A longtime rural resident, I use my 60 plus years of life learning to opinionate here and elsewhere on the “interweb” on everything from politics to environmental issues. A believer in reasonable discourse rather than unhelpful attacks I try to give positive input to the blogesphere, so feel free to comment upon rural issues or anything else posted here. But don’t be surprised if you comments get zapped if you are not polite in your replys.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

How to track that Infrastructure Spending

You cant!

See this from STEPHEN MAHER LETTER FROM OTTAWA

“As a journalist, it’s not my job to tell those people what to think or how to vote.
It is my job, though, to tell them how their government is spending their money, and I can report that the federal government is making it so difficult to do that, that it’s sending me into a black rage.

In order to create a database of federal stimulus spending in Nova Scotia, it was necessary to look at all kinds of different federal websites, all with scraps of information, and then find out from other levels of government how much money was spent on each project and figure out where the shovels were hitting the ground.

In the United States, on the recovery.gov website, you can, in seconds, download exhaustively detailed databases showing where and how stimulus is being spent, who is getting the contracts, for how much, when, and how many jobs are created.

In Canada, on the actionplan.gc.ca site, there’s a map with icons showing where projects are located, but if you click on the icons, you get a popup with a charming picture of what’s his name, our prime minister, but no dollar amount.”


More at http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1147994.html

H/T to Impolitical

1 comment:

Scott in Montreal said...

I think this story has traction. The stimulus spending (and its publicity campaign) tie it to the ultra-cynical Conservative election strategy in ways that are being felt on a local level across the country. It is a horrendously vast use of taxpayer money for partisan interests - at the callous detriment to sound economic management for the whole country, of course - and it will be their undoing, in time. CO2 may be an odorless gas, but the smell of corruption with this "economic action plan" is pungent.