Andrew Steele says it all:
The worst example is in British Columbia, where ridings held by the government received 13 times more than those held by the opposition.
What makes this stunning is not the partisanship of public spending. Governments since the days of the Château Clique have used taxpayer dollars to reward friends and supporters.
But prior scandals of this sort were typically involving secondary initiatives with middling importance to both the economy and the political outcomes of the government.
What makes this story stand out is that a government that has bet its very survival in the economic success of the stimulus package would be this dumb.
Tying up the stimulus in red tape was the Conservatives fault. Had they flowed the money through municipalities directly, as the opposition pointed out, the dollars would already be creating jobs. But the government chose to retain control spending so they could direct projects where they liked.
The results speak for themselves: 12 per cent spent and over-weighted toward places represented by the front bench.
And please, with all this money flowing to the favoured few, please don't forget about the comparatively paltry $30-odd million of taxpayer's money the 'Harper Government' just spent on partisan ads.
This is so huge, I'm not sure people are going to grasp the scale of it. I guess Harper figures that fortune favours the bold.
Kind of makes all that fuss years back over that hotel in Chretien's riding look ridiculously minor, don't it?
2 comments:
Glad you like the tag but I am frankly surprised at the hush from the MSM on this story. I think it's a whopper of a scandal myself. Could be some investigative reporter is going to snoop around and get the unvarnished goods for themselves (which you would think some media outlet might have thought to do ahead of Kennedy).
It is up to the opposition to make noise. Iggy et al needs to be leaking crazy examples of excess on a daily basis. If they aren't, then wtf are they doing?
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