National Post (National Edition)

Hiding limos of waste

-

Judging by her Wikipedia bio (which I hope she didn’t write), federal Health Minister Jane Philpott is admirably selfless: family doctor, AIDS fundraiser, regular aid worker and health organizer in Africa. It’s hard to believe her ministry paying $1,700 to a Liberal volunteer to drive her around Toronto last March was an act of personal venality.

Understand­ing why it has touched such a nerve, however, is easy. We’re a little insecure in Canada. We don’t like people who act like they’re better than the rest of us. Especially when they do it with our money. Plus: $1,700 for a day’s driving! For $1,700, I’ll drive the minister around Toronto myself. True, I don’t know Toronto very well, but with that budget I can buy myself a fancy GPS direction-finder and we’ll do fine. Nor do I own a Lexus, but if that’s what the minister really wants, I’ll rent one for the day and still come out ahead.

(While we’re on the details, let’s not begrudge her the year’s membership in Air Canada’s airport lounge: She’s a busy person. We want her productivi­ty to be high. It will be higher in the lounge. The minister of transport, on the other hand, should be legally obligated to sit on the hard plastic chairs and line up in zones 2, 3, 4 and 5 with us hoi polloi, just so he’s regularly reminded of what his constituen­ts are up against. But then again, the current minister, Marc Garneau, is a former astronaut and therefore already well-acquainted with high-priced, no-frills travel.)

The real hit to the taxpayer is not from Ms. Philpott’s limos but from her ministry — Health Canada — which, the latest Public Accounts of Canada reveal, had a 2015 budget of $6.5 billion. It’s easy to drown in the sea of zeros but by my calculatio­ns, $6,500,000,000 divided by $1,700 is 3,823,529. To spell it out, fully three million, eight hundred twenty-three thousand, five hundred and twenty-nine times a year her department spends $1,700. If you read an above-average 300

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada