Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- When Paul Wells tears into a story, you can be assured of results that are both entertaining and frustrating. This week, he's been hard at work pointing the complete lack of transparency and credibility in cuts which the Cons have already booked in this year's budget - which should tell us all we need to know about how much credence we should give to their deficit reduction rhetoric.

- Though at least the Cons are equal-opportunity cover-up artists, having made sure that their G8 debacle was funded without any written documentation at all.

- Which leads us to Susan Riley's latest:

On one hand, the new majority government has been promising judicious trimming of the federal bureaucracy, eliminating “inefficiencies,” stale-dated programs, redundant art curators — that stubborn “fat” that seems impervious to each periodic purge.

On the other, it stands accused in Thursday’s understated auditor general’s report on G8/G20 spending of the most blatant pork-barrelling in recent memory — essentially, two ministers, without benefit of bureaucratic oversight, carving up nearly $50 million in taxpayer money to prettify the Muskoka-area riding of then-industry minister Tony Clement.

The flimsy justification: some bored foreign reporter might have wandered father afield than the tightly constrained summit sight in Huntsville and needed to use a public washroom 20 kilometres away, or shelter from the sun in a pretty parkland gazebo.
...
It was Baird, as infrastructure minister, who approved the 32 projects only tangentially tied to the summit, dipping into an unrelated border infrastructure fund to pay for them — without telling Parliament. Odd behaviour from the father of the accountability act, but this was a rush job, he explained. No time, apparently, for a paper trail (sometimes known as accountability.)

This will be disquieting news to thousands of scrupulous public servants who now have to sign forms in triplicate, produce three witnesses, submit to a drug test and wait several months to be reimbursed for a $20 cab ride.

- Finally, John Gormley's sad defence of Stephen Harper's flight to is to declare that Harper is the decider - so that one he decided to attend the game he was entitled to saddle the public with any cost involved in that choice. Your principled fiscal conservatives at work!