The Bruce Report

Cataloguing all the ways governments waste tax dollars is the journalistic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel: It’s easy and not very sporting.

Still, the compendium, “99 stupid things the government spent your money on”, published earlier this month in Macleans magazine, is an entertaining, if not especially surprising, read. (Don’t we expect the public sector to get it wrong more often than not?)

Some items are indisputably egregious: Ottawa spent a small fortune on a plot of land it could have obtained for nothing; Environment Canada paid to store office furniture it would later sell at auction and replace; the Royal Canadian mint laid down a cool $7.3 million to make pennies for 1.5 cents apiece.

Others are merely silly: A Toronto politician submitted a receipt for $300 to cover the cost of having his office “blessed by a Baptist pastor”; Alberta forked out bucks to develop a slogan its new premier summarily scrapped; and the Public Health Agency of Canada announced a $55,000-study into a cure for traveller’s diarrhea.

Yet others are only arguably wrong-headed.

What, for example, is wrong with lending a legitimate New Brunswick business (Mrs. Dunster’s Donuts of Sussex) money to help it expand its export operations? Macleans seems to think this contradicts official public policy on healthy eating, even though no such policy exists. Indeed, the prime minister might justifiably declare, the government has no business in the private pantries of the nation.

More interesting, if less amusing, than any of this, however, is what doesn’t make the list.

In an excellent column penned earlier this month, the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson observes, “Conservative spending increased at five per cent to six per cent a year before the recession, then exploded during it and thereafter. The result was predictable: a structural deficit, an upsurge in borrowing and total government outlays higher than when the Conservatives were elected.”

One such category of outlay was the cost of advertising the government’s Economic Action Plan, which Public Works reports amounted to $54 million in 2009-2010. That was more than the entire federal ad budget in 2005-2006, which only four years later clocked in at a whopping $136 million.

To apply a Macleans standard of efficacy, the question becomes: What good did all this profligacy buy for Canadian taxpayers? Awareness? Peace of mind? A finer appreciation of irony? A heightened sense of the ridiculous?

Now, the feds are talking about cuts, of between five and 10 per cent, to government services and programs it considers only peripherally relevant to most Canadians even as it plans to spend billions on crime, defence and heritage projects for which it either cannot or will not make a cogent case.

Lawlessness is decreasing in every category of major offense almost everywhere in the country. But the Tories are determined to send more people to jail for longer just as soon as they liberate enough money from Treasury (that is, borrow enough dough from taxpayers) to build more penitentiaries. They say their share of the price tag will amount to a comparatively measly $79 million over five years. Quebec’s Minister of Public Security says, however, it expects the crime bill will cost the province more than $300 million, alone.

Meanwhile, 65 F-35 Lightening fighter jets are on order to thicken the nation’s military presence even though the U.S. Department of Defense and its oversight committees have raised serious questions about their design and engineering – a fact that did not escape the attention of Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page last year when he warned that the total cost to Canada could top $30 billion, about $9 billion more than government estimates had indicated.

And then, of course, there are the periodic displays of drum-beating sentimentality. Who cares about the bicentennial of the War of 1812? You do. Or you should, as you’re paying 30 million bucks for the commemoration.

It may not be nice, or even fair, to enumerate all the ways governments spend recklessly. But, then, they do make it so easy.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

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