I liked this one sentence pulled from the story headlined Firearms Centre pays for report that has nothing to do with registry, below:
Flumian said in an interview that senior bureaucrats often have additional responsibilities related to larger government issues.
While I grant you they’re talking about “issues”, the term “larger government” is really at the crux of it—it’s one of the most salient points of the entire liberal-left ideology.
It’s easy to get lost in all the leftist socialist government bureaucratic terminology and references to various and sundry agencies here….
OTTAWA (CP) – The Canada Firearms Centre paid $75,000 for a report that had nothing to do with the gun registry or any other part of the agency’s work. Documents obtained through the Access to Information Act show the centre hired the consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 2001 to develop a report on training in the public service.
The 73-page report, “Individual Learning Accounts: Linking learning to recruitment, retention and renewal,” contains no reference to the Canada Firearms Centre or to the gun registry. Rather, the report focused on the individual learning needs of public servants.
The report was commissioned by a committee of deputy ministers assigned to examine learning and development within the bureaucracy.
The chairwoman of that committee was senior bureaucrat Maryantonett Flumian, who was also the head of the Canada Firearms Centre in 2001.
[…] “At the time we were doing work at a corporate level that included a real push on renewing the public service, on increasing training in the public service . . . so it’s well within the realm of the work that we do,” said Flumian, now deputy head of Service Canada.
She added that improving the public service is not necessarily unrelated to the firearms registry.
“It has to do with making us all better public servants, and certainly the sound management of public service is not something that the (firearms) centre, being part of the government of Canada, had no interest in.”
The report was of direct interest to another government entity, the Canadian Centre for Management Development, now known as the Canada School for Public Service, an agency that helps train and develop senior bureaucrats.
Flumian said the agency was “lean” at the time as a result of budget cuts, with a budget of $15 million in 2001-2002, so it couldn’t afford the report.
Going back to Parliament to ask for more money for the report would have taken too much time, she said.
So paying for the report fell to the Canada Firearms Centre, a program that the government estimated in 2001 was over budget by $489 million – an estimate the federal Auditor General considered low.
“[W]e were doing work at a corporate level”? “Corporate”? Oh my. I love it when socialists try to pretend they’re in the corporate world. If they were in the corporate world, most of them would not be in the corporate world at all, of course, but rather in the street looking for work. It reminds me of how the state-run CBC, which competes against private citizens and their businesses, has on their 24-hour news channel Newsworld a “business report” every half-hour. And they do this with a straight face.
But anyway, this is the most important part of the story:
The new Conservative government of Stephen Harper has promised to scrap the long-gun registry, which has now cost the government roughly $2 billion.
It was supposed to cost about $2 million. So it’s a thousand times more than they figured. And the government is… larger.
(Hat tip: John)
UPDATE: Also see later blog entry about poll supporting scrapping the gun registry.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
Contact Mr. Johannesen about this article using this form. Please refer to article's title.
FOLLOW @JoelJohannesen ON X!
- Wow what a shock: a Big Government project’s cost estimate has DOUBLED — in only a few months - Tuesday April 30, 2024 at 4:50 pm
- UPDATED: State-Funding of Sports Boondoggles Need To Be Sent To The Penalty Box - Wednesday March 13, 2024 at 4:44 pm
- I’m from the government and I’m here to help you become barely mediocre like us. - Tuesday March 5, 2024 at 11:53 am
