Hey, look over there!

It's a busy morning at the office so I don't have time to go on at length about the Conservatives' supposed plans to end all public funding to political parties as part of today's fiscal update.

For now, I'll just say this. I was watching the CTV National News last night. Top two stories, the horrible violence and attacks in Mumbai. Third story? The economic update, with the report dominated by the plan to cut party financing, quotes from all sides, crafty, this is war, yada yada.

And buried at the end of that report on the update? Mentioned in passing so briefly you might have missed it? Oh, yeah, Jim Flaherty is expected to announce in the update that we're in deficit, and next year it'll be a big deficit.

Make of that what you will.

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Three totally unrelated news stories

Story One: Home for portrait gallery nixed

Citing the uncertain economic conditions, James Moore, newly appointed Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, announced yesterday evening that after years of stops and starts and squabbles, the selection process to grant the new gallery to one of three competing cities has been canceled.

“In this time of global economic instability, it is important that the federal government continue to manage its own affairs prudently and pragmatically.”

Story Two: Harper's bigger cabinet to cost extra $3.9M in salaries

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's enlarged cabinet could cost taxpayers an additional $3.9 million in salaries alone for extra ministers and staff.

The total cost of staffing ministerial offices, roughly $24.2 million in salaries, has grown by 19 per cent with last week's shuffle and has jumped 42 per cent since the Tories presented their first cabinet in 2006.

Story Three: How much is that cabinet in the window?

The Prime Minister’s Office just announced the appointments of 27 parliamentary secretaries, each entitled to a bonus of $15,600, amounting to a total of $421,200 in extra salary.

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Saturday afternoon stats

While the Conservative attack machine likes to use out of context statements to misrepresent Liberals as big spenders, the facts don’t lie: it’s the Conservatives that are shoveling taxpayer dollars out of the back of a truck at unprecedented levels:


The numbers speak for themselves. And what’s more, despite massively ramping-up spending the Harper Conservatives are cutting back in the areas that are priorities to Canadians, and have made petty ideological cuts, such as to the Status of Women and the Court Challenges Program.

Hopefully by the time Jim Flaherty is done spending like a drunken sailor, and waging a campaign against the province that is the engine of the country’s economy, he won’t have left too big a mess for the next fiscally prudent Liberal government to clean-up.

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