For those keeping score, Stephen Harper's Conservatives have used a few different variations over the last five years when describing the activities of their government in official government press releases. There was the original, back in 2006 and stretching through to 2008, of “Canada's New Government is pleased to announce …” . Then, as early as May, 2010, we started seeing the “Harper Government pleased to announce…” template.
Today, we had our first “pleased to announce” kind of press release from the new majority Conservative government. And, one week in, at least, they've gone back to the plain vanilla “Government of Canada is pleased to announce …”
This is the first funding announcement so far as I can see coming from the government of the 41st Parliament and — this may come as a shock — it's money for an event in Saguenay, QC, which, after being part of the riding held by Conservative Jean-Pierre Blackburn for the last two Parliaments, is now the fiefdom of one of our new Quebec NDP MPs, Claude Patry.
So Patry wins whatever award there is for being the first MP of the 41st Parliament to bring home some of that Ottawa bacon! Well done, M. Patry!
What M. Patry won for his riding is $39,063 from Denis Lebel, the Minister of State for the regional development agency for Quebec, that will be used to help stage the Coupe des Nations Ville de Saguenay, a cycling event that will tourist dollars and other economic benefits to the Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region. (Lebel just happens to represent the riding to Patry's west but I don't want anyone to think I'm suggesting anything!)
And this seems like a good a point as any to invite you to follow along my reporting of each and every spending announcement this government will make between now and 2015 through my #OttawaSpends project on Twitter. The Harper government, during its last minority run from 2008 to 2011 made nearly 6,000 spending announcements and I tried to tweet out most of them and provide periodic updates at this blog. You can check in on the OttawaSpends project by visiting http://www.twitter.com/ottawaspends or, if you're a Twitter maniac, simply follow @ottawaspends. And if you are following me @ottawaspends be sure to read this explainer for the syntax and rationale for the project. As always, keen to hear your feedback and suggestions for this project.
Two points on this:
• “The Harper government” label has been used regularly by the media, as have “the Charest government” “the McGuinty government” etc. I said as much back in Sept. 2010
http://davidakin.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2010/9/5/4622468.html
Perhaps there should be a clarification on what constitutes “the government.” Is it the party in power? Is it the party in power plus all other elected representatives? Is it the latter plus all the bureaucracy behind it? Maybe that's one reason for the personification of governments — some of us are unclear on the concept of what “government” means.
• Perhaps rather than questioning every funding announcement for its “wink wink nudge nudge” value some discussion of the role of the federal government should take place, so that some programs could be either cut back or disappear altogether.
But the reality is that the minute anyone — particularly a conservative — suggests that program X or program Y should no longer be funded, the wails, lamentations, and accusations will begin as sure as night follows day.
This was so enlightening I am glad I wasted the few seconds to read it. Akin when are you going to start writing something serious. Its back to the same old government bashing I guess.