It wasn’t all that long ago that the Conservatives were insisting that they’d never run a deficit. They had inherited balanced books from the Liberals and while they were certainly going to trim revenue (GST cut, anyone?) they were going to keep the books balanced. There were warnings as early as 2008 that the budget was heading into structural deficit because Prime Minister Stephen Harper was spending too much while cutting taxes too deeply. But, according to the party line, the books were good. Nothing to see here.
We don’t know how things would have played out had the global economic crisis not hit. Even if the Tories had set up a structural deficit, it was obscured by the massive hit to Canada’s economy, and subsequent stimulus program. When you’re hemorrhaging red ink, it’s hard to point to which particular drops were thanks to a childcare rebate. But we can say what the raw numbers are: When we take the amount of borrowed money the government is known to have spent since 2008, and add that to what it expects to spend before it hopefully balances the books in 2015, we’re left with … $176-billion.
But, hard as it can be to believe this, the Tories don’t need to worry about that. They probably do need to balance the books before the next election — a lot of the goodies they promised last time were conditional on the books being balanced. They’ll want to head into the next campaign promising all those shiny baubles while also loudly proclaiming that they got the deficit under control. So long as they can do that, the amount of new debt they put on the national credit card probably won’t hurt them.
It should matter. But it won’t. Anyone who really cares enough to complain will be met with hypothetical but plausible Tory claims that sure, $176-billionish in new debt is bad, but the other guys would have been worse.
But here’s the number that the Auditor-General found, and it might just be enough to sink the Tories: $3.1-billion.
That’s the amount of money that Michael Ferguson concluded has gone … missing. It was part of the federal government’s broader anti-terror spending efforts since Sept. 11. In the period between the attacks in the United States and 2009, the federal government allocated $12.9-billion to anti-terrorism, spread across numerous departments and ministries. Of that money, the Auditor-General can account for how $9.8-billion was spent. That leaves $3.1-billion that … well, who knows? It’s unaccounted for.
The government was quick to point out that that doesn’t mean the money was misspent. And that’s true. It’s possible that every last cent of it went toward stopping would-be terrorists in their tracks. It’s also equally possible that there’s a forgotten government savings account out there with $3.1-billion sitting in it, quietly accruing whatever lousy interest rate the banks are offering. Or, almost as good, maybe it all went missing while the Liberals were in power.
The problem is that the government doesn’t know. Mr. Ferguson asked them for extra documents so that he could run down where the missing money went. He didn’t get them. If the documents exist, the government doesn’t know where to find them.
This sounds suspicious, but it need not be nefarious. But the government needs to be able to say so. As my colleague John Ivison noted on Tuesday, even worse than the fact that money was wasted — what else is new? — is that no one even knows how it was wasted, when it was wasted, or even if it was wasted. That’s embarrassing.
And a godsend to the opposition. Not just because they get to crow about wasted billions, but because until and unless the government can figure out where the $3.1-billion went or is, it has no response to the opposition attacks. Thomas Mulcair can get up every day in the House and demand an update. Every time the government has no answer, they look stupid.
Canadians are a forgiving lot, but they don’t tolerate that degree of mismanagement. A government that spent $176-billion it didn’t have may be brought down by $3.1-billion it might not have spent at all.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: Matt Gurney
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