Hipster Grits funnel cash into tarty cover

Leave it to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to spend taxpayers’ money in the weirdest of places, especially if it adds to their hipster image. Like budget books, for example. Normally these ponderous texts, most now gathering dust on reporters’ and accountants’ shelves, have covers as plain as plain can be because they are what they are.

They are just budget books, filled with boring paragraphs, numbers, graphs, projections and political promises that are largely broken before the next full moon.

The Harperites, for example, spent all of $600 for their plain blue budget covers, using inexpensive stock photographs that can be purchased for a dime a dozen. But not the Liberals. Their last budget cover cost taxpayers $212,234.

Thanks to an Access to Information report obtained by Ottawa-based Blacklock’s Reporter, we now learn the Liberals paid the McCann Agency, a global marketing and advertising company, almost a quarter-million dollars to tart up the cover of its last budget document.

By the way, those “average Canadians” on the cover, diverse and far from average looking? All paid models, of course.

Their cost alone, plus talent fees, totalled $89,500.

The Prime Minister’s Office got into the act, too, of course. There was even debate over whether a model posing as a boy on a bridge should be wearing eyeglasses.

“I vote glasses,” wrote one PMO staffer. “Put me on team hipster.” And then there was this. “We would like to know about what ethnicities you would like us to cover,” wrote one McCann exec. “Asian? Native? Indian? Latino?” Four models on standby needed to know. Natalie Rieger, a senior marketing advisor for the federal Ministry of Finance, de facto publisher of the government’s budget documents, was apparently quite impressed with what McCann came up with, which is no surprise considering the PMO was going gaga.

“I like the colour scheme,” she wrote to the agency. “It’s fresh. I love where this is going.”

If taking taxpayers to the cleaners was “where this is going,” then it was clearly another job well done by the Trudeau Liberals.

It was an overly-expensive Holt Renfrew cover, befitting the budget of a Vanity Fair prime minister.

In other words, it was wrong. — Postmedia News