Well, sorry for the delay. I got sick, then had an OCD issue today. I am going to talk about Gomery, and I’ll even sing a song about it (probably tomorrow)… but not before I take the time to point out something new on the blog. Specifically, my blog’s new jukebox. Now, as anyone who lets me pester them on MSN know (or even my cousin Adam who visited with his wife Sarah), I love to pimp Canadian music. In case the decor didn’t convince you, I am a tried-and-true Canadian and I suppose I’ve adopted the Can-con mentality pretty strongly. Needless to say I’ve developed an appreciation for Canadian music as well as a semi-decent CD collection of the same.
Now, in addition to pestering people about Canadian music, I also enjoy playing it for anyone who will listen or is too shy to say no. I do this with my shoutcast stream (email me if you want more details on that) or by mailing CD’s. Thanks to the wonders of the internets, I have another option. If you will notice on the sidebar below the search feature, there is now a little jukebox. 
Each sunday I will post a song from a Canadian artist (which I will discuss at the conclusion of whatever I am primarily posting about) that I think is worth knowing and appreciating. Since space is of course limited I will keep only ten songs online at a time. I encourage you to check them out by picking the most recent song from the playlist or hitting “zap.” Feedback is great too. Now on to Gomery…
This whole Gomery discussion is interesting, for two simple (yet horribly frightening) reasons. First, because nobody has given the context in which this whole mess has dropped any consideration, and second because nobody has taken the time to bother understanding what it means. Of course, that never stopped a Canadian political discussion before. But without the proper context, and a really substantive analysis, the report has no meaning outside what every self-proclaimed pundit assigns to it… and while I am well aware of the subjective nature of truth, there are limits to what can be passed of as supposedly self-evident reality. So lets take a good hard look at this.
First, some numerical context. The Gomery report is examing the distribution of approximately 250 million dollars throughout the 90’s, although the cash really only moved (improperly) for four or five of them. That’s a shitload of money, right? Well here’s some food for thought: during the mid 90’s and later, the federal government budgeted approximately 150-175 billion dollars. Now, the Gomery inquiry found that not all the money was wasted (in that it was used improperly… I’ll save questions of practicality of Sponsorship for later), and it happened over time. But even if we assume that all $250 million went down the crapper, and that it all happened in one year, then we are looking at 0.16% of expenditures (using the lower end of $150 billion.) In more understandible terms, an entry level accountant (for example) making $30,000 lost $50 one night at the bar. Now if we consider that the money was funneled off over a prolonged period, and some of it was used legitimately, then the numbers get even more underwhelming. Lets say that $150 million or so was a waste (even though most people peg the number as lower), and that it was funneled off over a period of five years. That’s $30,000,000 per year. Again, a significant number, but inconsequiental in any bureacracy as large as the federal government. For our same account that is a $6 loss per year. I lose that much money on broken vending machines each year.
So now that we have an idea how much money was lost, we can think about the political context for these losses. To listen to Steven Harper, the current government is horribly corrupt, as evidenced by this legacy of mismanaged and stolen money. Nevermind that the amounts were surprisingly minor and that the inquiry exhonerated Paul Martin of complicity. For Harper I guess all those losses have kind of blurred one liberal government into the next. The fact is that Paul Martin was not held responsible by an independent inquiry, and common sense dictates that when people who are actively concealing their crimes steal relatively minor amounts of money that nobody is going to notice. But no, it’s a waste! Not only that, because of the waste of the previous governments, the current government deserves to be turfed.
If you’re not following that logic it’s because there is none. During the “reign” of Brian Mulroney the federal debt increased by over $400 billion dollars. Want to be that the interest rate paid each year on that is 50-100 times greater than any money funneled through the Sponsorship program? Of course none of that matters, because it wasn’t the Liberals.
The simple truth is this. Bureacracy invites costs, and even waste. The Federal government is a large bureacracy, in fact it is the largest in Canada by a far margin. Not because the Liberals are wasteful, but because the business of running this country requires duplication and organization: two things bureacracy does well. I know it’s vogue to trot out the “the bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureacracy,” but that’s not fair. The fact is that until recently it was in fact the most efficient way to organize on a large scale, and more innovative structures (i.e. the Network) aren’t suitable for governments just yet. The Canadian bureacracy may have room to shrink, but simply eliminating large chunks of it is not necessarily easy. As we in Ontario learned, a bureacracy can shrink, but it must do so along with a proportionate decrease in responsibility. If you try to do one without the other you get, well, the mess that is Ontario governance… and in the Federal Government the big ticket items are health-care, transfer payments, and education. I’d like to see the politicos clamouring about Liberal Waste explaining how they would reduce expenditures in these areas, as opposed to just claiming they would do better.
Discuss on the message boards…
Ok, so it’s time for my artist profile. This week I’ve got a selection from Moist. This band, fronted by David Usher was fairly popular in the mid-nineties and achieved some recognition with their album Silver devoted to AIDS awareness. For your listening pleasure I have attached the title-track from that disc. Enjoy… and please comment.
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