Remember Gerald Keddy, the man who got busted using a Conservative logo on a government cheque? Well Keddy is in trouble again, this time touting the party line on the unemployed.
When he used Peter Van Loan and Jason Kenney's 'hire a migrant worker and we'll make them do as they're told' plan, he called the unemployed in Halifax "no-good bastards". The man should be removed from the Conservative caucus immediately, given the rise in unemployment in this country.
But will he be? Of course not. This kind of thing appears to be encouraged in this party. It plays to their base and he will probably be promoted. Welcome to the new Canada.
OTTAWA — If anyone ever stops Nova Scotia farmers from hiring migrant labourers to harvest their crops, they would destroy a lot of businesses because unemployed Nova Scotians don’t want those jobs, says Gerald Keddy, the Conservative MP for South Shore-St. Margarets.
"Nova Scotians won’t do it — all those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can’t get work," Mr. Keddy said Monday.
He said if you want to "shut down the Annapolis Valley, and every market garden operation and all the apple industry, then don’t bring in immigrant labour. We’ve got 20 Christmas tree growers using immigrant labour this year."
Mr. Keddy was upset that a reporter called to check out a rumour that he had hired migrant labourers to work on his Christmas tree operation.
"Why would the question be asked?" he said. "Why would it matter?" (The fact that he asks that question says a lot)
Mr. Keddy has an eight-hectare Christmas tree operation, which he runs with his kids. They don’t bring in any migrant labourers, but Mr. Keddy said nobody should criticize farmers who do because "they can’t get enough local labour."
It’s also great for the workers from out of the country, he said. "They pay the guys 10 or 12 bucks an hour. It’s a great job for the Mexicans. (???? What a horrible thing to say) They’ve got to pay either their way up or their way back. It’s not slave labour here."
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.
After learning that the Harper government has signed on to changes that will allow corporations to legally defraud unsuspecting citizens, I thought it might be time to update this story on John Baird and Anderson Consulting, of Enron fame.
John Baird's attempt to privatize social services when he was in Mike Harris's Ontario government, resulted in one of the worst scams ever perpetrated in this province. A handful of people got very rich by exploiting Ontario's disabled and disenfranchised. And Ontario taxpayers were left with the bills.
Anderson Consulting (now called Accenture)
Arthur Andersen of Anderson Consulting, was once the accountant for Halliburton, and a close personal friend of Dick Cheney's, George Bush's VP. Cheney even used Anderson's firm in a promotional video, showing how good accounting firms do business. (1) Not long after, Anderson's firm was charged with fraud.
But at the time, John Baird hired them to revamp our welfare system. According to the Polaris Institute:
Social Services outsourcing for State and Provincial Governments, especially in the area of Welfare services, is one of [their] focus areas ... This outsourcing for government includes computer systems design and network creation and management. [Their] history of social services outsourcing, which often amounts to privatization of major parts of social services delivery under a certain time period, has often been very problematic. The problems have been especially serious in the U.S. states of Ohio and New York and the Canadian Province of Ontario ... (2)
Anderson Consulting would later change it's name to Accenture and Mike Harris would find his way to it's board as a "consultant". This was called:
...the fastest, most expensive re-branding effort in history as everything was changed to fit the new logo in a matter of days. It is Arthur Andersen that is in so much legal trouble for allowing Enron to cook their books and destroying Enron's documents as Enron collapsed. While Accenture states that because it is no longer tied to Andersen it is not implicated in the Andersen/Enron scandal, the Wall Street Journal reported that Accenture might have some legal exposure to the Enron scandal ... (2)
In October of 2001, Halliburton and Accenture announced a major expansion of their longstanding relationship with the signing of an alliance between Accenture and Landmark Graphics Corporation, a wholly owned business unit of Halliburton which is "the world's leading supplier of software and services for the upstream oil and gas industry.
And while Haliburton and the newly branded Anderson Consulting was announcing that major expansion, they were being investigated for another accounting fraud.
According to Halliburton's current CEO, David Lessar, Cheney was aware of the accounting changes. While the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) hasn't interviewed the vice president yet, the nonpartisan and conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a shareholder suit against Cheney and Halliburton claiming that because Halliburton overstated its earnings by $445 million from 1999 through 2001, shareholders lost their shirts when the fraud was revealed and the stock tanked in response. Despite Halliburton's troubles since Cheney left there for public office, he has stonewalled the press on every related subject—whether his stock sales, or asbestos liability assumed after Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries, or the SEC accounting investigation—and refers all questions to Halliburton, which conveniently declines to comment. (1)
Sound familiar?
Political Contributions
One thing that became public throughout the investigations of Anderson, Enron and Halliburton, even in the early days, was how generous these companies had been to George W. Bush and the Republicans.
One energy company stands above the rest in terms of its political influence. That company met with task force members six times and with Vice President Cheney at least three times. Its name: Enron, a donator of $1.1 million to the GOP in 2000 and another $300,000 for the Bush inauguration. According to Secret Service logs, Cheney had two additional meetings with Enron chairman Ken Lay in the spring of 2001. What resulted from all these get-togethers? An independent evaluation of the Bush energy bill by American Family Voices, an advocacy group for middle- and low-income Families, showed that seventeen different policy initiatives included in the plan directly benefited the rogue corporation. (3)
Meanwhile in Ontario:
Accenture has a huge, problem-filled contract, to 'streamline' the delivery of welfare in Ontario . In 2000 and 2001, Accenture gave $20,000 Canadian to the governing Tories. Interestingly, they started making donations to the Tories only after the Tory government's Accenture contract was given a scathing review by the Provincial auditor, and they were forced to renegotiate the contract. Said Deputy Liberal Leader Sandra Pupatello: "They [Accenture] were fearing that they were going to lose the contract altogether because the government was taking far too much heat on this contract. Then, suddenly, they started contributing to the PC Coffers" (Hamilton Spectator ['Briefly' Section] "Tory Welfare Donations Under Fire" October 25, 2001; "Consulting Firm Boosts PC Coffers, Liberals Say" Richard Brennan, Toronto Star, October 25th, 2001) (4)
And two years later, those donations were still paying off:
In May of 2003 - The Province of Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) offered Accenture a $500 000 (CND) contract to review the board's operations. The contract did not go through a formal public tendering process.
And now another Harris boy, Jim Flaherty, has just legalized this, so there will be no legal recourse to those who become victims of corporate fraud.
John Baird, Halliburton, Anderson, Enron
Baird's attempt to privatize social services was costly, not just in terms of the enormous cost to taxpayers, but also a human cost, as thousands were bumped from the system.
The Canadian Province of Ontario's contract for social services delivery, essentially privatized welfare during the duration of the contract (which was to be for 4 years, but has gone over that limit by more than a year). As of March 2002, Accenture has been paid $246 million (CND) to do this "overhaul of the Ontario welfare service", even though the original estimate was $50 - $70 million and the project was eventually capped at $180 million. At one point, Accenture billed taxpayers $26,000 in unreceipted out of pocket expenses and Accenture management was paid up to $575/hour. In 1999, a year after the Auditor General of Ontario put out a scathing report on the contract, hourly rates paid to Accenture management actually rose (3%), rather than being cut. After this, the government was forced to finally renegotiate a cut to Accenture's billing rates. The Ontario government cut welfare payments to $355.71 per child in poverty and fired massive numbers of social service workers, making this contract essentially a transfer from those in need to those in Accenture.
In 2001, many more critiques of the system were brought forth from labour, the Provincial opposition Liberals, and again from the Provincial Auditor. In September 2001, union and welfare activists picketed government offices in Hamilton, Brantford, St. Catherines and Simcoe. The employees of the Ontario Disability Support Program said that workers were frustrated by the Accenture created system because, in the words of union representative Paul Statham, "It's not working and needs to be fixed and we want the public to know. It means clients are phoning up and yelling at us for system errors that we have no control over...
When all is said and done the government is going to pay out $180 million and it doesn't work." The Hamilton-Niagara region, in the first four months of its use of the Accenture contract for social assistance delivery, has been plagued by such problems as blank cheques for recipients and missed drug and dental benefits.
In October 2001, the opposition Liberals called the Accenture contract for the welfare system a "boondoggle" at the expense of Provincial taxpayers, citing computer crashes and ministry staff which duplicated the work of Accenture management because of the need to double check the faulty work at Accenture. An Ottawa Citizen Editorial in October 2001 decried the fact that Accenture received millions of dollars before any savings occurred; that the government can't yet clearly say what the final cost, or savings, will be; that it is unclear that any savings will come from this at all; that computer crashes have been rampant. The editorial came to the conclusion that high-priced consultants are just that - high priced, and that "if a service truly needs to be provided by government, then government should do the job. The government defended the scheme, saying that though there were problems in the first two years, those problems have been dealt with and the contract is running smoothly, providing a huge windfall for taxpayers according to Social Services Minister John Baird.
In December 2001, the Provincial Auditor laid waste to the claims that the contract has been running smoothly over the previous two years, saying that the cost ratio of having Accenture do the work rather than public servants was 6 to 1 and that in 2000 the Province realized savings of $89.5 million [much of this from the continued gutting of access to welfare payments], but the government had paid Accenture $193 million. This statement of the Auditor General was part of a larger condemnation of the Tory government's overuse of private consultants throughout its Departments.
While the Ontario Government believes that the system is working and that they are addressing the issues raised by the Auditor General's reports with Accenture, the Auditor General's 2002 report again condemned Accenture and the Ontario Government's Business Transformation Project. The December 2002 report stated that the system, implemented across Ontario between May 2001 and January 2002, "was seriously flawed and was characterized by its principal users as being, in many respects, a step back from what had been available to them previously." (Auditor General's 2002 report). The Auditor reported that the service-manager staff were concerned that the Business Transformation Project had not been tested adequately and that it was essentially a work in progress rather than a finished product when it was released.
In terms of payments to Accenture, the Ministry has paid, as of March 2002, $246 million to the Accenture, significantly higher than the original $180 million payment cap. The Ministry paid Accenture $66 million dollars outside of the original $180 million payment cap, of which $22 million is related to work the Ministry had agreed to do but in the end was performed by Accenture. This, along with the fact that savings attributed to the Project and to Accenture were exaggerated, prompted Auditor to believe that the basis for the above cap payments continue to be questionable.
The Ministry's response to the Audit stated that "it is the Ministry's view that savings attributed to the overall business transformation are substantial and substantial future savings will continue to accrue to taxpayers from this transformation." Upon release of the report, Auditor General Erik Peters commented on the Ontario Government's willingness to respond to the report: "What worries me the most is really the slowness of taking action."
The report also noted that the Ministry had essentially abandoned the original principle of sharing risk and rewards with Accenture by guaranteeing Accenture full payment for its out-of-cap work. This comes after a January 2001 contract amendment that provides for the extension of the two-year period for benefit accrual after the end of the contract. It was noted in the audit that most out-of-cap expenditures came after the initial system release in May 2001. Many of the items in this category can be attributed to failures in the new information technology system which required design changes and increased technical support.
The Auditor believes that many of the changes should have been corrected under Accenture's warranty provision agreement with the Ministry. The Report stated that, "in our view, the willingness of the Ministry to pay for these items outside the agreed-to payment cap appears questionable and unnecessary."
The Accenture designed and implemented system has also been reported as having made unexplained errors. The Auditor General explained that the errors "do not inspire confidence and raise the possibility that other significant problems may go undetected." In one case the system inexplicably produced 7,110 discretionary benefit payments totaling $1.2 million to recipients who were ineligible for assistance.
The Auditor noted in an interview with the Toronto Star that due to the failure of meeting the obligations of their first contract with the Ministry, Accenture was granted a further $38 million contract to make sure that the system they have put into place operates properly.
The Corporate Party of Canada, made up of the old Reformers and Mike Harris cronies, headed by Stephen Harper, is now sticking it to us on a larger scale.
Sources:
1. The Book on Bush: How George W. (mis) Leads America, By Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN: 0-670-03273-5, Pg. 68
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!!!
For all their pork-barrelling and partisan advertising with our money, we learn today that the government infrastructure spending was too little, too late.
We are nowhere near economic recovery and job-creation hasn't been up to task. We were outpaced seven to one by the U.S., and as a result they are closer to landing on their feet than we are.
And again, because part of Flaherty's stimulus plan was buying up vulnerable mortgages, a scheme that is keeping up the appearance of an economic recovery; the Canadian taxpayer is now the largest sub-prime lender in the world. This is nothing to cheer about.
And instead of targeting the stimulus money to areas that most needed it and were closer to actually putting shovels in the ground, the ref-Cons targeted the spending on ridings that were either vulnerable for them, or the ridings of cabinet ministers.
Pork-barrelling is nothing new, but the economic crisis called for urgent action, not politicking. Many of the projects that sported their 'Actions' signs were ones already in progress or for simple maintenance. Few new jobs.
Canada's economy is a long way from recovery, and more public investment will be key to getting there, says a new report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel … and our high dollar is making it worse," said Jim Stanford, co-author of the report and an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers.
The private sector is still shrinking, most new jobs are being created in the public sector and the economy may require billions more in government stimulus, according to the report released Thursday in Ottawa. "So far we've seen continued decline in exports, continued decline in business capital spending," Stanford said. "Across the private sector as a whole, there's no source of new growth ....
These kids deserve answers, not rhetoric and cheap political tricks.
Recently Kelly McParland, columnist for the National Post, wrote "Ignatieff has been the target of criticism here at the National Post for quite some time. We're supposed to do that ... " He then went on to list several negative comments about the Liberal Leader that he had uncovered from various newspapers, in a Reform-Conservative style attack ad. The National Post apparently is supposed to do that. No wonder they're going bankrupt; morally and financially.
Well in a turnabout is fair play move, Warren Kinsella has done the same, collecting comments from several sources, about Harper's theft of our tax dollars. These are for you Kelly:
"The Economic Action Plan is just as much about stimulating the Conservative party's reelection chances... This is an abuse of tax dollars. Canadians should not be forced, through their taxes, to subsidize a political party's agenda." (Gerry Nicholls, National Post, Friday, October 16, 2009)
"I understand why they would want to take credit... MP's have to get elected, and re-elected. But there has to be a line drawn." (Howard Wilson, former ethics commissioner, October 15, 2009)
"I'm more troubled in the end by the notion that there might be a pattern to this that has seen money go to Conservative ridings rather than other ridings, and that to me breaks or is more over the line than actually even those cheques." (Chantal Hebert, CBC The National, October 15, 2009)
"It's symbolic of something underneath it which is a habit... that says that the public's money is their own, a program of government that says it's entitled to use that money to the furtherance of its own partisan political interests." (Andrew Coyne, CBC The National, October 15, 2009)
"It goes against everything that Stephen Harper campaigned on and against the notion once again that a new prime minister and a new regime was going to clean up the way Ottawa works." (Chantal Hebert, CBC The National, October 15, 2009)
"There really is sort of layer upon layer of scandal here. You've got not just the use of the logos but the use of individual MPs handing out this money." ( Andrew Coyne, CBC The National, October 15, 2009)
"Gerald Keddy is not a minister of the Crown. He's got no business anywhere near that ceremony. This is a corruption of their role. They're supposed to be watchdogs on the public purse." (Andrew Coyne, CBC The National, October 15, 2009)
"The Conservative MPs who splashed their names across big stupid cheques are... behaving corruptly by using public funds for personal or partisan political gain." (Colby Cosh, National Post, October 16, 2009)
"Beyond the shameful chequebook politics, there's an apparent tendency to concentrate stimulus funding in government-held ridings." (Don Martin, National Post, October 16, 2009)
"Keddy probably thought adding the logo to the cheque would spruce up the photo-op of him handing it over to a grateful recipient. Or perhaps he just wanted to make sure the recipient remembered who to thank come the next federal election. Either way, his action caused a storm of protest." (Gerry Nicholls, National Post, October 16, 2009)
"The partisan handouts are just the latest game played with your tax dollars by a government that promised to do things differently. It has blanketed the airwaves with government-promotion ads at a pace six times the rate of any H1N1 public education blitz." (Don Martin, National Post, October 16, 2009)
"La seule conclusion possible du commissaire à l'éthique doit être que cette pratique utilisée par 47 députés conservateurs est contre l'éthique parlementaire." (Jean Saint-Cyr, L'Acadie Nouvelle, 16 octobre 2009)
"L'argent remis par le député conservateur, Gerald Keddy, n'est ni le sien, ni celui du parti, mais bien l'argent des contribuables canadiens." (Jean Saint-Cyr, L'Acadie Nouvelle, 16 octobre 2009)
"It is well known that I am a Conservative government supporter and have been keeping a list of Harper government accomplishments as a show of that support. However, I sure don't support this latest streak of partisanship when it comes to government business - by including a Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) logo on stimulus project presentation cheques." (Sandra Crux, Crux-of-the-matter blog, October 15, 2009)
"I think people are intelligent enough to figure out what party the MP handing out the stimulus cheque belongs to. And we're also smart enough to figure out when we're being lied to." (Raphael Alexander, National Post blog, October 15, 2009)
"That is not how government works. Once someone is elected a Member of Parliament, they then represent ALL the people of their riding, not just those of the party who voted for them. Moreover, how would Conservatives feel if the Liberals were doing this?" (Sandra Crux, Crux-of-the-matter blog, October 15, 2009)
"There really isn't a Conservative Party anymore. There's only a Tory Party. Any of the conservatism has been bleached out of them. They're simply not interested in those issues anymore." (Andrew Coyne, CBC The National, October 15, 2009)
"Perhaps Canada needs a new conservative party... Lately some (MPs) have taken to decorating these with a Conservative Party logo. Our money -- their logo." (Michael Den Tandt, Toronto Sun, October 16, 2009)
And you thought that all Reform-Conservatives were hypocrites. You can hear it right from the horse's ass ... er ... I mean, mouth. He told us his government was going to trade accountability for corruption and he kept his promise.
With the rumblings from the Maritimes over the way that Peter MacKay has been doling out stimulus, I remembered that I had actually posted about this, and John Baird, on my blog back in June. Others were also trying to warn Canadians that there was corruption afoot, but it would appear that few listened.
I also shared an email from a 35-year-veteran civil servant with Transportation and Infrastructure. When he raised concerns with the way the department was being run he was forced to retire.
"I wondered how long it would take for the media to discover that the infrastructure stimulus spending has everything to with patronage, and nothing to do with what is good for the nation. [Deputy Minister Louis] Ranger [whose retirement was announced yesterday] was pushed out of the job and told, 'We don’t want your advice” regarding the spending projects. Indeed, the woman who is the ADM in charge of the file has been specifically told by the minster’s office, “We don’t want your advice; we want you to do as you’re told. Projects are selected based on the needs of the Conservative Member of Parliament in that riding as the first criteria. As a long time bureaucrat, I am used to dealing with politicians who revel in self-interest. Baird however, is the nastiest, most partisan creature to have ever run a large department. ...
There was a great Op-ed piece in the Guelph Mercury about the level of Ref-Con and Harper Hypocrisy. (Not Baird. He already admitted that he was going to engage in corruption)
One of the things that bothers me most about the Harper government is its hypocrisy. Don’t get me wrong. Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are not the first to make commitments they have no intention of keeping – or to promise to do one thing when their real intent is to do the polar opposite. With Harper and Company, however, hypocrisy has become a modus operandi.
Consider two examples: Harper’s war on patronage and his pledge of open government. These were two striking features of his struggle to lift his party out of opposition. Both were important elements of his government’s very first bill on taking office in 2006, the (so-called) Accountability Act ....
It has become painfully clear that Harper never had any intention of doing anything about patronage, other than to practice it with gusto and single-minded determination. The Chrétien/Martin Liberals had proved to be extremely proficient purveyors of pork in their 13 years in office; Harper is more than keeping pace ....
This government is riding high in the polls right now, so they want an election. However, they can't make it look like they want an election, so they do what they do best. LIE!
Pork-barreling in Canadian politics is hardly new. The task of the politician is to climb the tree to shake down the acorns to the pigs below, conceded Sir John A. Macdonald in a moment of, presumably drunken, sincerity.
Now we have Gordon Landon, regional councillor for the Town of Markham and the nominated Conservative candidate in the Ontario riding of Markham-Unionville.
In what will likely prove to be a career-limiting move, he admitted on live television that the reason his riding has not received federal funding for a medical testing centre is that the Member of Parliament is a Liberal.
It was against this background that Michael Ignatieff staged a press conference to accuse the government of breaching the public trust by funneling the bulk of the federal stimulus cash for infrastructure into Conservative ridings. After months of underperforming, the Liberal leader was finally out standing in a field - to be precise, a soya-bean field that would, he said, have been turned into a park, if stimulus money had flowed expeditiously.
Standing next to him in his shirt-sleeves, apparently rehabilitated in his leader's eyes after gifting the party Stéphane Dion, was former leadership candidate, Gerard Kennedy.
On Mr, Kennedy's initiative, the Grits contacted 946 of 1697 projects funded by the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund and found that only 12% were underway, in contrast to the government's claim that shovels are in the ground on 75%.
The reason for the delay, the Liberals said, was that the Harper government wanted to exert political control over the selection of projects.
Rather than flow half the infrastructure funds directly to municipalities using the Gas Tax Transfer, as the Liberals claimed they would have done, the government created a new program that resulted in a four month delay but allowed all projects to be vetted by the Harper government.
In a thorough, and one has to say convincing, report, Mr. Kennedy suggested that money was directed more often than not to Conservative ridings. In Ontario, Conservatives constituencies received, on average, 15% more dollars than Liberal ridings.
Four of the top 10 allocations for Ontario were given to ridings represented by Conservative Cabinet ministers and a fifth to the Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary. They received two to three times the average funding, despite often having unemployment rates around half the provincial average. The pattern was the same in British Columbia, the report said.
"There is a systemic bias toward Conservative ridings," charged Mr. Ignatieff. "Canadians don't want political games played with infrastructure money, they want it to benefit all Canadians."
Nobody should be particularly shocked by any of this - it was ever thus, particularly under previous Liberal regimes. Yet for Mr. Ignatieff, it's a God-send. The Liberal leader has been flailing around like a punch-drunk boxer for months but if this line of inquiry has legs, it could be the Conservatives who find themselves kissing the canvas. (It's the National Post. They hate Liberals, but the fact that Iverson may actually be finding fault with the Reform-Conservatives is news worthy)
Such was the government's concern, it sent out its best bare-knuckle brawler, Transport Minister, John Baird, a man who has been known to turn a blind eye to the Marquess of Queensberry's rules.
The charges are "downright opportunistic","shameful" and "just plain wrong", he said, without getting into specifics.
"If the Liberals are concerned about the infrastructure projects moving forward and where they are located, they should talk to the provinces and municipalities who approved each and every one of these and agreed with us," he said. "In Ontario, every single grant we make under the ISF is done in partnership with Dalton McGuinty. You can accuse Dalton McGuinty of many things [but] conspiring with Stephen Harper to reward Conservative MPs and help Stephen Harper get re-elected, I would suggest is not one of them."
Of course, he's right. But there's one suspects that closer inspection of the infrastructure spending will unearth that as many provincial Liberal Cabinet ministers benefited from taxpayer largesse as federal Conservatives. It all conjurs up mental images of Tarantino-eque heist movie, where "Nice-Guy" John Baird and his provincial equivalent, George "Mr. Pink" Smitherman, meet to divvy up the loot.
The contention that the provincial Liberals are accessories does not invalidate Mr. Kennedy's point that this is old-style pork-barrel politics. The Conservatives have spent the past year criss-crossing the country, indulging in what Mr. Kennedy called Announce-A-Rama at our expense. My Canwest colleague David Akin has calculated that the government has made 1770 Economic Action Plan announcements since last year's election, making $71-billion in funding commitments.
You don't have to be as cynical as me to imagine that much of this money ended up in Conservative ridings too.
It is early days for evidence of dubious spending - although there is already uproar in Collingwood, Ont., over the decision by the federal and provincial governments to allocate $523,000 to a private school to build a soccer field for its 156 students. All they need now is a hint of genuine sleaze and the Liberals will have their own Three Graces with which to attack the Conservative government - waste, mismanagement and corruption.
I like to razz Jack now for his hypocrisy, but I'm not really that upset with what he did. The only person who wants to strangle him would be Stephen Harper, because he's enjoying a climb in the polls, and really wanted an election.
However, since he's painted Michael Ignatieff as the villain for presenting a non-confidence motion, which could have meant we'd have one, he can't very well dissolve Parliament now. It's kind of funny, don't you think?
What the motion did successfully, was shift the dynamics on Parliament Hill. The Liberals can now do what we pay them to do - oppose; while Layton was left with egg on his face. He's been campaigning on the notion that the Liberals have backed 79 Reform-Conservative motions, while he has turned them all down. This was supposed to make him a hero.
The timing was right for the Liberals to announce to Canadians that they no longer have confidence in this government. Next month the 'In and Out' Scandal will hit the courts, and cries are getting louder over the way the Reform-Conservatives have been doling out the infrastructure money. No one can find it, despite the fact that Harper announced that 90% of it was out the door. What door?
OTTAWA — Canada’s stimulus-spending detectives say the federal government is being so miserly with basic information, they’re forced to take extraordinary measures to track just how billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent.
Elaine McCoy, a 63-year-old Alberta senator who used to consort with the likes of former premiers Don Getty and Ralph Klein, is a case in point.
She recently teamed up with a group of 20-something volunteer computer geeks to try to follow the money.
Together, they’re combing the Internet and swapping information with everyone they can find, in the hope of putting together a detailed picture of what the federal government is doing with its billions in stimulus funds.
Inspired by American websites such as www.stimuluswatch.org, McCoy hoped to compile government information on stimulus, slice and dice it, and allow Canadians to figure out how government money is working.
Her dream was to give Canadians easy access to the details of the stimulus funds and solicit their feedback on how well the package was working.
But the dream has hit a serious obstacle: McCoy can’t get hold of the facts.
"We started reaching out for data and it wasn’t there," McCoy, a Progressive Conservative senator, said in an interview.
"The news releases? That’s not data. That’s spin."
With the help of her volunteer team of web-savvy youngsters that has grown through word-of-mouth, she set up www.stimuluswatch.ca. They set up a platform, and figured out everything they needed to sort out and streamline huge amounts of information.
But the page meant to provide the basic data is blank.
"In order to set up the actual spreadsheet in a user-friendly format, it’s just not possible," McCoy said.
She’s frustrated. Not only are Canadians getting a foggy and incomplete picture of how the stimulus package is helping them, they are also turned off politics by the government’s reliance on advertising and ribbon-cutting to communicate policy, she said.
Young Canadians, in particular, are cynical. "That’s why they don’t go out and vote. Spin-doctoring is so old-school," she said. "They say ‘If you’re not going to give me the facts, I’m not going to play.’ "
The government counters that all the details of the stimulus package are in the public domain.
"For the senator and all Canadians, information on every announcement and every project we do is on the website," said Chris Day, spokesman for Transport Minister John Baird.
Some of the information can be sorted by city and province. It’s also plotted on a map of Canada that shows every project approved, he said.
But others have run into the same problem as McCoy.
The parliamentary budget officer, the government watchdog on fiscal affairs, is supposed to be tracking the stimulus spending and evaluating how it is affecting Canada’s recovery. But he, too, is stumbling over a lack of information and now has his hopes pinned on the government fulfilling his request to hand over its entire stimulus database.
The Liberal party, meanwhile, is developing a database of its own. It has taken months and the work of at least 23 volunteers to map out what has happened to the $4-billion Infrastructure Stimulus Fund.
They’re producing a riding-by-riding analysis. They say their research suggests a strong political pattern to the distribution of funds.
"The numbers say, if you’re a Conservative, you stand a better chance of getting this money," said MP Gerard Kennedy, who has led the effort.
Even so, the Conservatives charge that it’s too incomplete to be reliable — a charge that the Liberals have a hard time countering because only the government has complete information. "You can say anything you like, and there’s no way to verify it," said McCoy.
Individual MPs have great difficulty in sorting out what has happened in their own ridings. Liberal MP Wayne Easter compiled a list of 18 projects announced for his Malpeque riding in Prince Edward Island.
But on closer inspection, only five projects totalling $1.66-million were really new, he said. The other 13 projects would have happened with or without the stimulus funding.
Easter boiled over when he drove past a building in Charlottetown that had a large sign in front of it trumpeting Canada’s Action Plan — the government’s name for its stimulus package announced in last January’s budget.
Easter said he cut the ribbon for that building when he was in government in 2003.
For McCoy, the experience has pushed her in new directions. She has discovered the Open Government movement, and become a strong proponent of its goal of pushing for more accountable policy-making and more publicly available information.
She’s convinced her campaign will catch on, not just with young people, but with their parents and civil servants who are disturbed by the lack of public information.
