Tories keep spending amid $8.8-billion tally of pre-election largesse
Published Friday September 5th, 2008
OTTAWA - The Conservative government maintained there's nothing untoward in trumpeting projects on the eve of a federal election, even as it heralded a fresh billion-dollars' worth of taxpayer-funded largesse Friday.
"It's the business of government," said Chisholm Pothier, a spokesman for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.
With Canada's faltering economy set to be a pivotal issue in an autumn election campaign that's already underway in everything but name, one of this country's traditional pre-writ ploys is in full swing.
Half a billion dollars for Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Ont., and another $140 million for Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, N.B.; $279 million into a Manitoba building fund and another $42.5 million for the province's roads; $3 million security grants tossed here and there like nickel antes - it was all in a day's work for the busy Harper cabinet.
Even before Friday's spending crescendo, the penny-pinching Canadian Taxpayers Federation had compiled a list of almost 300 Tory announcements totalling $8.8 billion since June.
The NDP says it tracked more than $6 billion in the last week alone - and provided a spreadsheet to prove it.
"As opposition, the Conservatives lampooned the Liberals for doing this kind of shameless pre-election spending," said taxpayer federation spokesman Adam Taylor.
"Now, lo and behold, the Conservatives in government are doing the exact same thing. It seems no matter who's in power, all politicians play this little pre-election game."
Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, speaking to reporters after a town hall meeting in Edmonton, said the spending "shows two things: how much (the Tories) are manipulative and cynical, and how much they are not responsive about the way they manage the public finances of the country.
"Mr. Flaherty is doing to Canada what he did to Ontario - to bring the country close to deficit."
Harper will go to Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean on Sunday morning seeking the dissolution of Parliament for an Oct. 14 election date.
The economy and its stewardship will be a key issue, Harper's officials told reporters Friday at a not-for-attribution briefing at the Prime Minister's Office.
Voters will have to decide "which party leader is most like them," said the anonymous Tory official.
He portrayed Harper as a "minivan-driving hockey dad from the suburbs" facing Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, an "elitist professor" steeped in dogma and theory.
Left unmentioned was Harper's time spent in academia, and his master's thesis in economics from the University of Calgary - which, ironically, looked at the impact of political cycles and pre-election spending sprees on federal budgets.
The taxpayers' federation noted that the Conservative party website dutifully tracked Liberal pre-election spending before the 2006 election.
"They implied there was something wrong with that and that it was clear (Liberals) were up to shameless pork-barrelling," said Taylor. "Now that they're doing exactly the same thing, their credibility on that is out the window."
Not so, responded Pothier.
All the freshly announced spending has been budgeted for, approved by Parliament and previously announced - some of it going all the way back to the previous Liberal government, said Flaherty's spokesman.
"The Liberals on the eve of an election would make all sorts of new spending announcements," argued Pothier.
"These are not new spending announcements. These were all on the public record before."
Taylor agreed the Liberal spree before the 2006 vote exceeded the current Tory count. But he maintained that even legitimate spending, such as $4 billion in infrastructure for Quebec projects announced this week, is suspect.
"Don't tell me that doesn't have something to do with the federal election," said the taxpayer watchdog.
"It seems curious on the eve of an election that all this money is released by the federal government. People should be cynical."
Harper himself made the same point just before the 2006 campaign: Liberals would have to explain on the election trail "why, if any of these things are important to them, they didn't do any of them long before this."
New Democrat MP Thomas Mulcair said some of the spending announcements are particularly galling because they directly contradict long-held and espoused Tory dogma about not picking winners and losers in the marketplace.
New Democrats pitched targeted help for the auto industry last year, he noted, but the Conservatives dismissed the notion out of hand.
"Then on the eve of the election they realize they have ridings in play and they do what we've asked them to do. Of course it has everything to do with the election."
Mulcair said this kind of budgeting "destabilizes" what had been "a formerly balanced economy."
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The government has been running Surpluses, ie. taking money from taxpayers they do not spend. I agree that we need to use tax monies to pay down countries debt. This national debt was accumulated when the governments of the day spent more than they collected.
But even the governments of today need to reconsider their spending priorities. Why for example are we not doing more to relieve students of crippling student debts at a time when the need for a trained and skilled work force is having an enormous limiting effect on our ability to generate and substain our wealth. My past federal representative, Liberal Paul Zed once told me on a open-air talk show that it was because "we do not have the money". Its this kind of thinking that needs change, not that governments spend, but that they do so unwisely.