The Ministerial handout: The scorecard on who in Harper's cabinet handed out how much

One of the most important jobs for any minister is handing out tax dollars. The federal government collects more than $245 billion dollars a year in taxes and fees paid by individuals and businesses and, more often than not, spends more than it collects. Some of that spending is unavoidable — think Old Age Security benefits or transfer payments to the province for health care and social services — but a good chunk every year is quite discretionary. And when there’s a political spending choice to be made, you can bet a government minister wants his or her name associated with this decision.

As I’ve written here before, I try to track as many press releases as I can detailing spending announcements through my “OttawaSpends” project and, so far, up until Monday’s cabinet shuffle, that project has tracked more than 3,500 press releases issued by various ministers in which those various ministers announced spending decisions totalling nearly $27 billion. Many ask: Is this new money? Old money? To which I answer: That’s not the issue. All the money is voted on by Parliament through the budget process. What these announcements are is a government trying to earn political capital with your money. So it doesn’t matter to me if they make the same announcement every day for seven days a in a row. The point, for these purposes, is that a minister (and usually an MP) have put their name on a press release seven days in a row trying to take credit for spending your money.

Now, in many cases, the specific spending announcement would be something that would be tough to argue is a bad idea. Here for example, is former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announcing that Ottawa is giving Manitoba $50 million to help victims of flooding. And then there’s the spending announcements that can make you chuckle, like Minister Denis Lebel’s ongoing program to make sure every snowmobile club in Quebec has a new grooming machine, courtesy of taxpayers across Canada.

Now, how accurate is this data? Pretty accurate but I’m certain there are spending announcements I’ve missed. Not all spending announcements are released to the Parliamentary Press Gallery, distributed by various wire services, or published at various government of Canada Web sites. There is no one-stop shop you can go to for federal government spending announcements. That said, I’m pretty sure I’m getting upwards of 90% of them (maybe even 95%) so even if the exact numbers may be a little under-reported, I’m pretty confident the broad trend is accurate.

So, with that context and, as a new group of ministers gets set to start handing out the cheques, here is the scorecard so far from the last general election until Monday’s big cabinet shuffle. Ministers are listed alphabetically. Then the next number is the total number of press releases I could track in which they are the minister handing out some cash. For the last number, I simply add up cash that each press release committed to be spent.

And now, here’s the same table, ranked from “most cash handed out” to “least cash handed out.” Minister Lebel is the kingpin here because his departments — Transport, Infrastructure and Communities plus the Quebec regional development agency — are grant-dispensing machines. The Transport Minister, for example, is responsible for the Gas Tax Transfer so every time a municipality fixes up a road or something — as the Village of Minburn, Alberta did this month — Lebel gets his name on a press release and more dollars added to his total.  Goodyear is second because he’s the guy who gets to take credit for money disbursed by the National Research Council, grants councils like SSHERC as well as the regional economic development agency for southern Ontario.  I’ve included the old portfolios each minister before Monday’s shuffle.

My OttawaSpends project also tries to attach specific spending amounts to specific ridings. In some case, like the $50 million for flood relief announced by Toews, that cannot be done as the money will be spent across a region or over several ridings. But those snowmobile handouts of the Gas Tax Transfer? That’s definitely money going to a specific, identifiable riding.

So this time, we rank ministers according to how much federal cash for which they were the responsible minister ended up getting spent in their riding. Jim Flaherty tops the list with just one announcement. As Minister of Finance, he’s in charge of what’s known as the P3 Fund — Public-Private Partnerships — and on Sept. 20, 2012, Flaherty’s name was on a press release announcing a federal contribution of nearly $95 million to build a GO Transit Maintenance Facility in his riding of Whitby, ON.  (The P3 Canada Fund, incidentally, got $1.25 billion in the 2103 budget) Next was Leona Aglukkaq who, as Health Minister, saw nearly $30 million in spending Health Canada committed to in her riding which encompasses the whole territory of Nunavut. The ministers responsible for regional economic development agencies — Aglukkaq (CANNOR), Lebel (CEDQR), Yelich (WEDC), Clement (FEDNOR),  Goodyear (FEDDEV) and Shea (ACOA) — also signed off on the funding for a significant number of projects in their own ridings though no one did it quite like Minister Lebel. Of some note: Minister Lebel, after Monday’s shuffle, is still in charge of regional economic development agency for Quebec, Aglukkaq still holds the purse strings at CANNOR  and Goodyear is still in charge at FEDDEV. Oh, and Flaherty is still the kind of the P3 Fund.

Good luck to all new and shuffled ministers as they begin their work today of of sorting out the next 3,500 cheques to hand out! And remember, follow @OttawaSpends on Twitter where I’ll try to keep you posted with real-time spending announcement summaries!

Press release for the photo at the top of this post: Community Infrastructure Improvement Fund – Municipality of Saint-Edmond-les-Plaines receives funding from Government of Canada