The Sixth Estate

Most of the government met its required deadline of May 31st to publish last quarter’s reports of contributions over $25,000 to organizations across the country. The Sixth Estate Pork Barrel update has been delayed since then because I was waiting for the last laggards — Status of Women and Transport Canada — to file their reports. Since it now seems they won’t be publishing them at all, I’m going to have to move forward without them and simply update the numbers later.

The Sixth Estate Pork Barrel tracks government spending by riding across the country, checking whether the government is distributing money fairly across the country or whether it is privileging pet projects in Conservative ridings. It includes all grants and contributions, except core operational and health funding to First Nations by Aboriginal Affairs Canada and Health Canada. This quarter’s update confirms what I have reported before: although there is clear evidence that certain stimulus programs are being directed disproportionately into Conservative ridings, overall the government actually spends slightly more in Opposition ridings than it does in government ones. The following chart shows the average amount of money spent per riding on both sides of the House:

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As promised, the second installment in my new series of Pork Barrel audits involves the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (aka FedDev). This initiative got into the news over the weekend when the government excitedly announced that $10 million from its southern Ontario small business subsidy program was being diverted to a German multinational frozen pizza manufacturer, Dr. Oetker, whose Ottawa lobbyist just happens to be a Conservative insider. Don’t blame Dr. Oetker, blame the government. Dr. Oetker is just doing what any good investor does: going where the money is.

Because it’s a relatively young program and the funding announcements are just ramping up now, it’s too early to draw final conclusions. But so far it appears that this, like so many other “Economic Action Plan” programs, is seeing a disproportionate amount of funding sent to Conservative ridings. This dovetails with my last audit, which had similar findings for HRSDC’s Enabling Accessibility Fund.

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Well, not directly. But I can’t help noticing that the $1 million which the Diefenbaker-era National Council of Welfare would have used next year to publish its regular reports on child poverty and welfare levels in our country, if it hadn’t been shut down, instead got spent on this very important and highly worthy cause:

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After last year’s election, one of the projects I started was the Pork Barrel, which uses the govermnent’s quarterly Proactive Disclosure files to estimate whether the government is giving out grants fairly or whether it is clustering the majority of its grant money in ridings held by Conservative Party MPs. Partisan spending is an accusation regularly levelled against this government, and there are ways in which it’s certainly true — shifting government offices into Conservative ridings, for instance, or diverting border security funds into slush funds for infrastructure construction in Cabinet ministers’ ridings.

For more analysis, see the Pork Barrel project main page.

Note that this quarter’s data does not include information from the department of Transport Minister Denis Lebel. Mr. Lebel, you see, is negligent and incompetent, even more so than the other corrupt clowns who join him at the Cabinet table.

I’m happy to report some good news in my latest update to the Sixth Estate Pork Barrel, which tracks government spending by riding across the country using the quarterly Proactive Disclosure reports theoretically issued by every Department (some departments haven’t bothered to meet the schedule this fall).

Since the last update, I’ve removed Aboriginal Affairs spending. I’ve also removed the Ottawa ridings. The reason is because there are such a large number of Aboriginal reserves in Western rural areas, and such a large number of government-funded NGOs and quasi-NGOs in the Ottawa region. These funding areas are important, accounting for billions of dollars a year, but they both bias the results in misleading ways: every government has a massive Indian Affairs budget and most of that goes to Conservative ridings because that’s where a lot of Aboriginal people are, so a Conservative government would look more unfair on my Pork Barrel ranking, and a (hypothetical) NDP government would look much fairer, in both cases purely because of a single funding envelope. It also saves me a lot of time, since there are thousands of entries on the Aboriginal Affairs disclosure list and nobody’s paying me to process them.

The result is that, among non-Aboriginal spending, actually the trend is surprising and interesting. It seems that in every region of Canada, funding was relatively equally distributed during the second quarter after the election. In fact, in no region (Western Canada, Ontario, Quebec, Maritimes) did Conservative ridings receive more funding than Opposition ridings, on average. The Liberals do well in the following charts because they tend to control the downtown cores, and the downtown cores are full of NGOs soaking up grant money:

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If the Conservative Party is serious about cutting down on government spending in favour of private donations from individuals, perhaps they should look to their own ridings first. According to data being released today by Sixth Estate, and based on the government’s public grant and contribution records, since May 2011 Conservative ridings have received a disproportionate share of money from the federal government compared to Liberal and NDP ridings.

Today I’m making a major update to one of my other occasional features, the Pork Barrel, which tracks federal government spending by riding and party across the country. After the last election, I started up the Pork Barrel based on the government’s public funding announcements. In the new version I take a step back and base the list on the full list of project grants diclosed by each department and agency in their quarterly Proactive Disclosure reports.

The above chart does not show the total government spending by party, but rather the total amount of money spent per party per riding. In theory, the bars on this chart therefore should be the same, meaning the government was spending, on average, the same amount of money in each riding. As you can see, it is not. Instead, it would appear that the ridings held by opposition parties are receiving only a fraction of the amount of money that ridings held by Conservative politicians do (with the exception of Elizabeth May’s riding, which until this May was held by Conservative MP Gary Lunn).

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It’s been a while since I updated the Sixth Estate Pork Barrel, which I have now done. For those not familiar with the Pork Barrel, this is a list of government announcements of new funding projects to companies, cities, nonprofits, etc. It does not include development loans, “re-announcements” of existing grants, or normal government programs. Since the May 2011 election, 84 of 128 (66%) announcements went to Conservative ridings, which also received 96% of new grant money ($854 million out of $891 million). This compares with the Conservative presence in Parliament, where they have just 54% of the seats.

To highlight the general trend, I would like to look at just one limited program with an apparently valid objective, something I’ve done before with reference to the anti-hate crimes security program (which protects mostly just religious communities in Conservative ridings, including those not normally exposed to hate crimes, like a Baptist church). This time I’m looking at the Homelessness Partnering Strategy, which is human resources minister Diane Finley’s ineffectual plan to combat homelessness. You may recognize Finley as the wife of Senator Doug Finley, one of the Conservative insiders presently in court on charges of electoral finance laundering.

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I apologize for dropping off the face of the planet over the past week. I’ve been swamped with work on a research contract and, even for crazy left-wing loonies like myself, sometimes there really is work to do. However, I’m back now. To show you I haven’t been doing just nothing, I’m updating the Pork Barrel Index — the continuing tracking of government funding announcements by riding.

Unfortunately, on this score the Conservatives continue to disappoint. The percentage of government announcements going to Conservative ridings, according to News.gc.ca‘s RSS feeds, is now up to 73% since May 2, 2011. It gets even more fun, too. An impressive 99.5% of total dollars went to those Conservative ridings. The outlandish ratio respects the fact that several big funding announcements have gone to Conservative ridings, including the near-billion dollar subsidy given to Shell for its Quest carbon-capture facility in Alberta.

So far, for reasons which are a complete mystery to me, Kamloops MP Cathy McLeod is the big winner. Almost 9% of all government funding announcements have gone to her riding, though none of them were big-ticket items.

My last post in this series was published May 30. Since then, there have been 15 new spending announcements on News.gc.ca. Of those, 60% of announcements, but 94% of funding, went to Conservative ridings. It’s too early to call this out as any sort of manipulation, mind you. 60% is barely within the range of plausibility for a slim majority government, and the outlandishly skewed funding ratio is due to a subsidized wind farm in Dave Van Kesteren’s riding that accounts for four times as much as all other announcements combined.

It’s too early to say what the new government has in mind, still, but a couple of trends are intriguing. First, if the public announcements are anything to go by, the Quebec gravy train has ceased for the moment. Only one-quarter of funding announcements occurred in Quebec, and two of those were in the riding of industry minister Christian Paradis.

Second, it seems worth noting that of the six projects announced in opposition ridings, four went to Liberals and two went to the NDP. This is precisely the opposite of what you’d expect given the seat distribution of the two parties. An attempt to punish people for voting NDP? It’s too early to say, and that sort of backwards aid to the Liberal Party isn’t really in the Conservatives’ character, historically. We’ll have to see how things pan out over the coming months.

On May 26, 2011, Quebec Conservative MP Christian Paradis began to assert himself in his new role as the federal Industry Minister in the most decisive way possible: he announced $4 million in funding for economic development in his own riding. It’s a relatively small announcement, and Community Futures grants are actually quite standard fare, not just in Québec. But still, the fact that Paradis’s first announcements as minister were money for his own riding is prompting me to announce a new project here at Sixth Estate: the Pork Barrel project, which can now be accessed on the top bar of this website.

I subscribe to the government’s RSS newsfeed, and I’m going to track new funding announcements over the next year to see where they go. I am, of course, prepared to be happily surprised if and when it turns out that funding is spread equitably around the country. But here’s what I expect to find: (more…)