Harper Puts on a Show

Harper left Ottawa on Thursday and went to Cambridge, Ont. to give us his latest economic update on the recession.

He brought along Mike Duffy, former CTV news show host turned Conservative senator and together they put on quite a show with a hand-picked Conservative Party audience and a televised town-hall format.

The audience asked softball questions prepared ahead of time about the economic recession. Harper had no trouble answering. He took no questions from reporters.

Harper made a big announcement: that 80 % of his economic update plan is “being implemented.”

As Harper spoke a giant screen behind him announced in big, bold letters “80% ALREADY BEING IMPLEMENTED.” Sounds dramatic.

That doesn’t mean 80% of the $60.2 billion in stimulus money has been spent, and that people have been hired and the project is underway. “Being implemented” means the money was set aside in the Jan. 27 budget and that Harper and his ministers are discussing various projects with municipalities and provinces and that eventually something will be agreed upon, and an agreement will be signed, and public servants will review it, and eventually a cheque will be cut and then sent out and people will be hired and a project will be underway.

Give it six months to a year or two and eventually “being implemented” will become “been implemented.”

As usual, the devil is in the verbiage.

Had Harper announced his economic update in the Commons instead of before an partisan television audience in Cambridge, the Opposition parties would have ripped him apart and the Ottawa press gallery would have parsed his every word. Cambridge saved him that embarrassment.

The mayors of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver -- the three largest cities in Canada -- met recently in Whistler, B.C. and issued a statement saying that so far they had not yet seen one red cent of Harper’s money. None of those cities elected Conservative MPs.

There are two municipal projects which we do know about. Two municipalities in Saskatchewan where they did elect Conservative MPs have received $1.2 billion and people have been put to work.

But so far the rest of the country is still at the stage of “being implemented.”

The Liberals talked to some other mayors and decided to have some fun at Harper’s expense.

They located about a dozen empty sites of promised Conservative projects across Canada – some going as far back as two years ago -- still awaiting Harper’s “implemented” money. They took photos and put them up on the Liberal Party website – ugly empty fields and empty parking lots.

Harper’s people furnished seven huge binders of statistics about his “being implemented” plan. Heavy reading. It takes a forensic accountant to figure out what has been spent and what likely will never be.

According to law, any budget money not spent before the end of the fiscal year reverts back into the federal treasury where it goes to pay down the debt. So the money is not wasted. It does not go into somebody’s pocket. Except the banks’. But where’s the stimulus to get us out of the recession?

For Harper his grand economic stimulus plan announced 72 days ago is “already” turning out to be a race against time.

Good luck Steve!