partisanship

Thursday February 28, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay – Thursday February 28, 2019

The moral catastrophe of Justin Trudeau

The dangerous files are never the obscure ones. Scandals don’t happen in the weird little corners of government, in amateur sport or in crop science. They happen on the issues a prime minister cares most about, because everyone gets the message that the rules matter less than the result.

February 9, 2005

It’s a constant in politics. In 2016 I took one look at Bill Morneau’s first budget and wrote this, “The sponsorship scandal of the late Chrétien years was possible because it was obvious to every scoundrel with Liberal friends that spending on national unity would not receive close scrutiny from a government that was desperate to be seen doing something on the file. A government that considers the scale of its spending to be proof of its virtue is an easy mark for hucksters and worse.”

It wasn’t a perfect prediction. I kind of expected the hucksters and worse to be outsidegovernment. Unless the Trudeau Liberals can produce persuasive evidence that Jody Wilson-Raybould is an utter fabulist (and frankly, I now expect several to try), her testimony before the Commons Justice Committee establishes pretty clearly that the hucksters and worse were running the show. Led by the grinning legatee who taints the Prime Ministers’ office.

There will now be a period of stark partisanship. We’re in an election year. Loyal Liberals will tell themselves, and then everyone else, that the price of looking clearly at Justin Trudeau’s bully club (so many men; wonder how Katie Telford felt about that while she was signing off on every element of it) is ceding the field to Andrew Scheer. Who, they will tell themselves and then the country, is an actual Nazi.

September 22, 2017

I mean, after all, that’s pretty close to what they told one another, and then Jody Wilson-Raybould, last fall, isn’t it? There was an election in Quebec in the first week of October. And Ben Chin, a former journalist who did whatever Christy Clark needed done in B.C. before moving east to do whatever Bill Morneau and the PMO needed doing, used that thin reed of an excuse to try to sway Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff, Jessica Prince. “If they don’t get a [deferred prosecution agreement], they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election right now, so we can’t have that happen,” Wilson-Raybould told the committee, paraphrasing Chin’s conversation with Prince.

I’ve never met a Liberal yet who doesn’t reliably confuse his electoral skin with the national interest. So much of what Trudeau and his minions have done in the last year stems from that instinct. Take the ludicrous half-billion-dollar bailout for people in my line of work, never explained, sprung out of nowhere in Morneau’s fall economic update—or as I now like to think of it, between Trudeau advisor Mathieu Bouchard’s meeting (yet another one) with Prince and Michael Wernick’s chat with Wilson-Raybould. You can get a lot of op-eds written with that kind of dough. Take the cool billion the Canada Infrastructure Bank coughed up  to pay for a politically popular and impeccably well-connected transit project around Montreal… (Continued: Paul Wells, MacLean’s) 

 

Friday April 27, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 27, 2018

Auditor’s deficit allegations could be bad news for all parties

History, like politics, has a way of repeating itself. Especially at election time.

February 18, 2017

In opposition 15 years ago, Ontario’s Liberal Party smelled a rat. They accused the Tory government of the day of cooking the books.

Playing the reformist card in the 2003 campaign, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals proposed that all future pre-election budgets be reviewed by the auditor. Upon winning power, McGuinty ordered a special audit that uncovered a deficit of more than $5 billion “hidden” by the previous Progressive Conservative government.

Fast forward to 2018. Now, the PC opposition is accusing the governing Liberals of playing with numbers — and this time, the auditor general of the day, Bonnie Lysyk, is on their side.

December 11, 2014

Lysyk held a news conference Wednesday to declare the Liberals are understating the true deficit by $5 billion.

The law of unintended consequences has a way of catching up to you. All that Liberal reformist zeal from 2003 is now fresh ammunition for the PCs as they accuse McGuinty’s successor as of fudging the numbers.

There is nothing new in the auditor’s latest report. But in auditing as in politicking, timing is everything. Which makes the Liberals electorally unlucky.

Few paid the auditor much heed two years ago when Lysyk suddenly declared she was reversing the accounting rules established by previous auditors: Accumulated surpluses in major public sector pension plans could no longer be counted as budgetary assets, as they had been since Tory times.

The effect of her ruling was to produce a gaping multibillion-dollar hole in the government’s accounting framework at the very moment they were striving to meet a 2017-18 target for deficit elimination. The government convened an outside panel of accounting and pension experts, who declared that Lysyk couldn’t have it both ways: Just as pension shortfalls count as a liability on the balance sheet, a pension surplus should count for something — not nothing, as the auditor insisted.

Lysyk still wouldn’t budge. But Bay Street didn’t bite, ignoring the auditor’s alarm bells. Credit rating agencies also looked at the books but didn’t buy into her alarmist assessments. (Continued: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

 

SaveSave