In the land where money has no value

Wouldn’t you like to live in a world where money has no value? Where you could spend any amount of money on anything you like? And I don’t mean Taylor Swift money; the poor lass only made a billion dollars this year. I’m talking about really big dough, the major leagues of spending –  government, and the people who ride the government gravy train. 

In the rarified world of government, money loses all value.

Nobody has less respect for money than Danielle Smith, our ostensibly conservative premier. Smith has never met a cheque she didn’t want to sign. 

First, we have her cockamamie plan for an Alberta Pension Plan. Nobody outside of a tiny circle of fanatics wants this, but Smith’s government has decided to spend $7 million on an ad campaign to convince Albertans we want something we decidedly do not want and did not ask for. But hey, it’s only money, right? 

Then there’s the Tell the Feds campaign, an embarrassingly bad scare campaign that could have come from the J. Goebbels Agency. This campaign, which predicts mass destruction of society if Justin Trudeau’s draft clean energy strategy comes to pass, is costing the government (that’s us, by the way) another $8 million. That’s $15 million on propaganda campaigns to support this government’s opinions.

But wait, there’s more, and this one is a whopper that barely made the headlines.

Remember last winter, during cold and flu season, when there was a shortage of over-the-counter meds for kids? It was, at best, a short-lived mini-crisis. But Smith’s government, preparing for an election, decided that this was such a severe case of the sniffles that action had to be taken. The government went to, of all places, Turkey, to secure a supply of cold meds that no one here has ever heard of. The plan was to sell excess stock to other provinces. Genius, right? But by the time the miracle meds arrived two months later, the flu season was over and/or the meds supply was back to normal. Nobody wanted it. Cost of this election gambit? A mere $80 million. Oh, well.  

But no matter how hard we try, Alberta just can’t compete with the federales.  

The federal government has been ordered to pay $28 billion to settle a class action lawsuit for discrimination faced by First Nations children and families due to Ottawa’s “chronic underfunding of the on-reserve foster care system and other family services”. That’s a tidy sum for those eligible, about $40,000 per person. But the real beneficiaries are, of course, the lawyers behind the suit. They are claiming $80 million for their efforts. The government is not happy, saying that kind of money would mean that some lawyers were being paid $4,500 an hour. The lawyers are defending themselves by claiming that they are actually entitled to about a billion dollars. 

Forty-five hundred dollars an hour? Who do these lawyers think they are? Government employees?  

And finally, this week we learned of a truly head-spinning piece of government spending.

The Department of Natural Resources approved $669,650 for KPMG, a global professional services company, to provide consulting advice. Why did the department of natural resources need the assistance of a consulting firm?

They wanted to know how to spend less money … on consultants.