Case in point

Following up on this morning's post, the Hill Times serves up another example of an issue where the opposition parties could look to order the production of documents both in order to press the issue of parliamentary supremacy and in order to expose obvious Con mismanagement:

Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page is compiling a report, requested by Liberal public safety critic Mark Holland (Ajax-Pickering, Ont.), on the projected costs of the government's changes to the justice system. In February Mr. Page told The Hill Times the report would likely be ready this month, but his office said last week it would be further delayed and couldn't say when it would be released.

Mr. Jones said he's been in contact with the PBO about the report, and the reason for the delay is because Mr. Page is having difficulty getting the government to release the projected expenses of its justice bills, such as construction costs for prisons, and the expected growth of the incarcerated population. In 2007-08, the annual average cost of keeping one person incarcerated was $101,666 per year.

"All of those numbers are still Cabinet confidence, and that's the government's prerogative, but if we continue down this track it seems to me the government is asking Canadians to write a blank cheque for a crime agenda in a context in which crime is already in decline," he said.

And that's paired with a jaw-droppingly ignorant message from a Con-friendly source:

But Mr. Lewis, the former Tory justice minister, said voters are more interested in seeing tough justice for criminals than studying expenditures for corrections services.

"Any government could spend all their time providing information," he said. "But the vast majority of the public only has an interest when they decide to have an interest, and this demand for great chunks of information doesn't make things go round in their daily lives so I'm skeptical as to how much they want to know."

Needless to say, it's surely worth asking whether or not Canadians agree that it doesn't matter how much money the Cons sink into prisons which serve no purpose other than facilitating political posturing at a time when they're looking to cut back on public services in every other department. And if that can be combined with the narrative of the Cons' compulsive secrecy and fear of accountability, then so much the better.