This one showed up on Captain's Quarters and Proud to Be Canadian and Neal News too.
Scuttlebutt (Peter McKay actually) has it that Sheila's got a whopper here, may make Adscam look like small change. Which is what I've been saying for about three years I think. The ONLY explanation for the exhorbitant cost of this idiot program is graft on a huge scale, and the only reason to have the program at all is to make the graft possible.Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser's "Canadian Firearms Program" audit which is scheduled to be released in February -- if we're not in the midst of a federal election campaign.
Fraser isn't doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.
The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.
"The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed," Fraser wrote at the time.
Captains Quarters has another idea:
...It also cost much more than the Liberals acknowledged at the initiation of the program; the registry has drained finances from other law-enforcement efforts.Too convoluted I fear. Robbing money from the RCMP budget hasn't really been a problem, the RCMP has their own graft scandals to deal with. Besides, the Liberals control the staffing of the RCMP right to the highest levels. They don't need to de-fund them to get the desired freedom from investigation.Some Conservatives will say that this was the entire point of the Gun Registry all along. The RCMP, which administers the Gun Registry, has the only law-enforcement portfolio to independently investigate the Canadian executive. In the Canadian political system, the executive comes from Parliament and does not have checks or balances as the American executive does in Congress and the judiciary. The only such check comes in a no-confidence motion, which a majority party can easily squelch, or in the national law-enforcement agency of the RCMP. However, burdened by an underfunded mandate in the Gun Registry and the loss of high-ranking professionals over the last few years, the RCMP no longer has the resources nor the clout to exercise that check on executive power.
What happened as a result? Some would point to Adscam, which put a lot of money into the pockets of Liberal Party backers as well as the Party itself.
Besides, I don't think they are than smart. Look at Adscam. That wasn't brilliant, just the sleazy abuse of power and suitcases full of cash. Registry-scam, they're friggin' stealin' it by the trunk load. Bring on the Fraser Report!
The Prophetic Phantom
P.S. The Sunshine Girl is quite nice too. ~:D
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/5510 Trackback to Captain's Quarters.
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