Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Cons cut ACOA funding, muddy waters

A few posts down we've been having an interesting debate around whether it's appropriate to hold a party leader to a promise he made in an election earlier than the most recent one. While interesting academically, no matter on which side the jury comes down the Harper Conservatives are breaking plenty of promises from that election we had just a year or so ago too.

So, in addition to things like now welcoming floor crossers, appointing Senators, putting unelected people into cabinet, letting senior staffers become lobbyists, not following their own accountability act, well, suffice to say breaking a whole bunch of things, we can now add not cutting funding to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to the list of Harper broken promises. I suppose it would be unfair of me to remind people of comments like this?

Tories deny cuts to ACOA budget
By STEPHEN MAHER Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA — It looks like Prime Minister Stephen Harper has broken a campaign promise to maintain ACOA’s budget, although changes in the way figures are reported make it difficult to know by how much.

Since Mr. Harper’s election last year, the Tories have cut spending at the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency by 16 per cent to $366 million in 2007-08 from $437 million in 2005-06.
(more)


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1 comment:

Bailey said...

That's kind of funny. Earlier in the year, there was an article in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald about the accomplishments of the Harper government during their first year that specifically related to Atlantic Canada.

The article was fairly heavy on the criticism on how the Harper government has done very little for Atlantic Canada. Most of their announcements for Fisheries & Oceans or the Sydney Tar Ponds clean up have been rehashing old Liberal government promises and money. Basically, the two positives that the article came up with was saving the ferry between Saint John and Digby and the other was that they didn't cut the funding to ACOA.

Ooops. Looks like that 2nd one might not be true.