Tony Gazebo Finally Faces the Fire

... and doesn't say much of anything. When the evidence against your competence is this damning, sometimes it's just better to keep quiet.

Tony Clement and John Baird's testimony before a Parliamentary committee on how Clement's riding ended up with nearly $50 million in beautification projects stirred up as much anticipation among Hill-watchers as a new Twilight movie would among pre-teens. Aaron Wherry of Macleans paints the picture perfectly, as he's wont to do, noting the "Conservative brigade" that dropped by to support their dutiful ministers as they faced an onslaught of questions over just why there isn't any documentation explaining how the 33 projects in the Muskokas ended up getting selected for federal funding. But the most Clement would yield was that the paperwork "was not perfect," and that he would "take my share of responsibility" for that little oversight. "And that will have to do," remarks Wherry, wryly. "Because whatever trinkets were spread around a cabinet minister’s riding with public funds, whatever rules were broken and whatever notion of parliamentary accountability subverted, Mr. Clement’s having to say this much would seem to be the only consequence on offer." Well, that and increasing his re-election margin from 26 votes to a few thousand.

The National Post's Stephen Maher is far less kind to Clement, sighing that the minister "failed to publicly account for himself at the public accounts committee on Wednesday, repeatedly telling MPs he didn’t do something that, in fact, he did do: choose the communities in his riding that would receive gazebos under the G8 legacy fund." Maher focuses in on one exchange between Liberal MP Gerry Byrne and Clement, in which Byrne wondered if the minister had no role in selecting the projects, then why did Clement send out rejection letters to bids that didn't win? Clement's response ("Maybe we were being too polite") was "a paper-thin defence" that ranks up there in the pantheon of Canadian political half-truths. That it was Byrne who took this line of questioning is a bit "ironic," notes Maher, as he was accused of pulling a similar trick when he was the minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency in 2003, doling out $35 million to his riding in Newfoundland. But at least Paul Martin quickly shuffled Byrne out of his cabinet position, Maher notes, while Clement got a promotion.

Lawrence Martin takes to iPolitics.ca to wonder just why John Baird has gotten off so lightly throughout the whole controversy, as it was he, as minister of infrastructure, who was ultimately responsible for dispensing the "Border Infrastructure Fund" from which the $50 million came. After all, Baird openly admitted that siphoning funds toward a riding nowhere near a border was perhaps not the best way to get shovels into the ground quicker. "Why, in the estimates he tabled, Baird didn’t tell the plain truth – that $50-million was planned for the riding projects," asks Martin. "Why misslead parliamentarians into believing the money was for border renovations?" Yet the opposition MPs spent their time hounding Clement, leaving "a bigger fish floating." Martin figures that it's "reasonable to conclude that he engaged in a cover-up, that he misled Parliament, that he should have to pay a price," but it looks like the committee members missed their chance to make that happen.

We'll add that it's never really been made clear who's idea it was to give $50 million to Clement's riding in the first place, when most summit sites got $5 million or so for their troubles. As infrastructure minister, logically it would have fallen to Baird's office to come up with the figures for how much to dole out for the G8/G20 summit. These funds aren't magically created out of thin air – someone along the line would have had to have pitched the proposal of giving the Muskokas a makeover 10 times larger than any other summit site had ever before. That Baird gave the glaringly oversized fund his OK leads us to question his suitability as a senior cabinet minister; that Clement seems to have selected the projects clearly suggests he overstepped the bounds of his office. But whoever dreamt up that beautification projects in a single riding warranted so much money should be either be fired or resign immediately. Long ago seem the days when the opposition Tories were screaming from the rooftops about the wasteful, corrupt and unaccountable Liberals.