The idea is simple: if you must retreat, leave nothing behind that could be useful (h/t to Support the OPBO).
Tories unload 4,476 pages of stimulus details: The Harper government has dumped three box-loads of information about its efforts to stimulate Canada's sputtering economy on Parliament's independent budget watchdog.
Kevin Page had asked for more information, complaining that the sketchy data provided up to now made it impossible to tell whether $12-billion in stimulus spending is having any impact on the economy.
But rather than provide an easy-to-analyze spreadsheet listing infrastructure projects and how much money has been spent on each of them to date, the government flooded Page Thursday with 4,476 pages of documents...
[I]t will likely take Mr. Page's office days, if not weeks, to input the information into an electronic database for analysis.
Classy.
Conventional wisdom says people are more likely to vote conservative as they get older. So does the aging of the baby boom mean that we're looking at conservative governments for many years to come?
Posted by: Frances Woolley | October 31, 2009 at 10:41 AM
Yes. Unless all the parties move slowly rightwards at the same speed as the median voter ages!
Posted by: Nick Rowe | October 31, 2009 at 11:17 AM
Since Messrs Harper and Baird chose to act like children by dumping paper-based data on the PBO, I hope that the PBO has the resources to analyse and present the results in a clear manner (which the Harper government would never do). The staff of the PBO appear to be professionals who are quite capable of analysing data, and presenting the results in a meaningful way.
Presumably the PBO can catergorize the projects by status (tentative committment, firm committment, funding provided to local government or agency, money actually spent by the local government or agency). I doubt that very much spending has acutally reached the hands of individuals at this point.
It would also be interesting to get a breakdown of the nature of the project (hockey rink, sports facility, roads, railway improvements, water treatment facilities, subsidized housing, salaries of reseachers, salaries of continuing education teachers). The Harper government came up with the stimilus plan in a panic in December and January; I expect that the nature of the projects will confirm that the Harper government has no real vision for the future of this country.
Posted by: Robert | October 31, 2009 at 04:19 PM
They could open-source the task if there was no confidential aspects to it.
Posted by: edeast | October 31, 2009 at 04:33 PM
Frances: Yeah, probably. But the right is not homogeneous. A more libertarian bent might not be a bad thing. In any case, too much libertarianism is easy to fix. What I worry about is the nutty authoritarian conservatism we see in the US. Having to to endure holy roller politicians legislating morality while they're secretly spending the weekend high on 'E' while getting it on with their transgendered lover would be too much to bear.
Posted by: Patrick | October 31, 2009 at 06:55 PM
3 boxloads isn't bad. As far as being uncooperative goes, this could have been much, much worse. One person can get through 3 boxes of data in a week, maybe a week and a half (depending on font size). Unless it's double sided.
Posted by: Neil | November 01, 2009 at 12:24 AM
Patrick - agreed. And I bet the age/conservatism connection is about people getting more socially conservative as they age rather than more libertarian.
Nick - on the median voter theorem - of course. Perhaps Steve needs to give the Liberals some new policy advice!
Posted by: Frances Woolley | November 01, 2009 at 11:01 AM
Ah, the oldest trick in the book!
I seem to remember Carney citing the stimulus as one of the factors behind the recovery, but I was always wondering how he would have been able to determine the effects of the stimulus. Maybe he was talking about monetary stimulus.
Posted by: Matthew | November 02, 2009 at 11:58 AM