Sometimes I wish MPs would stay home and not go to Ottawa. When they’re not in Parliament, they can’t be passing unneeded new laws or approving spending we don’t have the money for. The State of Montana’s constitution limits the Legislature to sitting no more than 90 days over a two-year period on the theory that idle representatives equals smaller, less expensive, less intrusive government.
But there are other times when I wished MPs would stay in Ottawa, maybe go to a pub or take a long walk along the canal – anything but go back to their ridings to hand out goodies that, again, the country can’t afford.
Last week was one of the latter cases.
Tory MPs fanned out over the country during a weeklong Parliamentary break to announce over $1 billion in mostly useless spending initiatives. But most of the fanning was in Quebec. While the Tories won’t give $175 million to Quebec City’s new hockey rink, they have managed to find $504 million in Quebec projects they will fund, including nearly $270,000 to three snowmobile clubs.
The bulk of the Quebec money — $228 million – is going towards rehabbing two Montreal-area highway bridges that are crumbling into the St. Lawrence River. These are worthy projects and preferable to hockey arenas, but federal payment for the repairs begs the question: What has that to do with taxpayers in Timmins or Red Deer or Antigonish? Was it those taxpayers’ provincial governments that sat by and let these spans deteriorate to their current state? Of course, not.
The bridges fell apart while the Quebec provincial government spent lavishly elsewhere. The Quebec government likes to boast about how it has cheap daycare that, despite its low cost to parents (just $7 a day), is nonetheless very high quality. It sniffs at other provinces that charge in-province students tuition of between $3,000 and $6,000 for a year of undergraduate study at a provincial university paid for by their parents’ tax dollars, while Quebec residents studying in Quebec pay very low fees.
Of course, a lot of this elaborate social spending is sustained by the $8 billion to $10 billion annually that Ottawa collects from Canadian taxpayers and ships off to Quebec City in the form of transfers and equalization payments. But more still is made possible thanks to one-time grants such as the ones announced last week by Tory MPs.
