"Spring Stupidity hits Ottawa"

May 14, 2003

 It appears the late arrival of Spring this year is having a mind-numbing effect around the nation’s capital.  The following news items from Ottawa earlier this month detail some of the latest ridiculous proposals for how the federal Liberals could spend your tax dollars. 

Kicking off the folly was Nycole Turmel, president of the Ottawa-based Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), a union with a membership of 151,000 public servants.  You would think that Ms. Turmel’s overriding responsibility when negotiating contracts for her members would be to secure guarantees on pay rates, job security, health, safety and similar issues related to employment and the workplace. 

Instead, at PSAC’s convention early this month, Ms. Turmel won the authority to enter the next round of contract negotiations demanding that the federal government pay $3-million every year into PSAC’s “social justice fund”. 

For every hour worked by a PSAC member, Canadian taxpayers would pay one cent towards PSAC’s anti-globalization action plan to fight the evils of the “corporate agenda” around the world.  PSAC wants taxpayers to fund public servants’ ability to fight some of the very policies that they, as part of their jobs, help the federal government to conceive and implement.  

The next big-spending item to hit the headlines this month came with the appearance of CBC Chairman Patrick Watson before a Senate committee studying newspaper ownership in Canada. 

At a time when many Canadians are seriously struggling to justify the existence of a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster in a world that includes 500 TV channels and unlimited journalistic endeavours on the Internet, Mr. Watson proposes we create a taxpayer-funded national newspaper! 

Mr. Watson worries that privately-owned newspapers are too beholden to their advertisers.  Pushy advertisers will be the least of Canadian newspapers’ problems should they suddenly be forced to compete against a federally-funded competitor.  Mr. Watson says little about this “national public newspaper” being beholden to the government that keeps it afloat.  

Many Canadians will optimistically assert that even the federal government can recognize it would be preposterous for it to actually fund PSAC’s social justice fund or to create another media organization addicted to tax dollars.  Yet the mixed-up and contradictory funding priorities of the federal Liberal government indicate otherwise. 

In fact, yet another noteworthy story from Ottawa demonstrates this Liberal fondness for funding activities that the average Canadian finds outrageous.  It was revealed this month that the federal Justice Department gave $380,000 to the Coalition for Gun Control.  The lobby group needed cash from the federal government so it could hire professional lobbyists to ask the federal government to maintain the $1-billion federal gun registry! 

The Liberals continue to play this kind of complex shell game with your tax dollars. And lest you believe things will be different under Paul Martin, remember that he held the federal purse strings for almost a decade. 

Mr. Martin’s rigid adherence to traditional Liberal tax-and-spend priorities is the reason he enjoys considerable support within the Liberal party today.  To guarantee that support in the future, he must and will maintain the status quo.