Conservatives: in it for themselves

Impolitical writes about the poor optics of giving political aides in ministerial offices  nice bonuses, pay increases to match public servants (whose wages they constantly deride), and generous severance pay if they find themselves out of work.

 

This at a time when harper is constantly going on about cutting the fat in the federal government and TBD holds meetings with Catherine Swift of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business on how to cut public servants’ pay and benefits.

Of at least equal concern is something else the article brings up:

But ministers will have a little more money to play with since the government has decreed that their offices should no longer have to foot the bill for international travel by ministers, their staff and parliamentary secretaries. Those costs will now be absorbed by government departments instead.

Harper has cut departmental budgets, plans to make more cuts to them, but is shoving that horrendous cost onto them. 

Now the Ministers can make it look like they are spending little on travel and lay the blame onto departments, claiming this was all something the department required.  We know Ministers like to hide such costs. 

   

It is naive to believe that Ministers will not abuse this new policy.  Many trips made by MPs are used for partisan reasons with only the weakest of justification linking it to their role as Minister.

So once again, as expenses are transferred to federal departments, how does harper propose to make cuts to them?

cluckcluck-cluckedycluck...

Stephen Harper repeatedly refused Sunday to provide more details about where the Conservatives would cut to achieve the $4-billion in annual savings on program spending the party has promised to find.

"Now is not the time for instability, or for reckless, opportunistic experiments."

...and we need to stay the course.  (CPC site, on their platform)

Sure, let's not be reckless.

And hell, none of those opportunistic experiments please.

I'm all for staying this course over the next few weeks.

But we need to shift away from the CPC course of  -

contempt of Parliament :

"This is serious matter that goes to the heart of the House's undoubted role in holding the government to account," Milliken declared.

contempt for Canadians :

For all of its imperfections (and they are many), the only thing close to a democratic national body in Canada is the House of Commons. To be contemptuous of its members is to disdain those who elected them. Canadians get precious few chances to determine what their leaders do. When voters elected a minority government in 2008, they were signalling that they didn’t trust Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (or indeed any other party) to run the nation’s business single-handed.

Instead, they wanted the opposition parties to check government — to act as watchdogs, moderate its ideological excesses and keep it in line.  But throughout the life of this now-dead Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper refused to accept the voters’ verdict. His decision to operate as if he controlled a majority of Commons seats may have been good short-term politics. But it contradicted both the spirit and reality of the very limited mandate voters had given him.

reckless spending :

“The needs of most Canadians are neglected due to reckless spending on Conservative pet projects,” (CCPA Alternative Federal Budget Coordinator David Macdonald) says. “Canadians should be warned: deep spending cuts that will affect the services they need are on the horizon. The government isn’t revealing where the pain is going to come.”

“This budget wastes our time and our money,” says CCPA Senior Economist Armine Yalnizyan. “The Harper government has yet again tabled a fiscal plan that doesn’t deal with the tough issues of the day. How will we deal with aging infrastructure and high youth unemployment, a shrinking workforce and uncertain pensions?  The government’s response seems to be that these are our problems, not theirs.”