Roundup: Ginned up outrage over accounting rules

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My tolerance for ginned-up outrage is mighty thin, and it was exceeded yesterday as a certain media outlet ran a completely bullshit story about how in the last fiscal year, $105 million of Veterans Affairs’ budget went unspent and was returned to the consolidated revenue fund rather than simply kept in the department for the following year as the government “promised” to do following a completely inane NDP Supply Day motion a year previous. The story is one hundred percent not worth anyone’s time, and we have a media outlet who has decided to waste precious resources into putting a disingenuous framing mechanism around an NDP press release and calling it accountability.

To be clear: the whole premise of this “outrage” is the fact that the NDP have deliberately ignored how accounting and budgeting rules work in order to dial up a fake controversy for the sake of scoring outrage points in the media. The unspent money from Veterans Affairs is because they’re a demand-based department – they estimate how much they’ll need to deliver services to veterans every year, and if the funds don’t all get spent, then the law states that money goes back to general revenue, and reallocated in the following year’s budget. This does not mean there is deliberate under-spending – it means that they overestimated what the demand for services would be in an abundance of caution. And yes, there are backlogs in the department, but when you have capacity issues because they can’t hire enough qualified staff at the drop of a hat (after the previous government let hundreds of them go), you can’t just throw that “leftover” money at that problem. Pretending that it works otherwise is frankly dishonest.

One of the journalists at said outlet took exception to my calling out the disingenuous framing and insisted that the government shouldn’t have promised not to keep the funds in the department if they didn’t intend to keep the promise – and I would almost accept that as a valid argument except for the whole promise in and of itself was the result of shenanigans. The NDP’s whole Supply Day motion last year was illusory outrage, and government explained over and over how accounting rules and demand-based departments work, but if they voted against the (non-binding) motion, they would be voting against veterans and it would be bad optics. The path of least resistance is to vote for it and just keep following the rules. Because what is the alternative – vote for it, and then bring in new legislation to contort the accounting rules for this one-off bit of faux outrage over a non-scandal that is the direct result of a party that deliberately misstated how said accounting rules work in order to try to generate headlines? How is that a productive use of anyone’s time or energy? It would be great if we could get certain media outlets to engage in some critical thinking and not fall for this kind of transparent spin, and then gin it up as though it were a real scandal. We all have better things to do.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says that he’s confident there can be an “orderly transition” as Brexit is now official and the UK has eleven months to come up with a new trade deal.
  • Patty Hajdu says it’s too early to declare a national emergency over coronavirus in Canada, while “vulnerable” diplomats and their families are being evacuated.
  • The government has agreed to do DNA tests on the remains of Flight PS752 victims’ remains, to ensure that the right remains have been returned to families.
  • Here’s a further look at the broadcast and telecom industry report and some of the responses to it, including the promise for a bill within six months.
  • Government Leader in the Senate Marc Gold named his deputy and whip – err, “liaison” yesterday, Senators Gagné and LaBoucane-Benson respectively.
  • Two new senators were appointed yesterday – one for New Brunswick, one for Saskatchewan – and the former has some legislative experience.
  • The Senate’s ethics committee recommended re-suspending Senator Lynn Beyak again, pending more education and a better apology.
  • Matt Gurney has a three-part series on lessons learned from SARS and how the current situation with coronavirus compares. (Parts one, two, and three).
  • Gurney also reflects on where we’re at in the coronavirus cycle, how the situation has evolved over the past week, and where we might be three months hence.
  • Kevin Carmichael calls out Canadian exporters’ reluctance to seek new markets in an era where our two largest trading partners are harming us with their trade war.
  • Chris Selley calls on the Liberals to put their Middle Class™ branding exercise farce out of its misery.
  • Colby Cosh offers a thoughtful – if biting – exploration of the re-ignited question of whether prospective prime ministers need to be bilingual.
  • Robert Hiltz compares the Conservative leadership to a lame and half-hearted Thunderdome, and it’s a delightfully acid read.
  • My weekend column looks at Jagmeet Singh’s plan to use a private members’ bill to implement pharmacare, which is both out of order and robs his MPs of their agency.

Odds and ends:

Senator Serge Joyal retires from the Senate today, and I am gutted because this is an incalculable loss to Parliament. We are all worse off now that he has left.

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3 thoughts on “Roundup: Ginned up outrage over accounting rules”

  1. The state of politics in Canada is a mess. No bipartisanship, no fact checking by spokes people for parties. disingenuous self serving statements to a gullible press…the list goes on and on. But, then when one sees what happened in the US Senate where members couldn’t even bring themselves to have first hand witnesses and documents which were banned by POTUS in an impeachment “trial” one can understand that the state of our democracy is in danger. In fact, it was once said by a US president that American democracy was that “shining city on a hill” to be emulated by all those countries that wished for a democratic system. By their actions, which will undoubtedly be followed up with a refusal to remove the POTUS has placed the American status of their democracy as a two-hole in the Ozarks. A lesson for Canada perchance?

  2. So much for cooperation. The opposition parties and the press alike are afflicted with a serious case of Trudeau derangement syndrome that no pharmacare plan in the world can fix. It looks like this minority government is going to be a waste. The NDP is desperate for attention and as disingenuous as the CPC/GOP and the Bernie brigade, while the corporate M$M in Canada is as useless and addicted to phony scandals for ratings, clickbait and subscriptions as CNN, FOX, the NYT et. al. are in the U.S.

    That same outlet decided the other night to run a pointless rehashed report about the India trip (which mentions yoga, what a coincidence!), and was also the same outlet that aired a clip of Trudeau allegedly getting “snubbed” at a G20 conference, a clip that was first sent out by a Russian troll outlet with its own vested interests in sowing chaos and disinformation in Western democracies. I’d say “do better,” but knowing the biases of this particular outlet and a number of its cohorts (ahem — the Mike Duffy network, in partnership with the Glob & Oil, they of Ezra op-ed infamy), I don’t think that’s possible.

    Meanwhile, you have two dunces competing to “lead” the CPC by how much they can out-macho each other and (cough) *lay Trudeau out in lavender* under the guise of attacking “wasteful spending” and “Laurentian Liberal elitism,” which also appeals to the other side of the loonie in that the Dippers will complain they don’t care about the poor. But you just know Jeff Ballingall and whatever batch of deplorables is running Populist Pete’s campaign are dying to send out a meme of “Justine” photoshopped as Marie Antoinette. What’s next, investigating his emails?

  3. Pingback: QP: Trying to make Orwell happen | Routine Proceedings

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