PARLIAMENT HILL—Newly unearthed documents about $50-million in lavish G8 spending for projects in Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s riding disclose Mr. Clement was up to his eyeballs in the planning as towns and cities vied for the money and that federal bureaucrats may have misled federal auditors about their role.The documents, obtained by the federal NDP under Ontario’s Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, disclosed that Mr. Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.), Industry Minister last year when the summit of G8 leaders was held in Huntsville, Ont., deep in wealthy Muskoka cottage country in the heart of Mr. Clement’s riding, show that Mr. Clement himself chaired a “Local Area Leadership Group Committee” made up of local mayors and councillors who wanted a share of the federal largesse.
Minutes of one of the group’s earlier meetings, held on Sept. 12, 2008, well before the government presented Parliament with what former Auditor General Sheila Fraser criticized as a misleading request to authorize the spending, shows a senior federal official from the Summit Management Office was present, as well as Joseph Klein, manager of the Deerhurst Resort where the leaders met and stayed and which benefited indirectly from highway and infrastructure upgrades for the event.
The documents also show that Cheryl Forth, a senior official with Fednor, the northern Ontario development agency Mr. Clement oversees in Cabinet, was also involved in helping local communities develop requests for funding, along with another senior Fednor official.
But after Ms. Fraser’s auditors went through the records they could locate about spending criteria for the projects and information about how the decisions were made, her report, which she held back last April until after the May 2 federal election, said departmental officials told the auditors they had no information about project selection because they were not involved at those early stages.
“Departments were not involved in the application intake or review process and, therefore, could not provide us with documentation showing how projects were selected,” the report stated.
It also slammed the government for burying its request to Parliament for spending approval under a general description of $83-million for the Border Infrastructure Fund.
Then Transport and Infrastructure Minister John Baird (Ottawa West-Nepean, Ont.) denied a report during the federal election campaign that a draft report of Ms. Fraser’s audit accused the government of misleading Parliament, but her final report said the government “was not being transparent” about the purpose of the funding, which Parliament approved in 2009.
NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.) says the possibility that senior government officials appear to have misled the auditor general, an officer of Parliament, may be even more serious then the misleading way the government originally sought approval for the spending.
“This is the disturbing element, that the deputy ministers signed off on information that was not correct,” Mr. Angus told The Hill Times. “The auditor general works on a system of trust. When a deputy minister, who is supposed to be outside the partisan process, says ‘none of our staff were involved in this, so we can’t comment,’ the auditor general says, ‘Well that’s a big question mark, why weren’t they involved?’ Now the bigger question is why would deputy ministers sign off, tell the auditor general one thing when clearly the paper trail says something completely different?”
A spokesperson for the auditor general’s office, Ghislain Desjardins, said deputy ministers for three departments attested to the accuracy of the information their department’s gave Ms. Fraser’s auditors, but added that despite the new documents, the office will not begin another inquiry into the spending.
A media aide to Mr. Clement, press secretary Heather Hume, dismissed the NDP interpretation of the new documents, which total more than 700 pages.
“This is a case of context dropping by the NDP,” Ms. Hume said in an email. “The auditor general’s report does not indicate that officials weren’t involved in the process. Certainly they were.”
Ms. Hume quoted evidence from senior government officials at the House Government Operations and Estimates Committee to back up her claim, but the quotations were related to actions that took place after the projects were selected.
Mr. Angus said the documents reveal how Mr. Clement was intricately involved as the decisions to dispense the federal money were being taken.
“This guy, it was like he had won the lottery and he was Daddy Warbucks,” said Mr. Angus, adding that Mr. Clement’s position at the top of the local group that played a key part in selecting projects was untenable for a Cabinet minister.
“It was the place where projects were put together, and then Clement chaired those meetings, the minutes were kept, there was follow-up work if there was any problems,” he said.
“If there were going to be issues about whether they could get a project through and that’s what they counted on the bureaucracy for, it wasn’t to do the checks and balances, it was to make sure everything flowed, quickly.”
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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