McGuinty
Government expediting its own demise with grants scandal,
says MPP Arnott
Speaking about Provincial grant money that has been
“shovelled out the door” by the Minister of Citizenship,
MPP Ted Arnott made the following statement in the Ontario
Legislature on April 25th, 2007:
When
I first learned that the Minister of Citizenship was
going to give a Minister’s Statement on the grants scandal
on Monday, I thought for a moment he was going to do
the right thing and apologize.
Not
only did he not apologize, he broke his promise to release
the specific criteria upon which the previous grants
had been determined.
Clearly
there were no objective and defensible criteria, and
as such this was an egregious waste of taxpayers’ money.
How else could you characterize the expenditure of $20
million of the taxpayers’ money with absolutely no due
diligence, no financial background information requested
of the grant recipients, and no fundamental evaluation
as to whether or not a need actually existed?
This
is surely a question which the Auditor General of Ontario
must address. And he must do so and report his findings
before October 10th to ensure that the McGuinty Liberal
Government is held to account for what has happened.
For
it appears on the surface, that with about five months
to go before a provincial election, a desperate Minister
of Finance, who also acts Chairman of the Ontario Liberal
election campaign, allocated this money to the Minister
of Citizenship. He then assigned him the task of shovelling
the money out the door without any normal accountability
provisions, in a blatant effort to generate support
for the Liberal Party in that election.
The
people of Waterloo, Wellington, and Halton Hills, will
be outraged by this abuse of the public trust and the
taxpayers’ money. And instead of generating support
for the Ontario Liberal Party, as the Finance Minister/Campaign
Chair had planned, this scandal will only expedite the
Government’s demise.
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