Tuesday Evening Links

This and that to end your Tuesday.

- The Ottawa Citizen tears a strip off the Cons' G8 patronage and cover-up:

The more details emerge about the way the government funnelled money into the Muskoka region under the convenient category of "G8 legacy infrastructure," the more "smalltown cheap" the whole thing looks.
...
In a sense, none of this money was theirs to spend. Parliament approved the funding under the mistaken impression that it was for border infrastructure.

In a larger sense, the government never had any business throwing public money around like this. Yes, municipalities were and are in sore need of a better model for infrastructure funding. But using an international summit as a tenuous excuse to create a oneoff, regional fund is not a good way to accomplish that goal. It's a good way to create the circumstances for cronyism and waste.

- And even Kelly McParland is less than impressed:

Now we discover, thanks to some innovative digging by the NDP, that Mr. Clement took personal command of the $50 million, setting up a command centre in his riding headquarters, creating a mini-council consisting of himself, the mayor of Huntsville and a local resort manager to sift through projects and pick the ones they liked. He convened meetings with area mayors to get input, dragged in bureaucrats from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Industry Canada, and Infrastructure Canada, and managed to avoid leaving a paper trail that might prove embarrassing if someone started poking their nose into his activities later.

Someone did start sniffing around — Auditor General Sheila Fraser — but even her formidable investigative skills missed the extent of what Clement was up to, or the fact he had the bureaucrats helping him out. And without supporting documentation, which seem be mysteriously absent, the Auditor General couldn’t tell whether projects were suitably chosen or not.

It’s not the way things are supposed to be done. The government isn’t supposed to just hand $50 million to a local MP and tell him to pick some projects for it. There’s red tape to be dealt with, and not all of it unnecessarily. There are standards and procedures to be satisfied when spending taxpayers’ dollars, and the whole Clement operation seems to have been organized to get around them.
...
Cover-up. Slush fund, Secret committee. No paper trail. All we need is Howard Hunt, a hidden tape machine and a trail of dirty campaign tricks and we could have a real scandal here.

- And pogge reminds us that it isn't Tony Clement that nominally approved the Cons' G8 spending - meaning that John Baird has plenty to answer for as well.

- Aaron Wherry painstakingly lists the topics for which the Cons have claimed a mandate from May's election. But for a next step, let's note that multiple topics on the list (attacking Air Canada workers, slashing the civil service, and cutting search and rescue operations as prime examples) are issues which were mentioned approximately zero times as part of the campaign which the Cons claim to have provided them with that mandate.

- Finally, Joe Comartin signals that the NDP is looking to point out how the Cons' disdain for evidence and rational policy-making conflicts with the values of Canada's legal community:

Joe Comartin says the country’s lawyers and judges are “offended professionally” by the Harper government’s law-and-order agenda, which is prohibiting any changes to its mandatory minimum sentencing legislation.

“They find this offensive as lawyers,” the NDP justice critic told The Globe. “The evidence is overwhelming this is the wrong approach. ... [Lawyers are] just so offended that they are shifting the criminal justice system as dramatically as it should be. They are offended professionally the government would do this.”
...
Lawyers at the CBA meeting were strong in their condemnation of the government’s tough-on-crime agenda, and its position on sentencing. And Mr. Comartin, a former defence lawyer, said past governments would consult with the legal profession if significant changes were being proposed. This one, he says, does not.
...
He added that the NDP continues to oppose the proposed legislation, pushing prevention rather than punishment and “knowing this is the most effective way to protect our citizens.”