On the “open and accountable”
file this report will be interesting reading, I suspect Mr Page and
his team are still having problems getting the real figures out of
the Harper Regime.
Hundreds of millions of federal
infrastructure dollars might not get out the door before the Harper
government's program deadline on its economic stimulus plan for the
projects next spring, says a new analysis by Parliament's budget
watchdog.
Kevin Page, the parliamentary
budget officer, said the assessment, to be released on Monday, is
based on recent figures from Infrastructure Canada regarding the
multibillion-dollar government programs in its stimulus package for
the economy.
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Stimulus+money+door/3370869/story.html#ixzz0w0vr3AFP
One wonders what kind of accounting
practices the government uses to track such moneys COMMITED to these
projects that is not spent (leaving the municipalities to pick up the
shortfall), and where it will be spent. Another budget increase for
the Spin and Cover up Department (PMO) perhaps?
Support Democracy - Recommend this Post at Progressive Bloggers
UPDATE:- The PBO report can be now
downloaded at :-
Several observers have noted that the
BPO has determined that there is a strong risk of 23% of approved
projects not being completed by the March 2011 deadline with a
resulting shortfall (if as the government has said they will not
honor their funding commitment beyond this date) of abt $290 million.
This could go as high as 46% and $500 million. The shocking thing
about this report is not so much the above as anyone with any
knowledge of large construction projects will tell you, unforeseen
problems do occur to delay completion dates. The hard part to swallow
is that the government does not seem to really know where and how all
the funds are being spent, (or if they do they are not telling Mr
Page) as shown in this bit from the PBO.
“The claims datasets the
PBO has received from Infrastructure Canada include data
inconsistencies that affect the relevance and accuracy of PBO
performance analysis. Coupled with the fact that a significant
number of projects have not yet submitted progress reports, it is
impossible to draw authoritative conclusions about the program
performance at this time. Parliamentary monitoring of program
performance would be better served by a more consistent reporting
regime, with appropriate incentives to ensure timely and accurate
progress reporting.”
AND
“All PBO analysis is
sourced from the datasets received from Infrastructure Canada, and
the PBO continues to find inconsistencies in the datasets.
The Percent Complete figure, for example, is based on the
judgement of the reporting proponent and has no clear definition,
standard or process to calculate its value. These data
inconsistencies impact negatively on the results and accuracy of
PBO analysis and does not allow for an authoritative assessment of
program performance. “
With the above in mind if we look at
the number of projects completed as of March 2010 we see that with
26% of projects “not reported” only abt $650 million of
the $4 billion has been “claimed” as of march 2010. We
can but hope that this summers construction season will see things
move forward more swiftly but where unforeseen circumstances delay
completion of these projects the government MUST NOT withdraw
committed funding and download the additional costs to municipalities
who are already overwhelmed with additional social assistance costs
from those whose employment insurance has long since run out. The
“recession” is NOT over for many of our citizens, but
that “data” will no doubt also be ignored or forgotten by
the PMO spin doctors.
No comments:
Post a Comment