The Canadian Taxpayer Federation’s convenient double standard

Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical world in which an NDP provincial government purchased $75 million worth of medicine from a Venezuelan company in order to address a health-care crisis affecting children. Imagine if that medicine turned out to be poorly formulated, improperly dosed, and arrived long past the point at which it could help with said crisis. Imagine if our hypothetical Conservative federal government had already procured supplies of medicine from more reliable suppliers before the NDP government announced its ill-fated deal. And imagine that, in the end, fewer than 5,000 of the 1.5 million bottles the government bought actually ended up in pharmacies.

Oh, and just for fun, imagine if the owner of the company that helped broker the deal was friends with the NDP government’s justice minister — and his son worked as a political staffer in their government.

How, exactly, do you imagine groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) would react? Given the way they tend to react to even the smallest expense incurred by public servants and other government officials, I’d suggest they ought to be practically incandescent with righteous indignation over such a flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars.

Weirdly, though, that hasn’t been their reaction to the UCP government’s bungled purchase of Turkish children’s acetaminophen. In fact, a search of their website’s newsroom shows they haven’t had any reaction to it at all.

Here’s another hypothetical. Imagine that same NDP government paid former leader Brian Mason $253,000 to produce a report on the pandemic, one that clearly reflected his own biases and beliefs — and mirrored a fictional report he’d already prepared and published elsewhere. Imagine Mason then sent an email to all NDP MPs in the country informing them of how they could weaponize his taxpayer-funded report against the federal Conservative government. Imagine.

We don’t have to, of course, because that’s exactly what Preston Manning did with the Alberta government’s Public Health Emergencies Governance Review that he was charged with leading. “It’s all quite shameless,” Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid wrote, “but not entirely different from the $7.5 million being spent to promote an Alberta pension plan, at the same time another $1.8 million is lavished on a panel that’s supposed to be studying whether people want it… There used to be at least some reluctance to use public money for such nakedly political purposes. Those days appear to be gone.”

The CTF’s newsroom has been conspicuously silent about this as well. It’s even been quiet about the $700,000 in sole-sourced contracts that have already gone to conservative insiders under Danielle Smith’s government, ones that would be grist for their mill if it was a progressive government rewarding its friends and former colleagues with public largesse.

That’s because the CTF isn’t actually interested in protecting taxpayers, least of all from conservative politicians. It’s interested in prosecuting arguments against non-conservative governments and politicians and uses the taxpayer as its ventriloquist dummy. Sure, they’ll occasionally salt their mine with a mildly critical complaint about something that’s done by a conservative government, but the overwhelming majority of their attention is dedicated to finding fault with progressive policies and politicians.

Their silence on Doug Ford’s repeated mishandling of the Greenbelt is a case in point here, not that we really need more evidence. Despite commenting repeatedly on things like the gas tax and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s plans to raise the municipal land transfer tax on homes sold for over $3 million, the CTF gets deathly quiet when it comes to a conservative politician engaged in an $8.3-billion scandal. If this set of circumstances was arranged around a Liberal or NDP premier and their political friends and donors, of course, you wouldn’t be able to shut them up about it — ever.

That’s fine, by the way. They’re free to run a glorified training camp for future conservative leaders, just as progressives are entitled to do the same under the auspices of their own organizations. But it would be nice if they stopped insulting our collective intelligence by pretending that they’re actually doing this work to serve the best interests of taxpayers. That’s because despite claiming to be a “citizens advocacy group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government,” they’re really only interested in that first one. In fact, so long as you cut taxes for the rich and big corporations, you can get away with almost anything as far as they’re concerned.