It's Criminal

You just get the sense that something is increasingly out of place.  I’ve only been home for a few days and already heard an earful from angry citizens upset over the $1 billion dollar price tag for the G8/G20 security arrangements.  Absolutely no one buys the government’s claim that such disbursements are justifiable.  And current polling is showing that Stephen Harper is wearing the cost for excessive spending.How then to explain the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s findings today on the true cost of the government’s crime agenda?  Kevin Page is something akin to Auditor General Sheila Fraser in courage.  This isn’t the first time he’s blown the whistle on government waste, but coming as it has on the heels of the Muskoka boondoggle, he’s beginning to connect the dots of a troubling trend of arrogance and waste.Page put out a 100-page report today, replete with methodology and models, to reveal that far from costing $2 billion over the next five years, the true costs of the government’s crime agenda is more than double that - $5.1 billion.  Okay, that’s pretty serious.  But as the Budget Officer stated, none of this increase went through Parliament and wasn’t even in the budget.  Once again, Parliament was refused the right to see the books – as was Page himself; when he requested the needed figures from Corrections Canada, he was denied.The question for all of us isn’t, “How can the government get away this?” but rather, “Why do we put up with it?”  A billion here, a billion there during a time we are undergoing the greatest deficit in Canadian history is simply too laisse faire, too insensitive to our precarious fiscal situation.  At least the G8/G20 costs were tabled in Parliament, though they were underestimated to the tune of almost $1 billion.  But now Canadians are about to pony up another extra $3 billion over the next five years that was never placed within the budget or even declared to Parliament itself.  As Kevin Page stated today, there’s a real problem with government transparency here.What will your hard-earned tax dollars get you in return?  At least five more jails, longer terms, and extra security costs.  The provinces are just finding out as we are that their own corrections budgets will be going up as a result of shared costs they’d never even heard of in the federal budget.Conservative supporters will want to defend the PM on this, yet, being true Conservatives, they have a great deal of trouble backing such unaccountable disbursements of huge sums of taxpayer money.  As with the G8/G20 summits, Stephen Harper has just finished dividing his base again, and the wear and tear is beginning to show.And here’s the ultimate kicker: crime in Canada has been going down consistently for the past 25 years!  Even the university in Edmonton has undertaken an effort to study why our crime rates are so low even during recessionary times.  The research is out there in spades; the trends reveal the story.  And yet with crime rates the lowest they have been in a quarter of a century, we have just learned we will be spending an extra $5 billion that the government didn’t even have the responsible sense to put in the budget.In the next few days I have tons of events in the riding.  If my ears are already sore from the anger over the G8/G20 costs, this trend of profligate spending is about to make my forays into my community a challenge indeed.