Tony Clement's Pimp My Riding

In which bandshells replace in-car Playstations, Tony Clement is Xzibit, and our annoyance is multiplied by 50 million.

Tony Clement, the MP for Parry Sound-Muskoka and a federal cabinet minister, is having a bit of a rough week, although that tends to happen when you siphon $50 million of taxpayer money to buy new flower pots for your riding in a process that seems to have deliberately left no paper trail. The Ottawa Citizen's Kate Heartfield considers this latest flap to be the moment in which the Conservatives come full circle from their years of howling about previous Liberal governments' free-spending ways. “They might not be as bad as the Chrétien Liberals – yet – but all the signs are that these Conservatives are just as willing to use public money to buy votes,” says Heartfield. “They've gone from jeans and cowboy hats to cufflinks and big watches,” but remarkably still carry that Reform chip on their shoulder over science, “elites,” arts galas and anything that might hint at some level of intellect. Yet, unlike the Liberals following the sponsorship scandal, the Tories have four more years for voters to forget this ever happened.

Lawrence Martin also hearkens back to the Chrétien era for iPolitics.ca, bringing up the striking similarities between the Transitional Job Fund scandal of the late 1990s and Clement's Pimp My Riding. With the TJF, MPs were given the power to hand out money to projects in their ridings without bureaucratic oversight, under the guise that they were better suited to understand their ridings' needs than some bean counter in Ottawa. “Opposition MPs were outraged that Liberal MPs were meeting with locals to dole out taxpayer money without leaving a paper trail,” recalls Martin, noting the pitch-perfect similarities between Clement and the TJF. But so far, there's been one key difference: the Grits issued a mea culpa (of sorts), eventually citing the “Dark Ages” conditions of the Department of Human Resources, whereas Clement, well, he's been silent on the matter, ostensibly figuring out ways to cut down the size of government as Treasury Board President. One would figure the gazebo budget would be the first to go.

And finally, the National Post's editorialists express their outrage over the government they've endorsed in consecutive elections, envisioning that the only fallout from this chapter will be opposition anger but little of substance. “There are always bureaucratic hoops to jump through, and sometimes, there's a good reason for that,” they write. “There are standards and procedures to be satisfied when spending taxpayers' dollars, and the whole Clement operation seems to have been organized to get around them.” Sadly, though, because of the Conservative's majority, they can kill any attempts by Parliamentary committees to begin inquiries into the matter. The best we can hope for is for the NDP to harangue the party in power over this issue until 2015, because if there's one thing we've learned about the Tories' habits, it's their profound inability – even by the low standards by which we judge our federal politicians – to admit when they're wrong.