Out of scope

Following up on this morning's post, there's actually another notable bit of misdirection involved in Tony Clement's G8 pork-barrelling which helps to explain why the Auditor General was led astray in reporting on the Cons' spending.

Here's some of the newly-revealed background to the slush fund:

In addition to representatives from local communities, the meeting was also attended by four federal public servants from FedNor – a development agency for Northern Ontario led by Mr. Clement – and two officials from Industry Canada, also led at the time by Mr. Clement.

Other meetings were attended by Gérald Cossette, then the G8 summit manager with the federal department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

And by way of comparison, here's the list of government departments consulted about the fund - presumably based on the Auditor General's reasonable expectation that only departments with some reason to be administering the fund would be involved:

We included in this audit the federal departments who had an involvement in the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund—the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Infrastructure Canada, Industry Canada, and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada.

Now, it's not quite clear how at least a couple of departments managed to falsely assure the Auditor General's office that they had no role in the legacy fund. But it can't escape notice that the department with the most direct involvement seems to have been FedNor - which had so little valid reason to have anything to do with the funding that the Auditor General's office apparently didn't even think to include it in the G8 report.

Which figures to explain in part why - like Clement's constituency office - it was apparently seen a convenient place to handle G8 pork-barrel projects so as to avoid any accountability. But there's all the more explaining for Clement and the Cons to do now that the truth has come out.