The Canadian Press reports, “The wording has been softened but the auditor general’s verdict remains much the same: the Harper government kept Parliament in the dark about a $50-million G8 fund that sprayed money on dubious projects in a cabinet minister’s riding. The final report on the G8 legacy infrastructure fund concludes that the government ‘did not clearly or transparently’ identify how the money was going to be spent when it sought parliamentary approval for the funding.”
“Moreover, the report criticizes the utter lack of documentation to explain how and why 32 infrastructure projects in the Parry Sound-Muskoka region in Ontario were selected to receive the government largesse. And in a separate chapter, the auditor general says spending on operations and security for the G8 and G20 meetings in Ontario was presented piecemeal to Parliament instead of in a package, leaving MPs poorly informed about total costs.”
“The final report does not contain the inflammatory language used in a January draft, which baldly asserted the government had ‘misinformed’ Parliament and suggested the opaque process for approving the funding might actually have been illegal. …Although the language has been toned down, the gist of the criticism of the legacy fund remains the same in the final report as in the initial draft.”
“The report details how, in November 2009, the government tabled supplementary estimates in which it asked Parliament to approve $83 million for a border infrastructure fund aimed at reducing congestion at border crossings. Parliament was not told that $50 million of that money was to be devoted to infrastructure projects hundreds of kilometres from the Canada-U.S. border — in Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s Parry Sound-Muskoka riding. …(The) auditors were unable to find any documentation about how projects were selected or even why the government settled on $50 million for Parry Sound-Muskoka when cities that have hosted previous summits received no more than $5 million.”
The Council of Canadians had demanded during the federal election that the Auditor-General find a way to make this report public so that voters could make an informed choice on May 2, http://canadians.org/campaignblog/?p=7465.
The Canadian Press article is at http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110609/g8-auditor-general-report-spending-110609/.
