Liberal ads waste money, sicken coffee shop crowd

The level of mismanagement and wasteful spending revealed in the most recent Ontario auditor general’s report is mind boggling.

Bonnie Lysyk even found government financial statements are “unreliable,” concealing a deficit of up to $4.5 billion on current operations.

Those of us who have been harping about the deficit and debt are not surprised by this finding. However, we take no comfort in Lysyk’s confirmation of our fears.

In the U.S. it is a criminal offence to lie to the FBI. Perhaps we should consider flipping that and make it a criminal offence for politicians to lie to the people about financial matters.

In Ontario, we’d have to build more jails.

The AG said that expenditures on government advertising are out of control in Ontario. An even bigger problem is the fact a lot of that money is spent trying to make the party in power look good.

The recent audit found $58 million spent for government ads in 20162017, a 10-year high.

A full 30 per cent of these ads are clearly partisan and are conceived by Liberal officials twisting into pretzels to pat themselves on their backs.

This is the kind of unfair waste of taxpayer money that’s easier for people to grasp than other items in the AG report, such as the fact that Ontario has one of the largest waiting lists in the country for social housing, at 3.4 per cent of the population.

Also, the advertising issue lands with a thud squarely on Premier Kathleen Wynne’s desk since she had no help from previous Liberal administrations digging this particular hole.

Even the government of her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, pretty much admitted that it couldn’t be trusted on the advertising front and gave the AG power to spike ads deemed too partisan.

After Wynne took over, she introduced legislation that in effect told the AG to get her nose out of the ad budget.

Let’s check in at a coffee shop in rural Ontario on the issue.

Complaints about over-the-top provincial advertising varied from the newshound who disliked her BBC news feed being interrupted by an Ontario ad every few minutes, to the elderly couple who are sick of “every third ad on television” being from the Ontario government.

Here’s how the advertising issue was summed up by these consumers.

“First they spend our money on these programs. Then they spend more of our money telling us about the programs we just paid for.”

Sadly, all this advertising is not the only way the taxpayers of Ontario will be helping the Liberals stay in power.

Wynne has undertaken a series of town hall meetings where she will meet provincial residents and hear their concerns.

So far the few meetings haven’t gone all that well for one of the most unpopular premiers in the history of the province. But she does get grudging admiration for standing on the firing line.

Many more such meetings are planned for 2018 and guess who’s paying the freight? Of course, it’s being paid by taxpayers since these are meetings with the premier, as opposed to election meetings with the leader of a party.

But clearly the meetings are electioneering, plain and simple. They are designed to make Wynne and her government look good prior to next summer’s vote.

It’s cynical political manipulation of the system at its ugliest. Voters only have to wait until next June’s election to pass judgment on this kind of conduct.