A rchive Date
[ 08-12-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
|
[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/gibbons.html
Just another boondoggle
RICK GIBBONS -- Ottawa Sun
December 8, 2002
It's been a dreadful week for taxpayers, what with the runaway spending in the gun registry and with Auditor General Sheila Fraser's provincial counterpart, Erik Peters, stealing some of the spotlight with his own horror stories of over-spending at Queen's Park.
I may be wrong, but you get a sense Canadians have grown so accustomed to the annual wave of spending nightmares that this week's revelations about the gun registry probably provoked more yawns than howls of outrage.
Oh sure, as taxpayers we still care about how our tax dollars are (mis)spent. It's infuriating to see money wasted while the demands in health care grow. But I'm convinced that, if only for our own sanity, we've conditioned ourselves not to get our blood pressure up by tales of gross waste and misspending by governments at all levels. After all, it doesn't do any good.
Truth be known, governments have grown conditioned to the annual report card on misspending too. The days are long gone when governments cowered at revelations of horses on the federal payroll or some other spending horror story. Politicians have learned that nothing surprises taxpayers any more.
At worst, auditor general reports generate a few days' headlines, a few howls of protest lodged in opinion pages and a few noisy days in the Commons. But for politicians and bureaucrats alike, it's just part of doing business. You take your flak and move on, hoping your department escapes the wrath of next year's report.
Sadly, auditor general reports are part of the political landscape, predictable as the onset of winter, both in their timing and in the nature of their findings.
We know from experience that even though the costs associated with the gun registry have exploded from a break-even proposition to maybe a billion dollars, no one will be fired or disciplined, no cabinet minister will be shuffled off to backbench hell and absolutely nothing will stop next year's auditor general report from identifying some brand new spending fiasco. Can you remember last year's auditor general report?
It concerned a whopping $16 billion being poured into grants and other discretionary spending (read pork-barreling) without a hint of proper over-sight. Exactly what corrective measures do you think have been taken to get that spending in check?
What about the year before, the last report by then-auditor general Denis Desautels? Remember the highlight? It was the infamous billion-dollar boondoggle in the Human Resources department. Are you any more comfortable today about spending controls in that department?
And what about the year before that?
Surely, you remember the winter of 1999 when Desautels warned that the feds were blindly spending billions of dollars without proper checks and balances, including the reckless fuel rebate scam that saw millions of dollars sent out to dead people and prisoners. Or the signing off on billions of dollars in contracts without even bothering to put them out to tender. Desautels even warned that nobody in government knew exactly how much was being spent on health care in Canada. Do you think anybody has any better idea today?
Or what about 1998, when Desautels named both Heritage Canada and Industry Canada for dishing out grants with no obvious purpose. Remember that? Do you really believe those departments are now paragons of virtue in the managing of your tax dollars, or are they just lucky that the auditor general didn't knock on their doors this time?
Here's a prediction: Next year, Auditor General Sheila Fraser will point the finger at some yet-to-be determined department for wasting millions or billions of your tax dollars on some foolish scheme. We'll nod our heads and grumble, a few politicos will take the heat and everybody will move on.
I'd even hazard a prediction that some future auditor general report will identify how billions were spent or lost implementing the Kyoto Accord with virtually nothing to show for it or how the government pumped another $15 billion into health care with no tangible benefits to the health care system. But let's not get our blood pressure up ...
Rick Gibbons is Editor-In-Chief of the Ottawa Sun and can be e-mailed at rgibbons@sunpub.com Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|