AG says, show me the money

[silver72]

In QP, Clements was really getting heated up over questions the NDP kept asking about the misplaced, lost, spent money. He even blamed them for not asking the questions in 2000-09 about the public accounts. The problem is the Conservatives, which were Reformers, was the official opposition and they didn't ask questions either , so that would be a double whammy for them! http://www.ipolitics.ca/2013/05/06/scrums-how-the-ndp-is-apparently-responsible-for-the-government-losing-track-of-3-1-billion/

[jacee]

What is really loathsome about Harper in this is that a) I do not believe that he doesn't know where the money went, and it is quite apparent that he has no intention of telling us where he spent $3.1b of OUR money!

Losing track of $3.1B will hurt Tories

Neither Ferguson nor anyone else is suggesting any wrongdoing or misappropriation, but no one can explain where, exactly, the money went. The auditor general simply was told that the relevant records are not available.

We can only imagine what Revenue Canada auditors would say if they heard such as this from a taxpayer.

...

...boondoggle normally refers to a public project for which costs are out of control. We don't know in this case if costs were out of control since we don't know what they paid for. That's not a boondoggle. That's more like a bungle.

For Harper, it could be the most damaging of bungles. His government's reputation is staked on sound fiscal management and accountability. It was to restore accountability in Ottawa that the Conservatives first were elected. They might be mean-spirited. They might be dirty fighters. They might even be shape-shifting space aliens who have temporarily assumed human form. What mattered more than all that, however, was their supreme competence as fiscal managers, or so they would have us believe.

...

Harper did promise in question period that his government will in future track spending more carefully. If memory serves, that's as close as he's been after seven years in power to admitting a mistake.

It was not a cleansing admission. The Harper Conservatives will be reminded again and again about the $3 billion. Their self-proclaimed monopoly on fiscal competence invites these repeated reminders.

This would be a good time for the Conservatives to start working on some other aspects of their game.