What a billion dollars could buy Harper
The combined costs of the G8 and G20 meetings are now being speculated to reach $2 billion, (see Buckdog here) which sort of overshadows the Muskoka like fake lake, we first heard about yesterday.
Apparently the not so fiscally minded, not so open or open minded for that matter and the now not so smart conservative government has been spending summit funds on restoring paddle wheel boats, installing space age patio lighting, creating natural living walls, and building facilities hundreds of kilometres away from either summit.
Security is important, but with the RCMP, who are in charge of security, announcing today that the total budget for security personnel, mounties, police, armed forces, private security, undercover, and surveillance, including overtime, travel and accommodation will be coming in at around $330 million, you would have to start to wonder, what the remaining $700 million to the now speculated $1.7 billion is being used for.
Sounds like Harper and his conservatives have finally been caught with their fingers in the cookie jar, you know that old fashioned, pork barrel, vote buying, politics and in key ridings. Ridings that they want to hold on to or possibly in ridings that might be split when the additional seats are added to Ontario.
In other words the same type of politics that Harper and his party sort of raised a stink about a few years back, when the old Liberal government was caught doing a similar thing. It would be interesting to learn which firms are receiving these so called security funds.
A lot of bloggers have been posting about what else a billion dollars could buy, however based on what we are now learning, each day, about this Summitt Scam, it looks to me like this scandal could buy Harper 4 Adscams and hopefully a one way ticket out of town.
Comments
Even if one accepts the figure of $40M claimed by the Cons as the cost of Adscam (likely much exaggerated), "SummitScam" at a cost of $2B is approx. 40 times more.
If one accepts that all governments are wasteful of taxpayers' money, I would much rather reluctantly suffer Adscam than SummitScam.
You are correct. The whole Sponsorship Program was $250 million and that ran for years. The Auditor General started the whole deal by asking where a $100 thousand went.
Seems like chump change today, in comparison to the amount of money this government is wasting for political gain. A fake lake and some solar lights surpasses the amount that was actually diverted according to Gomery.
But that is the way of scandals.