Update: This Week in Pork Barrel Politics

That's a deliberately, er, colourful headline to this post because, on Wednesday, at least, we saw the government commit to spend $26.6 million but only a fraction of that — $2.9 million — will be spent in a way that is specifically targetted at Conservative ridings.

This follows two days of announcements — chronicled here — where Conservative-held ridings overwhelmingly were the beneficiaries (and those held by one Maxime Bernier were particularly lucky!) of government investment.

Wednesday, this week, was a big week for FedNor – the Northern Ontario Federal Economic Development Agency — that is part of Industry Canada (Tony Clement, prop.). FedNor rolled out a pile of press releases yesterday with more than $9 million in new federal investment spread out among its major regions. Thunder Bay, the largest city in the north, got the lion's share of that money and, notably, the two Thunder Bay ridings are held by the NDP. The extremely cynical will note that it serves the Conservatives to help boost an NDP MP's profile with funding in a riding that is likely to send back either an NDP or a Liberal but highly unlikely to ever elect a Conservative. Olivia Chow in the downtown Toronto of Trinity-Spadina is often held up as a good example of the kind of riding where the Conservatives are happy to throw Chow some bones from time to time because they know the alternative for voters there is not a Conservative candidate but a Liberal one. Almost the same deal in Thunder Bay where voters, until 2008, had been pretty much electing Liberals for the last decade or two.

In any event, here's the summary scorecard for Wednesday, Dec. 16. What I'm counting is the number of press releases issued by any government department and then adding up how much federal funding is being committed in each press release. I then make a determination as to where that federal funding will be spent and put it in a political party's column. In some cases, the spending of the money will directly benefit voters in multiple ridings. Yesterday, for example, Conservative MP Rick Dystra announced $1.5 million will go to the Grape Growers of Ontario, funding that will benefit grape growers in several different regions of the province and, hence, several different ridings. For those projects, I assign an 'M' for multiple ridings and tabulate those results as well. Here's the results: