A person with just so much money to last until the next cheque, learns to manage money. They have to and they can become very careful and frugal. Conversely, persons managing billions of dollars can be very wasteful. And to make matters worse, these persons managing billions—who think they are being careful and frugal—are the most wasteful of all. Take the Canadian government:
Just one example of government waste in the past four years is the huge increase in consultanting fees paid with taxpayers’ dollars. In the last fiscal year, Canadians paid over $10 billion for temporary staff or consultants. And not all departments were forthcoming about the reason they needed these people.
The simple answer to this in many cases is that the consultants are doing the work normally done by department staff. The Conservative government has cut department budgets and put a freeze on staffing. In a desperate attempt to do their job, the departments hire consultants. The worst part of this is that many of these consultants are former staff. They are now being paid three to four times their normal salary to do the same work on a short term basis. Any business person can tell you that this is bad economics. Only Treasury Board President Tony Clement will argue otherwise.
That is what happens when you are dealing with politicians rather than business people. Politicians are different. Politicians lack business school disciplines. They can also be ideologues. (Those are the worst kind of politicians.) They put their ideology first. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is an ideologue. Flaherty controls the government budgeting. His friend from Huntsville, Tony Clement, is the Cabinet colleague who approves the consulting contracts.
Since the Conservatives promised Canadians all kinds of right-wing type goodies after 2015 (the next federal election) if Jim Flaherty could get rid of the annual deficit. That is not easy to do in a still shaky economy. It meant putting the civil servants feet to the fire, cutting staff and freezing budgets. God forbid, a Conservative ideologue would ever increase taxes!
The Conservatives are effectively maxing out Canada’s credit cards. They are building mountains of debt for the next government—which is obviously not going to be Conservative. The few Tories left in Parliament will have the fun of telling the new government that they do not know how to manage. It is a cycle that goes on and on.
And if that is the worst of the problems the Conservatives leave us, we will be lucky.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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