Juno News - Feds spend half a million on awards for themselves

00:00:00.000 We are in the midst of a new year, but of course, some things never change.

00:00:13.760 One of those is government waste.

00:00:16.180 Yes, it's the gift that keeps on giving.

00:00:18.560 If by gift, you mean debt that keeps on amassing.

00:00:21.620 There was a new report from our friends at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation this morning.

00:00:26.280 And this report found that over the last decade, like this is a 10-year period, one of the

00:00:34.160 government's great pastimes has been like giving its own employees awards and just like

00:00:39.140 patting themselves on the back through the public service awards.

00:00:43.720 Now, I didn't know that public servants needed awards.

00:00:46.440 I didn't know they had earned awards.

00:00:48.220 In fact, if you look at a report last year from the parliamentary budget officer, it found

00:00:52.920 that federal departments fell short of meeting half of their performance targets.

00:00:59.000 So I don't know what awards they're given.

00:01:01.320 This is not necessarily like the big Golden Globes and the Oscars and all of that.

00:01:05.560 But still, they've spent half a million dollars over the last decade.

00:01:08.940 Most of that was just on like custom trophies.

00:01:11.900 But then there's also a hefty fat catering bill that gets thrown in through that as well.

00:01:17.920 So this has just been one aspect of this when you just see a great disconnect between the

00:01:23.940 way government deals with things and the way people in the real world tend to deal with

00:01:29.300 them.

00:01:29.460 Now, I don't know if you've been, no judgment.

00:01:31.360 If you in the last 10 years have been giving yourself awards and you've been hosting these

00:01:36.780 galas to give yourself the awards and you've been getting these fancy, fancy trophies to

00:01:41.560 remind you of just how incredible you were, maybe that is what flies for you.

00:01:46.800 Again, I don't want to be too judgmental a person here, but we want to talk about this

00:01:51.160 in a bit more depth here.

00:01:52.600 So we have joining us our Alberta correspondent, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Alberta

00:01:58.360 Director, Chris Sims.

00:02:00.020 Oh, apparently Chris has turned off her camera.

00:02:02.000 So I don't know if we're going to get a Chris appearance in a moment.

00:02:05.120 We'll get Chris in just a second here.

00:02:07.760 But let me just read through some of the greatest hits from this here.

00:02:10.740 This is, I should be precise, $476,000.

00:02:18.040 That's what taxpayers said to spend.

00:02:20.360 Now, this is from 2012 to 2022.

00:02:24.100 But the hilarious thing is they launched this award in 2005 with 14 award categories to recognize

00:02:32.540 government employees who demonstrated excellence in achieving results.

00:02:37.880 So excellence in achieving results for Canadians.

00:02:41.440 So if you've been feeling like you've been really getting results from your public servants,

00:02:44.900 Chris Sims from the CTF.

00:02:46.360 We have her at long last.

00:02:47.520 Chris, good to talk to you.

00:02:48.660 Thanks for coming on.

00:02:49.760 Sorry, I always get a gremlin.

00:02:51.140 Just before I go on your show, my camera clicks off.

00:02:53.600 So yeah, this was great work that was done by my friend and colleague, Ryan Thorpe.

00:02:57.720 He is our resident investigative journalist.

00:03:00.640 A lot of folks may not know this, but we actually have a full-time investigative journalist

00:03:05.760 paid on staff at the Taxpayers' Federation.

00:03:09.400 We did this, Andrew, because as you know, investigative journalists are an endangered species now.

00:03:15.300 And so we created this little terrarium for him.

00:03:18.200 And he now lives under his little heat lamp in Ottawa.

00:03:21.060 I think he lives down the street from Franco Teresano.

00:03:23.080 And Ryan dug up these great ATIP documents that showed that not only, Andrew, are they

00:03:29.680 doing this Public Service Excellence Awards, which started under Prime Minister Paul Martin,

00:03:34.160 by the way, 10 years ago, but they also do this big catering gala.

00:03:38.860 They actually had duck prosciutto.

00:03:42.220 Like, I didn't know that you could do that.

00:03:44.580 I thought prosciutto was like pork.

00:03:47.400 Like, I'm totally showing my roots here.

00:03:49.860 But apparently, like, it must just be you can turn...

00:03:52.800 No duck prosciutto in Lethbridge, is there?

00:03:54.500 No, at least not in Lethbridge.

00:03:55.800 I did, hang on, on this, I got, I did an artist rendering of the menu before the show started.

00:04:02.120 I used, there's this program called Mid Journey, which is like a photo generating AI.

00:04:06.840 And I basically plugged in the government's catering menu here so I could get a sense of what

00:04:11.780 these bureaucrats were getting. 1.00

00:04:13.600 Sean, can you put the graphic up?

00:04:15.180 There we go.

00:04:15.640 So this is charcuterie featuring cured Arctic char and duck prosciutto.

00:04:21.640 I didn't ask the AI engine to do the champagne in the background.

00:04:25.020 It just kind of got the sense on its own that the Government of Canada employees were probably

00:04:28.980 having champagne.

00:04:30.480 But yeah, that is the AI, pretty good actually, AI generated government charcuterie platter.

00:04:35.780 I think the Arctic char is the pink stuff on the left.

00:04:38.520 And I think the duck prosciutto is the stuff in the middle just to the left of the green olives.

00:04:42.580 But like I said, I haven't seen duck prosciutto, so I don't know for sure.

00:04:46.360 Me neither.

00:04:46.740 Well, maybe when you go over to the WEF forum, they'll throw some for you over the wall.

00:04:51.880 They're not letting you in, but maybe they'll send you a doggy bag.

00:04:55.240 This, this is, this is what's so annoying, okay, is that you'll have the government say

00:04:59.740 something like, oh, well, we've been fiscally responsible for the past 10 years or whatever.

00:05:03.860 And then the moment you tell them, hey, you guys are wasting a lot of money, they get all

00:05:08.640 huffy and they're like, well, what do you want to cancel first?

00:05:11.280 Education for children or healthcare for old people?

00:05:14.100 It's like, well, maybe don't throw yourself an awards gala for bureaucrats.

00:05:19.240 Maybe don't hand out antique gold trophies on glass marble bases.

00:05:25.640 Just stop doing that.

00:05:27.460 Don't hire a photographer.

00:05:29.200 Don't literally roll out a red carpet for yourselves.

00:05:33.140 This is all taxpayers' money.

00:05:34.960 We have to stress this, okay?

00:05:36.360 We know there are some corporations, if you're a big company, you do give out awards for a

00:05:42.020 job well done, but you all chip in over the year.

00:05:45.460 Like people donate their pay to this fund and they'll have like a big dinner and then they'll

00:05:51.420 recognize people and you'll get some little crystal thing and you keep it on your, on your

00:05:54.800 shelf.

00:05:55.460 No, no, this is not coming from their own little fund.

00:05:58.700 This is taxpayer funded awards galas here.

00:06:02.800 I misunderstood.

00:06:03.980 I thought the red carpet was just like a gender reveal for the debt. 1.00

00:06:07.320 Like you just, we roll it out and it's like, oh, we're in the red today.

00:06:11.500 That's such a good idea.

00:06:12.820 We should do that next time with the debt clock.

00:06:15.000 Well, it's always, you don't even need to buy a black carpet.

00:06:16.820 It's always red every year.

00:06:18.080 That's the reality of it.

00:06:19.560 That's it.

00:06:20.040 We're going to put that with the debt clock.

00:06:21.500 Next time we do a debt clock tour, we're just going to roll it out and that's going to

00:06:25.100 be the reveal.

00:06:25.760 That's a brilliant idea.

00:06:26.760 So I'm looking at this too and they might as well make all the trophies snowflakes because

00:06:31.940 this is really just the snowflake award thing here where you've not even done your job well,

00:06:36.520 but we're going to give you an award for not doing it because you didn't do it better than

00:06:40.720 anyone else didn't do it in the company.

00:06:42.340 Yeah, it's not only awards to bureaucrats, it's participation awards to bureaucrats that

00:06:48.680 were handy.

00:06:49.460 Like every now and then there's a moment that happens in our current crazy wacky culture

00:06:54.000 and this is one of them.

00:06:55.740 This is just peak woke silliness of handing out a participation trophy to a bureaucrat at

00:07:02.000 taxpayer's expense while eating duck prosciutto.

00:07:05.300 I just realized that when I did the AI photo, I forgot to put in the pork terrine.

00:07:11.260 So there was also a pork, we didn't do the AI, we'll have to like bill another $10,000

00:07:15.080 and put the...

00:07:16.500 Is that a paste or is that a soup?

00:07:18.380 A pork terrine, yeah.

00:07:19.200 It's like a, it's like a pate.

00:07:20.980 Oh, okay.

00:07:21.840 Yeah, but a pork pate. 0.91

00:07:22.900 So they took the pork out of the prosciutto and instead put it into the terrine when the

00:07:26.520 terrine should have been duck.

00:07:27.480 They're going all freaky Friday here.

00:07:29.500 This is all that Sean and I are going to be eating next week in Davos.

00:07:32.780 This reminds me of, speaking of Davos, which you have to fly to, I assume.

00:07:37.020 You're not going to, you're not going to parasail over there?

00:07:38.840 No, we're not doing like the Greta Thunberg transatlantic sailboat or anything.

00:07:43.200 You'd be there in a month.

00:07:45.720 Oh, we missed it.

00:07:46.640 Time to go back.

00:07:47.500 And in January.

00:07:48.500 No, you died.

00:07:49.220 Don't try to do that.

00:07:50.400 This reminds me of the in-flight service that the governor general had, right?

00:07:55.020 We all had to look up what beef Carpaccio was, but she was eating it. 0.97

00:08:00.000 I knew what beef Wellington was from Bugs Bunny, but I had to look up what beef Carpaccio was,

00:08:04.600 but we all paid for it.

00:08:06.020 This is the thing, folks.

00:08:07.100 There's literally, no pun intended, so much fat to trim here that they blew almost half

00:08:12.380 a million dollars on a public service trophy ceremony over the past decade.

00:08:18.880 Harper government included, I will point out.

00:08:21.340 This sort of nonsense was going on under the Harper government's nose too.

00:08:25.020 There was also one, I looked up one of the documents, this was in 2021, where they even

00:08:32.060 spent, I think it was like $37,000 on a virtual event.

00:08:36.800 So they didn't even like have to all be in the same room and it still cost them $20,000 for,

00:08:42.760 no, $15,000 for trophies, $20,000 to develop an online platform, because apparently $200

00:08:49.600 for a Zoom subscription was too complicated and a $2,000 speech writer.

00:08:54.980 So even your crappy human resources award, Joe, you can't even just write the speech on 0.98

00:09:00.640 the back of a napkin like every other crappy boss does. 0.98

00:09:03.040 You hired a speech writer. 0.98

00:09:04.800 Right.

00:09:05.400 And, or you can't even get one of your millions of middle managers who are keyboard warriors

00:09:10.960 at the best of times to write a speech on their own time.

00:09:15.260 No, you had to contract that out to someone else.

00:09:18.520 We should A-tip the speech.

00:09:19.620 I want to find out what speech we got for $2,000.

00:09:22.280 That's a really good idea.

00:09:23.300 If you're listening, Ryan Thorpe, I want to get the speech.

00:09:26.460 He wants the speech.

00:09:27.400 Okay.

00:09:27.560 I will mention that to Ryan.

00:09:28.500 And like, just to put a poetic note on this, okay, the Taxpayers Federation, this is definitely

00:09:34.160 going to be in the running for a Teddy Waste Award.

00:09:36.860 We do our own awards show, okay, that the foundation and the organization pays for itself.

00:09:42.600 It gets tons of media coverage and it's announcing government waste.

00:09:47.220 We hand out trophies for that.

00:09:49.860 Okay.

00:09:50.340 There's a big gala, but we keep the trophies.

00:09:54.240 Andrew, I got one of these trophies once that I built myself.

00:09:57.480 Do you remember that show, Babe with the pig?

00:10:00.560 Oh yeah, Babe the Pig. 1.00

00:10:01.440 Yeah.

00:10:01.760 So I found-

00:10:02.860 Babe the Pig is actually now the pork terrine that the bureaucrats are being served.

00:10:07.200 2023 wasn't good to him.

00:10:08.940 That's just too much art.

00:10:10.260 That's perfect.

00:10:10.880 I love it.

00:10:11.300 It doesn't have a government grant attached to it.

00:10:12.960 That's good.

00:10:13.560 I took a Babe piggy bank from the thrift store I found and I spray bombed it gold and I glued 0.99

00:10:21.120 it to some wood.

00:10:23.200 Like, I think it cost $4.

00:10:25.920 And that was the prototype.

00:10:27.040 That was the original Teddy?

00:10:28.580 Sure.

00:10:29.060 And it's right behind me here in my office.

00:10:31.280 Like, it's back there, like, next to the Millennium Falcon.

00:10:34.360 Like, it's just pretty good stuff.

00:10:36.460 It's pretty good stuff.

00:10:37.280 And so this is what we're saying.

00:10:38.400 We're not saying you can't have fun.

00:10:39.960 We're not saying you can't award people for truly doing a good job.

00:10:42.980 No participation trophies allowed.

00:10:44.980 But you have to realize that real people are paying for this, okay?

00:10:51.240 Taxpayers are strapped.

00:10:53.140 They can't afford most normal things.

00:10:55.600 And the idea of you guys handing each other awards on a red carpet while eating fancy duck

00:11:00.760 and gold trophies being handed out, the optics of this are terrible.

00:11:05.380 And they need to stop it.

00:11:06.880 Like, they don't need to reduce it.

00:11:08.400 They need to stop doing this.

00:11:11.060 One other story you flagged just before we went on air here.

00:11:14.360 What's this about a federal plastics registry?

00:11:17.340 Yeah.

00:11:17.640 This is a big thing.

00:11:18.980 I think it's going to be a big thing.

00:11:20.760 It could turn into nothing where they get spooked and they run away from it like they

00:11:24.520 did when they floated their idea of a pickup truck tax, which was a real thing.

00:11:28.360 And it was in a government report.

00:11:29.880 I will stand by that.

00:11:30.900 And then they ran away from it saying, oh, no, no, nothing to see here.

00:11:33.680 You caught my hand in the cookie jar.

00:11:35.460 So now the federal government is putting out word basically saying we want to get feedback

00:11:42.940 from people about having a plastics registry.

00:11:45.260 So what this looks and smells like is you might remember years back, groups like the OECD and

00:11:53.840 the United Nations put out an idea of EPR, Extended Producer Responsibility.

00:12:01.140 What that means in normal people talk is that a pizza place or a bulk barn, for example, would

00:12:07.480 be responsible for every bit of packaging that leaves their store forever.

00:12:12.420 However, so they're the ones that then need to track it.

00:12:16.420 And as a consumer, you would need to pay an extra fee for using a pizza box.

00:12:21.040 So this is what this sounds like.

00:12:23.220 Our alarm comes from the fact that the government is terrible at most things, like awful.

00:12:29.620 They couldn't organize a two car parade.

00:12:31.720 OK, their last registry of the long gun registry was a disaster.

00:12:36.400 It didn't make anybody safer and it ballooned to, I think, close to two billion dollars in

00:12:41.780 1990s money.

00:12:43.460 That's a ton of money wasted.

00:12:45.020 The idea that they're going to start a plastics registry for what?

00:12:49.380 Like your little olive containers?

00:12:51.500 Does that include the wrap that goes around your meat?

00:12:53.920 Like toys?

00:12:54.880 Like what are they talking about?

00:12:56.800 This just reeks of boondoggle.

00:12:59.480 And we wanted to flag it for people because they squeaked it out late in the day on December

00:13:04.520 29th, like in the middle of the big fog that people are usually in between Christmas and

00:13:09.400 New Year's.

00:13:10.020 So big flag.

00:13:11.700 Take a look at the just look at the government website.

00:13:14.840 Plastics registration.

00:13:16.480 Well, yeah, I mean, it's insane and it's going to be bureaucratic, regulatory, red tape,

00:13:22.880 burdensome, all of that.

00:13:23.740 When I first saw the plastics registry, I was concerned that like Kim Kardashian would have

00:13:28.340 to cancel her upcoming Canadian tour.

00:13:30.300 Because she no longer exists.

00:13:32.500 Yeah, she couldn't register with the government in time to do the plastics registry.

00:13:36.500 So there we go.

00:13:38.000 But it's insane.

00:13:39.120 And the serious point of all of this is that this is the kind of thing that forces companies

00:13:43.540 to say, I'm just not going to do business here.

00:13:46.240 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:47.880 I had tons of conversations with independent restaurant operators.

00:13:52.760 It was heartbreaking during the lockdown in British Columbia, where they were contacting

00:13:57.480 me because they were also cracking down in Vancouver on single-use items.

00:14:02.560 And there was this, I remember this poor guy, he's been running his restaurant for the last

00:14:06.180 five years leading up to the lockdowns.

00:14:08.660 Then the lockdowns hit.

00:14:10.420 And here he was trying desperately to stay afloat and was selling food out the door or a takeaway,

00:14:15.760 as they would call it in the UK.

00:14:16.940 And then he was nailed with, I think, his costs of his containers for food, I think they quadrupled

00:14:24.460 out from under him because of the new regulations that were being put in.

00:14:28.880 But I think it was by the city itself.

00:14:30.900 Imagine that now at a federal level.

00:14:34.780 And keep in mind, Vancouver was going full crazy.

00:14:37.380 They were going to try to start forcing people to all share a communal pool of sippy cups in

00:14:43.580 order to ban single-use coffee cups.

00:14:46.520 Like, I'm not kidding.

00:14:47.760 Everybody in Vancouver would have had to share this communal pool of shared cups.

00:14:53.120 And so that's where these ideas come from, or places like that.

00:14:57.140 And this could be nothing.

00:14:58.860 This could turn into nothing.

00:15:00.500 They could be floating it as a trial balloon and it could disappear and you'll never hear

00:15:03.880 about it again.

00:15:04.960 I would love to think that it could be used as like a return it recycling depot thing, which

00:15:10.580 most people are used to doing with their cans and bottles, but not lately.

00:15:15.200 The last 10 years especially, with especially the federal government, it gives them a chance

00:15:21.020 and the cost will quadruple and it also won't work.

00:15:24.000 So this is where we're really trying to flag this for people.

00:15:27.440 All right.

00:15:27.880 Chris Sims, the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

00:15:31.260 I know we'll be doing the show from Davos next week.

00:15:33.180 We'll still have you on in the Monday slot here.

00:15:35.820 Thank you so much, Chris.

00:15:37.040 All right.

00:15:37.320 Be careful over there.

00:15:38.500 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:15:40.580 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - January 13, 2024

Feds spend half a million on awards for themselves

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