The Sixth Estate

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.