Agriculture Canada’s flawed 2008 tobacco transition program to buy out quota from 1,000 southwestern Ontario producers and former producers received the kind of publicity last week that makes bureaucrats and politicians cringe.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, organizers of an annual Parliament Hill stunt that involves a pig mascot, a woman in a slinky black dress and Oscar-like “awards” for what the anti-government group considers the most egregious examples of government waste, singled out the tobacco program this year as the worst.
It cost $284 million, was hastily conceived and poorly executed and forced Ottawa to change the rules mid-program when it discovered that more than 300 quota holders transferred the quota to family or friends who then stayed in the business despite the requirement that buyout recipients leave the industry. The transfers were not allowed.
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Last autumn, interim federal auditor-general John Wiersema exposed the problems with the program in a report to Parliament.
The CTF jumped on the revelation, awarding Agriculture Canada the top Teddy award (named for a federal bureaucrat who lost his job for extravagant expense spending) for the “worst performance by a federal department in a supporting role.”
The citation noted the creative quota transfers, the fact that most quota holders already had left the business and the fact that tobacco production, no longer quota-regulated, actually increased the next year.
“Who couldn’t use millions of taxpayer dollars to shuffle the ownership of your farm equipment, on paper at least, to another member of your family?” it asked sarcastically. “ A lucky strike indeed!”
But if the tobacco program drew ridicule for the federal department about a program that is history, the satirical awards actually led to change in Alberta last week.
The provincial Teddy winner was the Alberta “standing committee on privileges and elections, standing orders and printing,” which has 21 MLA members who received $1,000 per month for their work and had not had a meeting for more than three years.
Now, election-bound Alberta premier Alison Redford has announced that pay for work on legislative committees will be suspended while the issue is reviewed and Progressive Conservative MLAs have been ordered not to accept pay for committee work.
“For the last several days, Albertans have expressed their concerns about MLAs receiving pay for sitting on a committee that did not hold meetings,” she said March 12. “Albertans are right on this issue.”
In politics, ridicule is one of the most powerful weapons.
Score one for the pig mascot.
