PHILPOTT’S TRIPS ARE PETTY CASH; PROGRAMS ARE WHERE THE BIG MONEY IS.

words a minute (we take it for granted that Financial Post readers are above average), the ministry has spent $1,700 nine times since you started reading this column. That’s $15,300.

The point here is not that Minister Philpott’s $1,700 limo doesn’t matter compared to her ministry’s by-comparison fantastically large spending. It does matter. But indulgent spending by the minister’s office is just the tip of a very large … well, “iceberg” doesn’t really do it justice, since only 90 per cent of an iceberg is underwater. This is more like the minister’s limousine service being a little hill with an entire planet hidden underneath.

In that $6.5 billion total spending there are bound to be lots of self-serving expenditures. Say it’s only one per cent; that’s still $65 million. Even so, people spending taxpayer dollars taking limos and eating lobster (as used to happen at Hydro-Québec’s Christmas parties) isn’t the problem.

Milton Friedman used to say there are four kinds of spending: 1) spending your own money on yourself; 2) spending your own money on somebody else; 3) spending somebody else’s money on yourself; and, finally, 4) spending somebody else’s money on somebody else. When you spend your own money on yourself or on other people, you’re pretty careful to get value for that money. As for spending other people’s money on yourself, well, at least Minister Philpott knew what she herself was getting in terms of the quality of her drive around Toronto.

But, number 4, spending other people’s money on other people — how do you judge that? And how do you stop people from spending on what simply feels good, whatever its effect? The Public Accounts indicate a Health budget of $1.104 billion for “supplementary health benefits for First Nations and Inuit.” That’s 649,417 limousine-days’ worth of spending. Another $885 million — or, 520,517 limo-days — is for “First Nations and Inuit primary health care.”

We all support the good health of native peoples. Native health matters, you might say, and so does non-native health — equally, I hope. But what kind of value are we getting for the almost $2 billion Ms. Philpott’s ministry is spending on that worthy purpose? Most of us have driven in taxis, some even in limousines. We can understand that experience. By contrast, spending $2 billion — an amount almost impossible to grasp — on a positive-sounding but hard-to-measure thing like native people’s health, how do you possibly evaluate that? Face it, limos are petty cash; programs are where the big money is. If programs are only five per cent misdirected or wasteful, on a $6.5 billion budget that’s $325 million.

The big challenge is to get over the very positive names we give to programs — no one opposes “food inspection” (250,000 limousine-days), “radiation protection” (12,529 limo-days) or “consumer product and workplace chemical safety” (22,176 limo-days) — and develop as graphic and intuitive as possible an understanding of what actually takes place in programs whose stated goals are, we all agree, Good Things. For that, common-sense outrage isn’t enough. We also need tough-minded, skeptical, and relentless auditors.