Feb. 16 - This was not the best day to get my T-4 slips, you know? Grits hide $9B in slush funds:

Eight years after the first foundation was set up, for instance, nine of them collectively still have over $7.7 billion of the original $9.1 billion in their bank accounts.

A handy hiding place for the Liberal government to stash its annual surplus on budget day, the foundations hand out grants for everything from hi-tech research projects to student bursaries, aboriginal counselling and, of course, "research on linguistic minorities."

Up to their boardrooms in Liberal appointees, the foundations have been officially declared "independent of government" -- that is, off-limits to the auditor general and exempt from the Access to Information Act.

Agencies which receive public funds yet do not have to account for them are dominating the headlines and the scandals aren't going away. The problem up here is that the party in power, be it Liberal or Conservative, uses the patronage appointments and grant system to reward its party faithful. Until an elected public official takes leadership on this issue and fights for real reform to the system itself, simply changing the party in power won't end the abuses.

Feb. 17 - One bright spot: 10 out of 18 Crown corporations will be opening their books to the Auditor General's scrutiny (and yes, the CBC is one of the 10 but they want the law amended to protect their journalistic sources. Tea leaves and animal entrails require whistleblower protection? Whatever ...)

Posted by: Debbye at 09:09 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 286 words, total size 2 kb.

Feb. 15 - Hurray! Andrew Coyne is no longer AWOL and has some new postings on his blog including a list of the things we are supposed to believe that would even choke Alice (of six impossible things before breakfast fame) in My Saturday column [Feb. 12]:

We are asked to believe that Jean Chretien, having created the sponsorship program, having personally secured funding for the program out of the so-called “unity reserve,” having personal authority over every request for funds from that allocation and having been warned in writing by the Clerk of the Privy Council that he would thus be personally responsible for every grant made out of those funds, should accept no personal blame for anything that went wrong under the program.

Posted by: Debbye at 08:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.