the top.
At the same time, some senior public servants have quietly raised concerns about what they see as the politicization of the bureaucracy and the prime minister's penchant for using the Privy Council Office for political purposes, rather than just policy.
Officials at both PCO and the Prime Minister's Office have denied criticisms the civil service is becoming politicized. The Public Service Commission prides itself for upholding a strictly non-partisan workforce that is hired based on merit alone, and has issued guidelines to reflect the principle.
In a recent paper on impartiality, the commission warns that partisan hiring could undermine the legitimacy of government practices, erode public trust, cause turmoil and high turnover, and even threaten the essence of a functioning democracy.
If there is any advice that those of us in Ontario could give to the rest of the country, it's that the stuff that comes out of John Baird's mouth has been carefully analyzed and concluded to be 99% pure shite. The remaining 1% is just regular crap.
This walking, talking caricature is long on bluster but very short on facts. The video above is from several months ago, and not surprisingly, Mr. Kennedy was right and John Baird's nonsense was pure lies.
Our parliamentary budget office Kevin Page is trying to do an analysis, but John Baird has been stonewalling. However, recently he dumped three boxes of an accounting mess at Page's doorstep so it may be weeks before we learn just how corrupt this government is. (I knew in 2006 when I saw that Harper had named Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement to his cabinet. Mike Harris all over again).
Maybe Harper can lull us all into complacency again on the piano. It seems to be the only thing he has going for him, and yet apparently it's enough. Sigh.
OTTAWA — The Harper government has dumped three boxloads of information about its efforts to stimulate Canada's sputtering economy on Parliament's independent budget watchdog.
Kevin Page had asked for more information, complaining that the sketchy data provided up to now made it impossible to tell whether $12 billion in stimulus spending is having any impact on the economy.
But rather than provide an easy-to-analyse spreadsheet listing infrastructure projects and how much money has been spent on each of them to date, the government flooded Page Thursday with 4,476 pages of documents.
A spokesman for Transport and Infrastructure Minister John Baird said the documents are in fact one big spreadsheet. "The reason it is so large is because of the thousands of projects we have got out the door. That's good news," said Chris Day.
Nevertheless, it will likely take Page's office days, if not weeks, to input the information into an electronic database for analysis.
The tactic sparked opposition accusations that the government is trying to bury the parliamentary budget officer in paper.
"I think the PBO is being buried with data now and the goal is the same: To confound and confuse the general public," said New Democrat MP Pat Martin.
"They don't want to tell us how much they've really spent."
The boxloads of paper were unloaded just before Baird appeared at a Commons committee, where he was peppered with opposition demands for an accurate accounting of exactly how much money has been spent to date. He made no apologies for not delivering the information in a more user-friendly form. He said 200 officials at Infrastructure Canada have been "working flat out" to get 7,600 projects up and running and that has to be their "first priority."
"The parliamentary budget officer has asked for a significant amount of information. We've given him a significant amount of information," Baird said.
Baird was repeatedly asked during the committee hearing to specify how much money has been spent thus far. He did not provide a figure.
Instead, he explained that the federal government has advanced up to 30 per cent of a project's cost upfront to some municipalities. But in general, he said the government only pays when its municipal and provincial partners submit invoices for work that's been done.
He said he didn't know how much has been advanced to municipalities. As for paying invoices, he later told reporters the government has paid "in the hundreds of millions" so far.
Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay said the lack of precision is "extremely frustrating." " We have not yet seen a single answer to (the question) what have you spent sofar."
Baird stressed that all of the stimulus announcements are public and posted on a government website. They are also available on an interactive map. But the announcements are not categorized or easily searchable, nor is it obvious if any of the various lists of projects are complete.
That means it has been next to impossible for any researcher to come to conclusions about how the stimulus money is being spent on a national basis, regardless of whether they want to know about political bias or economic impact.
The Liberal Party has employed two dozen volunteers to assemble its own database, culling information from an array of websites and making their own calls to municipalities to collect more data.
Page made an official request for more data in September. But in a sign that he wasn't holding much hope for government answers, he and his officials are working with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to obtain details and research directly from municipal governments.
Page complained earlier this month that he did not have enough information to even begin to assess how the stimulus spending is affecting the economy and jobs. The information made available by the government has been incomplete, hard to assemble, and some programs have been dropped or renamed, making them difficult to track, he said.
Even with all the information he requested, Page will have a hard time figuring out the impact on job creation.
Unlike in the United States, the government did not set up a mechanism to track jobs created by the stimulus money. Instead it relies partly on a rule of thumb derived from research done for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities by economists at think-tank Informetrica Ltd. Baird told the committee the federation has estimated 11,000 direct jobs are created for every $1 billion in stimulus spending.
It shouldn't be this hard. IT IS OUR MONEY, NOT THEIRS!!!
So while the Conservatives are running helter skelter, promising this and promising that, the only thing flowing is a lot of hot air.
The money is just not getting out.
The Liberal infrastructure critic, Gerard Kennedy, has been tracking the situation, and plans to produce a full report by the end of the month.
However, even without the report, the latest job loss figures pretty much validate that the stimulus is not creating jobs, and the good news about economic recovery may have to be put on hold to reflect this.
Because no one else is doing it, Liberal MP Gerard Kennedy and his staff of four are attempting to track the $12 billion in new infrastructure funding in the government's January budget. Their research is not complete, but Kennedy estimates that between 15 per cent and 25 per cent of the money has actually flowed. The rest has been promised, approved, allocated or announced – but municipalities don't have it. Following the money isn't easy. Ottawa has 16 different infrastructure funds in play. Conservative MPs have announced a blizzard of local projects this summer.
Even when a project has been authorized, municipalities still have to negotiate contribution agreements with Ottawa and their provincial government.
The federal finance department says 80 per cent of the stimulus is "already implemented." But that means the money has been committed, not delivered. Infrastructure Canada, which disperses the funds, has not released any figures on how much has gone out and where it is being spent.
To cut through the confusion, Kennedy is contacting every municipality that applied for funds and asking how much it has received. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have yet to see a cent. Smaller communities, especially in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, have fared better. Surprisingly, most municipalities in Alberta are still waiting.
"The government is going to underspend its target, there's no doubt about that," the Liberal infrastructure critic says.
He also has concerns about what is being built. "We could be paying for a lot of shoddy stuff and sprawl. They (the Conservatives) know they'll never be held to account."
One complaint that has cropped up repeatedly is that contractors are jacking up prices, knowing municipalities have little bargaining power. To qualify for federal funding, work must be completed by March 2011.
While collecting his data, Kennedy has been thinking about what kind of infrastructure policy the Liberals should take into the next election. He can't speak in specifics because he hasn't presented his proposals to the party, but he outlined some of his priorities in an interview last week.
He believes federal infrastructure funding should serve two primary purposes: to make Canada's cities more sustainable and to renew the quality of life in northern and remote communities.
This would make Ottawa less open to proposals to widen highways and accelerate road-building in urban areas and more open to proposals to find new uses for public buildings in towns struggling with depopulation. He thinks the gas tax fund, through which Ottawa transfers a portion of its gasoline tax revenue to the municipalities, should be the principal vehicle for distributing infrastructure money. The Conservatives did add $1 billion to the fund in January's budget, but Kennedy would like to have seen most of Ottawa's infrastructure funding delivered that way. As well as being more efficient, he points out, gas tax transfers allow municipalities to use federal money intelligently, rather than coming up with hasty proposals to take advantage of on-again, off-again infrastructure programs. He would like to break the link between infrastructure spending and political pork barrelling.
It is hard to blame Canadians for being cynical, Kennedy admits. For generations, politicians have used capital projects to reward their friends and pay back voters who supported them. "We need to convince Canadians we can use their money to make their lives better."
He hopes to release his cross-Canada tally by the end of August. Kennedy knows voters will question his motives. He has a vested interested in discrediting the government, after all. He hopes skeptics will do their own scouting. They won't find many shovels in the ground or jobs openings for unemployed construction workers.
I think that many in the media have now outlived their usefulness. They would do much better hosting a reality show, because clearly few have the ability to think and speak, or think and write; at the same time.
