On poor promotion

It's bad enough that in axing the PromArt program, the Cons had the nerve to ask prominent Canadians to represent the country abroad, then turn around and bash them in the media for accepting. But the fiasco raises another issue which makes the slashing of a single program far less significant than what looks to be some serious underlying mismanagement:

Mr. Dyer told The Globe and Mail that a Foreign Affairs official at the Canadian embassy in Cuba called him and asked him to speak in Havana, promising to cover his travel expenses. He said he was given $3,000 in cash to cover his airfare, hotel and expenses in Cuba, and that he had never heard of PromArt until last week.

"It suggests to me this is the gang who can't shoot straight. My surmise ... is that they didn't have a pot of money that they could easily fit this into, so a little creative bookkeeping was done ... and you take it out of the PromArt budget," he said.

From my standpoint, Dyer is far too generous in merely labeling the Cons' actions as "creative bookkeeping". What his example really signals - along with other PromArt funding for initiatives which don't seem to fit within its mandate - is that the Cons haven't had the slightest interest in what money is supposed to be used for, but have instead simply used whatever pool of money they could get their hands on to do what seemed most expedient at the time.

Now, that kind of behaviour is most obviously a problem for those of us who see the federal government having a meaningful role to play in supporting Canadian culture among other areas. If the Cons couldn't care less whether an arts fund is used for foreign affairs initiatives, do we have any reason to think that money earmarked for any program will actually be put to its intended end?

But the problem should be equally significant for those who want to see government made smaller and more efficient. If the Cons' policy is to ignore whether money is used for its intended purpose, what good could it possibly do to slash a particular program such as PromArt if they can just as easily divert funding from, say, Foreign Affairs to promote Holy Fuck abroad if it suits their political interests to do so?

In sum, the main problem isn't whether PromArt in particular was being used as a slush fund - but rather the fact that the Cons seem to see all public resources as nothing more than that. And it'll take a change in government, not some mere shuffling of program funds, to give Canadians any confidence that their public money is actually being used properly.