Roundup: Cheap outrage against the AG

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The Auditor General is in the news for a couple of reasons, both of which start bordering on the ridiculous. The first is the news about the price tag of the Senate audit, which is said to be approaching $21 million. The AG himself didn’t want to start talking numbers out of context, and to wait for the final report, but this likely has to do with the fact that a number of outside contract staff were brought in to do the audit – which is also what a lot of the process complaints are, particularly since these outside auditors have no idea about what constitutes parliamentary functions, or the bounds of propriety in some cases. (Incidentally, the numbers of senators affected being leaked in this story is far less than those in other reports). The other story is more egregious, but not for the reason you might think. CTV reported that the AG’s office has spent $23,000 over four years on team-building exercises. Mind you, that’s over 600 staff, which basically amounts to an annual pizza lunch, and it’s in the context of a $90 million annual budget, but look – a big number with little context! Scandal! And thus we get to the egregiousness of the cheap outrage that apparently fuels out political media in this country. Who doesn’t love a story where a big number gets presented with inadequate context, and calling it a scandal? Why can’t we be a country that is so cheap and flinty that we are the Ritz-crackers-and-ginger ale crowd? Why should we spend money on anything at all? But no, it’s all OH NOES PIZZA LUNCH and lighting our hair on fire. And then of course, the perennial bugaboo of the Challenger jets, where every time the GG flies somewhere we need to get the CTF on the line to decry how terrible it is that we go and do diplomacy. Sometimes I wonder if we’re really a grown-up country after all.

Good reads:

  • All of the parties launched new ads, many of them pretty terrible (and in one case a poor image choice), but hey, fixed election dates and no spending caps. Whee!
  • Mike Duffy’s lawyers claim that internal Senate audit will exonerate Duffy, I’m guessing by saying the rules were too unclear. Not sure that’s really the case.
  • Former Justice Deschamps and Major-General Whitecross went to Defence Committee to talk about the Deschamps report yesterday.
  • The Information Commissioner was at committee yesterday, and spoke not only of the retroactive legislation problem, but of her office’s need for more resources.
  • Stephen Blaney was defending C-51 yesterday, saying we need “pre-criminalization,” which I think means we’re now in Minority Report.
  • Oh hey, it looks like it will be nigh impossible to reach our new emissions targets.

Odds and ends:

A group has launched anti-union ads aimed at Justin Trudeau, which led to the resignation of someone from both the CFIB and the C.D. Howe Institute.

Conservative and Liberal MPs are concerned the NDP will use a loophole in the rules to let their staff get paid for campaigning as they did in a by-election.

The vast majority of people aren’t keen on the planned Victims of Communism memorial, but the government plans to go ahead with it anyway.