The administrator for a township in Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s constituency that received $455,350 for projects under the controversial $50-million G8 legacy fund says the township sent all its funding applications directly to Mr. Clement’s constituency office.Of course, the question of who exactly pared down the projects to be funded ranks awfully low on the list of glaring issues resulting from the Cons' pork-barrelling and cover-up. But it looks like just one more area where the Cons' spin has nothing at all to do with reality - and the more Clement's credibility suffers, the less believable his excuses will become.
Furthermore, it was Mr. Clement’s office that also advised the township which of the 15 to 20 projects—only three were accepted—would receive funding in the scheme, possibly contradicting the version of events Mr. Clement gave to the Commons Government Operations and Estimates Committee last June.
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“We submitted them to Tony’s office,” Mr. Chevalier said. “There would be about 15 to 20 projects that we submitted.”
Asked whether the township council reduced the list of projects to the three that got the funding or whether Mr. Clement’s office just told the council which ones would receive funding, Mr. Chevalier replied: “It was the latter, they just told, advised us.”
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(Clement had testified), "(s)o they said they agreed that 242 was too much and they suggested 32 or 33, which they conveyed to me, that conform to the terms and conditions that were set out by the Government of Canada. I conveyed them to the department and to the minister of infrastructure, Minister [John] Baird at the time, and that's how that process went."
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
The journalism continues
Tim Naumetz is at it again:
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You know Greg, given what little media coverage that this story and others have received, I am beginning to think that the media could have proof of Harper being the head of a major crime ring and they wouldn't even report it. I am not sure why that is. Obviously the media has a generally conservative bias but they have also, historically speaking, loved the hype of a good corruption story. Has it really gotten so bad that we are back in the days of late 18th century England when the media was so pro-Pitt that, with the execption of a few hold-puts like William Cobbett, the media and the state essentially become two parts of the same body? It certainly seems so. If true, we might as well forget politics for the next generation or so (the time it takes for a real social shift to take place) and find nice quiet lives and try to stay out of the way of the whole thing. I think of Marx after the failure of the 1848 insurrections - he assonced himself in the British Library and just wrote books for the next twenty years or so.
ReplyDeleteOh, I have no doubt that there would be plenty of reporting of a major piece of news like Harper being the head of a major crime ring - as the easy story will always be the first choice for the headlines. I suspect the problem here though is that it takes a bit of effort to explain how the new revelations are different from what's been reported about the G8 scandal in the past, and far too many outlets have no interest in bothering.
ReplyDeleteSo the issue isn't so much partisanship (with a couple of obvious exceptions) as attention span. And that's exactly where I think we can make the most difference in building connections narratives that the media can't be bothered to put together.