Recent requests by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) into what the federal government spent on advertizing its stimulus (read deficit) campaign were met by rebuffs from central government departments (such as Treasury Board and Public Works) to file other requests with an array of specific departments. Each and every one of the departments filed with, flooded the CTF’s Ottawa office with hundreds of pages of documents, specifying individual (and essentially) meaningless media buys.

For example: Finance Canada bought 60 seconds in Edmonton, played in Cantonese on Omni News. It also paid for an ad-space in the Valley Times, a local paper in Port Alberni, BC. All fine and great, but 111 pages of spreadsheets for a single department’s advertising means that in practical terms, you have no information.

Check out HRSDC’s response to the CTF: 200 pages of alphabetized words used for ‘Google Ad-Word’ purchases.

The “stimulus” campaign and the critical plan to sell it to Canadians with their own money is wasteful enough, but the government’s attempts hide how much is really costs is just the latest break in its 2006 campaign promise to bring accountability to Ottawa.

Program spending has increased by more than 60% in the last 6 years beginning long before there was any drop in revenue, a bailout of General Motors, or threat of Stéphane Dion becoming prime minster with Monsieurs Layton and Duceppe at the ready.  In 2013 we will begin to feel the pinch of the baby boomers retiring and the double whammy of increased CPP, GIS and health-care costs on the one hand, and a shrinking tax base on the other.

Anyone who has crunched the numbers will see that there has been a massive and permanent growth in the size of government beyond the so-called ‘Economic Action’ plan over the last six years and that the pressures of demographics will means that even holding the line on spending will be entirely insufficient to balance the budget.

The Trudeau and Muloney governments made the same claim that balancing the budget can be done by getting spending “growth” under control and allowing revenue growth to take care of the rest.  We all know the history and how well that worked.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has released a detailed plan to make reasonable cuts in spending coupled with freezes that will actually get the budget back in black within three years.

Conservatives should make it known within their party that this situation has a strong smell of the 1970s and 80s, and Liberals and New Democrats should get credible on this issue and hold the government to account, as is their job.

The Liberals have been trying – albiet quite unsucessfully – to pillar the government for these mounting sins.  The very thought of the party of Alfonso Gagliano, Chuck Guite & Jean Pelletier trying to take the moral high ground is laughable in the extreme, but that is no excuse for the creeping tendency of the government to let it’s previously shinny armour of accountability rust so quickly.

The current smell of foul play creeping over the government is not a symptom of Tory governance, but of big spending and what it does to the sense of fiscal restraint that the government should have.  When a party that sprang from roots that resembled fiscal sanity throws those roots to the fire and “stimulates” that fire with gasoline, it is little wonder that said party begins to loose its ethical bearings.

The arguement that the Conservatives are no worse ethically than Jean Chretien’s Liberals may be accurate, but it is hardly a high bar to judge a government by.

Pork barrel spending and acting as if taxpayers money belongs to a party or MP is not necessarily a reflection of a party or MP’s personally, but a direct result of what happens when any government – Liberal, or Conservative – engages in the kind of spending that we see today.

Liberal attacks on the current “stimulus” fiasco may be hypocritical, but they are half legitimate. The Conservatives should take action on this not by retorting that they will be more ethical managers of out-of-control spending, but that they will get this spending under control.