Conservatives Misquote the Auditor General in Defense of their G8/G20 Spending
Auditor General Sheila Fraser has written a scathing letter rebuking the Conservatives for misquoting her in a parliamentary report on the costs of the G8/G20 summits in Toronto last summer, CBC News has learned.
The Conservative report presented to the Commons the morning Parliament was dissolved last month quotes Fraser giving high marks to the Harper government for prudent spending on the summits.
The report quoted the auditor general as saying: “We found that the processes and controls around that were very good, and that the monies were spent as they were intended to be spent.”
But in her letter addressed to members of a Commons committee on Friday, which was received by the clerk and members on Monday, Fraser said the quote had nothing to do with the summits.
Instead, the Conservatives falsely recycled an old comment she made on security spending by a previous Liberal government after the 9/11 terrorist attacks a decade ago.
“The comments attributed to me in the [Conservative] report are completely unrelated to G8/G20 spending,” Fraser writes in her letter.
This whole debacle just fits in so nicely with Larry Smith’s “Conservative or sorry-no-funding” stance. It sickens me that the lives and livelihoods of so many Canadians are less important than the game being made of government in Ottawa. Open admission that Tory ridings will get more funding, then covert mangling of all that is ethical to fulfill that promise, just to secure another swing riding here and there. Spending taxpayers’ money for partisan purposes … just another day at the office for Harper, I suppose. It’s just so fucking blatant though.
Mother fucker.
