Tax-payers foot bill for Liberals (again)

May 24 - The weight of the Liberal Party's notion of how to best protect their own interests good governance daily becomes more unbearable. The latest: Taxpayers foot $1M bill for Liberals' sponsorship 'war room' for a secret team that monitors the Gomery Inquiry and preps the Prime Minister for questions that might be raised in the House of Commons:

Documents obtained by the Citizen through the Access to Information Act reveal that the rapid-response war room, which is in almost daily contact with the Prime Minister's Office and the government's top bureaucrat, Alex Himelfarb, operates out of the Privy Council Office.

The cost of the strategic office, which does everything from preparing answers for question period in the House of Commons to keeping the Prime Minister's Office abreast of testimony at the inquiry, covers the salaries of staff and expenses.

The war room and its cost came to light on the heels of last week's complaints from Justice John Gomery about officials exaggerating the cost of his inquiry.

Officials at the commission looking into the sponsorship scandal say the total cost of the actual inquiry will come in under $32 million. Judge Gomery said government officials have "leaked" to the media that it is costing departments another $40 million to cover costs at four key departments, including the Privy Council Office. "It's an exaggeration and it's twisting reality," Judge Gomery said last week.

Revelations from the inquiry, which is digging into the $250-million sponsorship scheme, forced the Liberals to set aside $750,000 in a trust fund to pay back money improperly obtained by the party.

One memo to Mr. Himelfarb indicates the strategy office was set up almost immediately after the Martin government launched the inquiry in February 2004 upon the release of Auditor General Sheila Fraser's damning report on the sponsorship program.

Dated Feb. 18, 2004, the memo describes "the intergovernmental co-ordination group" being set up in the PCO, the nerve centre of the federal government, under the proposed direction of bureaucrat Guy McKenzie. However, the summary and attachments are mostly blanked out, under section 23 of the Access to Information Act, due to "solicitor/client privilege."

The office's operating budget now totals $1,068,000 after its first-year budget of $534,000 in 2004-05 was renewed for a second year, according to Hali Gernon of the PCO.

Remember when I expressed some sympathy for why the Conservative Party might not want to release the Grewal-Murphy tape to the RCMP? Read this next bit:

Ms. Gernon said the office has a small staff of about "four or five" employees and since June 2004 has been under the direction of lawyer Ursula Menke, the former deputy commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard and inspector general of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The team will continue to operate until the Inquiry concludes and "until the end of the fiscal year to allow any required followup to the inquiry."

Judge Gomery has made it clear he doesn't appreciate the Martin government adding its hidden costs to his overall budget. In an exchange with an ad executive, the judge said: "What they did was ... put together the fees of everyone in the Justice Department that worked on the file, the photocopies they made at the PCO and God knows what other expenses that were totally beyond the commission's control."

Bookkeeping, Librano style. Judge Gomery knows it well.

Posted by: Debbye at 12:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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