A recipe for waste

Editorial, The Ottawa Citizen:

The more details emerge about the way the government funnelled money into the Muskoka region under the convenient category of "G8 legacy infrastructure," the more "smalltown cheap" the whole thing looks.

The Auditor General's office pointed out with some dismay that it could find no paper trail to show how the projects were approved . and whether the Canadian people got value for money. So the NDP filed accessto-information requests and got hold of municipal documents. They include application forms titled "G8 Community Project Summary" with instructions at the bottom to return them to the constituency office of Tony Clement, the local Conservative MP and the industry minister at the time. They include lists of funding requests from the municipalities for such things as street lights and public washrooms, and they include minutes of the "local area leadership group," which included Clement and local mayors and which seems to have overseen much of the approvals process.

In a sense, none of this money was theirs to spend. Parliament approved the funding under the mistaken impression that it was for border infrastructure.

In a larger sense, the government never had any business throwing public money around like this. Yes, municipalities were and are in sore need of a better model for infrastructure funding. But using an international summit as a tenuous excuse to create a oneoff, regional fund is not a good way to accomplish that goal. It's a good way to create the circumstances for cronyism and waste.