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| Don't Trust the Liberals - Friday, March 26, 2004 at 09:32 |
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PUBLICATION: The Edmonton Sun -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DON'T TRUST THE LIBERALS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Liberals just don't get it. Finance Minister Ralph Goodale tried yesterday in his first budget to put 10 years of Liberal scandals behind him, the party and Prime Minister Paul Martin. Oh, how he tried, devoting a good chunk of the beginning of his budget speech to the way the government is going to prevent "the kinds of financial abuses that have so understandably angered Canadians." Intoned Goodale: "As a government, we not only accept our responsibility for what went wrong, we also accept our responsibility to get it right." He then went on to announce the re-establishment of the Office of the Comptroller General of Canada to "rigorously oversee all government spending." Well, for starters, it's the job of Parliament and elected MPs to "rigorously oversee all government spending," but decades of parliamentary decay under successive Liberal governments have put an end to that. But Goodale's promise to put in new rules and regulations to protect our tax dollars from that kind of egregious abuse misses the fact that there were already scads of rules in place to protect our money. It's the fact, to paraphrase Auditor General Sheila Fraser, that every rule in the book was broken that led to Adscam in the first place. More rules won't change the fact that the Liberals are the cause of these "financial abuses," not the solution! And it's not just the $100 million wasted in Adscam, either. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that nearly every dollar spent under Jean Chretien's decade-long disaster as prime minister has become tainted. For not only is there Adscam, but now there are reports that retailers asked to sell flags to the government for Sheila Copps's big flag giveaway didn't supply the merchandise, but got kickbacks if they submitted fake invoices. The NDP has called a foul on the federal contributions to the Pan-Am Games in Winnipeg, citing a $1.7-million gap between what the feds contributed through the sponsorship program and what the Games organizers actually received. There's the $100 million that Ottawa used to buy, untendered, new Challenger jets from Bombardier. There's the billion-dollar boondoggle of the gun registry. There's the Auberge-Grand Mere scandal. And on and on it goes. That's the kind of endemic and deeply rooted corruption that comes from Canada being a near one-party state. Putting the party that caused this mess in charge of cleaning it up isn't just letting the fox guard the henhouse, it's letting the fox set up a roadside deep-fried chicken restaurant. "Management with integrity," declared Goodale. "Canadians deserve no less." Canadians deserve a new government. The Liberals must go. |