Can you imagine if we had the sort of hand grenade type budgeting for the social services of Canada? It would be like OH!, nationalized day care??? we thought it was like only 5 billion, but it turned out to be 7 billion, damn I guess that’s just ‘mission creep’. Or, hey we are not going to rely on wisdom from the dark ages and build more prisons but rather, front-load the services that keep people above water and obeying the law instead. OH no, oh no no no.! The only area where we have the flexible budgets and creative accounting seems to be military, and all they seem to do is buy shiny new murder vehicles designed to kill poor coloured people in far away lands.
Woo! Canada F-Yeah!
Our job, fostering democracy and stability in the Middle East, doesn’t come cheap, or even measurable when it comes to budgeting.
“Defence Minister Peter MacKay is defending the government’s accounting of the costs of Canada’s military mission in Libya, following the release of new figures by the Department of National Defence that lay out the final cost of the deployment.
And the total cost of the operation — a figure that includes everything from jet fuel to pilot salaries, including the salaries of military personnel — comes in at $347 million.
Last October, MacKay told CBC Radio’s The House the Libyan mission had cost taxpayers less than $50 million.
“As of Oct. 13, the figures that I’ve received have us well below that, somewhere under $50 million,” MacKay said.
“And that’s the all-up costs of the equipment that we have in the theatre, the transportation to get there, those that have been carrying out this critical mission.”
Well thanks Peter, you missed it only by about 300 million. In the war department, that must be what they call a “slight oversight” or an accounting irregularity. 
“The director of the military’s strategic joint staff was called on to explain duelling figures at a hastily-assembled news conference at National Defence headquarters on Friday afternoon.
Maj.-Gen. Jon Vance said MacKay did not mislead the public and pointed out senior military leaders referenced the figures publicly during Senate committee hearings.
But he concedes the minister would have known the estimated cost at the time and did not speculate on why MacKay chose to go with the lower figures exclusively.”
What? Conservatives lying to the Canadian public? I am completely shocked, especially over war spending and democracy promotion.
“Peter’s got problems with his math yet again and this government’s got problems with trying to figure out how to cost things,” said NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar. “I suppose he just thinks that if he can lowball it, people won’t be concerned about the costs. But, you know, in the end, the costs add up and it caught up to Mr. MacKay.”
The solution is just to get Mackay into the right portfolio. With his math skillz we should be able to rejuvenate the social democratic fabric that makes Canada such a fantastic place to live.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
1 comment
May 15, 2012 at 5:02 pm
VR Kaine
“It would be like OH!, nationalized day care??? we thought it was like only 5 billion, but it turned out to be 7 billion, damn I guess that’s just ‘mission creep’.”
Haha! Yep, scope creep’s surely a Tory problem. The gun registry came in right on budget under Liberal watch, didn’t it, or their Sea King replacement program? Such a thrift administration that one was, and nope, never one to lie, either. ;)
As for the $50m vs. $300m, one thing jumps out at me there – the line “which includes salaries”. If straight salaries then that’s a sunk cost, and likely a huge one. At any rate, I’d need to see a line-by-line on the actual costs before I jumped on the NDP bandwagon with this one where they tote the usual “Sea Kings work great in the desert at 150 years old” kind of line. :)
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