Juno News - December 27, 2023Sex toys, bus blankets, and beef carpaccio – a year in government waste
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Summary
On this episode of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, host Andrew Lawton is joined by tax fighter Chris Sims and Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Franco Terrazzano, to talk about all kinds of government waste.
Transcript
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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On this Wednesday, December 27th, 2023, good to have you aboard the program.
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First day of true love, get a partridge in a pear tree.
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Okay, so I hope you have opened up your three French hens.
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That is the one downside of the three French hens.
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They should make for a delicious post-Christmas dinner for you on this, the third day of Christmas.
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As we've been doing in the course of this week and as we've done in years past, we like
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to take a bigger picture view of a lot of the issues we cover on the show, whether it's
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free speech or civil liberties or today the fight against government waste and a government
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Now, you may be in the post-Christmas hangover dealing with massive credit card debt, but I
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assure you, even on this day at the end of December 2023, you are not as indebted as
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Well, I guess which means you are indebted because the federal government's debt is your
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But that's part of what we're going to be talking about.
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We've assembled a crack team of tax fighters that are no doubt familiar to you on this show
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Chris Sims, who joins us every Monday, the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers
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Federation and her federal counterpart, and also, I guess, her predecessor as Alberta Director,
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So let's, I figured we'd do this a couple of ways here because I do want to talk about
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the bigger picture of how big government in Canada is.
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But it's also, I think, important to look back at the last year and all of these little
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stories of government waste that may have fallen by the wayside.
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They've dropped off the radar because the thing about government waste, as anyone knows,
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the price of an orange juice at the Savoy by now, $16, the little stuff is the big stuff.
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And it's the little stuff where you often see that culture and attitude there.
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Chris, what's the one that stands out over the year past of just how government is just
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Well, I'm fenced in here in Alberta, so I don't have the plethora of waste to pick from.
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But boy, they can still waste our money here in the province of Alberta.
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They blew around $60 million on electric buses that don't work because it's cold outside.
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Now, I'm not sure if the bureaucrats at Edmonton City Hall didn't know that Edmonton is one
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But more than half of them, around three quarters of these buses, Andrew, are constantly in the
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My favorite little tidbit, though, is that apparently they spent $200,000 on blankies
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to wrap the batteries in, and it still didn't work.
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So I'm going to fight hard for this to win a Teddy Waste Award.
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Every year, we do this annual thing where we hand out these golden pig statues to governments
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that waste your money in a spectacular fashion.
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This is definitely going to be my entry for the province of Alberta and the city of Edmonton.
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I would suspect that the city of Edmonton does not spend $200,000 on giving homeless people
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blankets, but they got $200,000 in blankets for buses.
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All joking aside, that's pretty rough because a lot of people are living rough right now.
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And this is the city that, like elsewhere in Alberta, has power outlets at parking spots,
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including probably a city hall so you can plug in your block heater on your car, and they
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didn't realize that buses might not operate in the cold weather.
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I once had to explain to a friend of mine who was visiting West Edmonton Mall who was from
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They're like, oh, wow, they're plugging in electric cars.
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That's to keep the car from freezing at the block engine level.
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This is the same city, by the way, that spent about $100 million on bike lanes.
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Now, again, the city of Edmonton can have snow on the ground from September until May,
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So they're just trying to outdo themselves here with the blanky batteries.
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You have, obviously, a fair bit more material to work with, Franco.
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So I won't just ask you to list the examples of waste, because I think I could just go and
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have a coffee and come back in three days, and you'd still be going.
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But what are a few of the standout examples to you?
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You know, let me start with a bit of a win for taxpayers.
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It was the scrapping of the Mission Cultural Fund in 2013.
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So this was a slush fund brought in around 2016 by Global Affairs Canada to essentially
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throw your money all around the world on the most wasteful things.
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Folks, honestly, I couldn't have come up with the wasteful spendings myself if I was trying
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Now, one of the things that we discovered through this Mission Cultural Slush Fund was the federal
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government spending more than $12,000 paying seniors in other countries to talk about their
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So folks, we weren't even paying seniors in Canada to talk about their sex lives.
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We were outsourcing old people's sex stories out to other countries.
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Now, this might almost sound too crazy to be true, but Andrew, thousands of dollars giving
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seniors in other countries to go on stage to talk about their worst time, last time, first
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time, best time, and it cost you folks about 12 grand.
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Now, I see you wanting to butt in, Andrew, but let me just end with saying this.
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You know, after we put out this story about a week or two later, Global Affairs Canada shut
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I just, my issue is not with old people talking about sex.
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I'm trying to figure out where is the benefit to Canada in this?
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Like, how does it even, what's the involvement to Canada?
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Is it like the one time they, you know, they got a little kinky with some poutine gravy and
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Like, how did, like, where was the perceived benefit to Canadians?
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Uh, you know, I, I just wish I was a fly on the wall with, I love it when you wear that
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Like the craziest part of this is like, when you know how these government bureaucrats like
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make these decisions, I can imagine like 200 bureaucrats, a bunch of managers, managing
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Like how many people have to sign up on this before they're like, yup, $12,000 stamp of
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Let's pay seniors in other countries to talk about their sex lives.
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So when it's almost crazier to ask the question, like who thought this was a good use of Canadian
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Now, if I can add one more thing, this isn't the first, uh, let's say kinky way the federal
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Back in like 2018, we actually spent 8,800 smackers on a sex toy show in Hamburg, Germany.
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I think we just lost our clean tag on Apple podcasts.
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Was that like a direct translation from German or was it an English title?
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Uh, the one I do not have the answer to, nor do I want to have the answer to.
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Again, were we exhibiting Canadian sex toys at least?
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Well, it was like a Canadian artist apparently.
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Um, but no, I mean, we're not even spending 8,800 bucks on sex toy shows here in Canada.
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I mean, at least combine the two, like just have the seniors talk about the German sex toys
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they used and at least we save a couple of thousand dollars by just consolidating it into
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And one of the benefits is if we actually did it here at home, at least we would get to see
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one of the politicians, maybe a cabinet minister standing in front of a podium talking about
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all the jobs it would be creating here in Canada.
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I have so many that I just don't want to use because I have these like lovely little older
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ladies that listen to this show that come up to me and say they love how wholesome it
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So including, uh, including my girlfriend's mom, who's actually your biggest fan, Andrew.
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Yeah, well, I met your, I met your lovely girlfriend and I was very, very honored to hear that.
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We will do the after hours edition in which we'll, we'll just let it all loose.
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Like we did at a true North nation in Calgary, a couple of weeks back.
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It's funny though, because there's the serious point behind all of this is that you have people
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in these offices that much like the seniors on stage, just don't know how to say no.
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And they, uh, just approve all of these expenditure requests.
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And at a certain point, they don't even think of things that like a normal person would think
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Does this meet the stated purposes of what we're trying to do here?
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And that's when you look at government waste, it takes place over time in which these things
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Well, Andrew, let me go one step further too, right?
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A lot of the waste, especially the waste that we've covered in the past year kind of falls
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The Canadians back home struggling so much dearly, whether it's what the price of a hamburger
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meat, whether it's the price of the pumps, just worried about fueling your car on the
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way to work, or whether it's about like how many Canadians losing sleep, worried about losing
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And at the same time, when Canadians are struggling at home, you see bureaucrats and politicians essentially
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showering themselves, spending your money on the fanciest hotels, the sweetest rides and
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So one of, let me just list some of the other examples of ways you had the governor general
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spend less than a handful of days in Iceland and she dropped $71,000 on a limo service when
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her hotel was like an eight minute walk away from the conference center, right?
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The story broke that Trudeau spent $61,000 on a two day anti-poverty summit in Manhattan
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Like, look, I'm not an anti-poverty expert here, but I'm pretty sure you don't fight poverty
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like by taking money away from struggling taxpayers and dropping $61,000 on fancy hotel rooms in
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And then the last example I'll give is the almost $100,000 that the governor general and
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their band of bureaucrats spent on airplane food during a week-long trip to the Middle
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And I would say over this year, a lot of these waste stories are really put into this
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bucket of us versus them, the struggling taxpayer versus the thriving federal government bureaucrats
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That was the original title for that show in Hamburg, Germany, but they ultimately changed
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And I'll ask you about that, Chris, because that is really the common theme here is that
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you have these two classes of people and the rules that we all in the private world and
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the real world have to deal with are just not the rules or the attitudes that this bureaucratic
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And again, I mean, I'm convinced and I don't know many bureaucrats personally.
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Well, I'm convinced that they don't handle their own finances at home the way that they
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handle the finances of the taxpayers when they go to the office and they have that veto
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And actually, I don't even think they do have veto pens anymore in all of these granting
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So, I mean, how do you get these two classes of people, Chris?
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You get it because you expand the size of government.
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Grover Norquist said it best when he said that government should be small enough that
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And he said that because if you continue to allow the size of government to grow, your bill
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will continue to grow because they will never rein themselves in.
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And so if you keep on adding tens of thousands of bureaucrats to the government payrolls, to
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the taxpayer payrolls, the way that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done since he's been in
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power, you're going to wind up with these makers and takers.
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You're going to wind up with this new elite class of government workers who largely work
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within the Ottawa bubble, sometimes are farmed out to other departments across Canada, but
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And they will become completely disconnected from average people.
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In all seriousness, when Franco and I were looking at the airplane food, some of the
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stuff they were eating on those flights, we had to Google it.
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I see them at the grocery store looking at the hamburger, wondering if they can afford
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it because it's certainly not on sale right now.
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Yet they're funding this fancy stuff that the governor is blowing on a trip overseas, which
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I will point out, even if you are a hardcore royalist, OK, the role of the governor general
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is to be the crown's representative in Canada, within the geographic borders of Canada.
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If the king or her late majesty, the queen in previous years wanted to do international
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travel, that's something for the Brits to handle.
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But here in Canada, there's absolutely no excuse for our governor general, who has to
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sit at Rideau Hall and rubber stamp legislation, that's their role, to fly overseas.
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And definitely there's no excuse for them to spend this kind of money.
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And just, you know, Franco lives there right now.
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And we joke and we say, you know, it's Mordor and he's doing God's work, working for taxpayers
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But if you live in Ottawa long enough, you start noticing the big difference.
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You'll be able to tell who is a government employee and who is not.
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There used to be a thing that people used to refer to as the boat bonus.
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Your average rank and file, typically manager level at a bureaucrat station in Ottawa would
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They would get on average $60,000 of their bonus, just kind of heaped up over the years
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And they used to refer to it as, oh, it's the boat bonus because they've already bought
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And this gets ingrained into the culture of Ottawa.
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Well, and there used to be, when you talk about the culture, this thing called March
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Madness by people in our world, where at the end of the fiscal year, a department has
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And they say, oh, wow, we've got, you know, $100,000 left in our budget.
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You and I would say, amazing, $100,000, I can put that towards my mortgage.
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They say, OK, well, we don't want the government to cut our budget next year.
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And when you look at ATIPS, you'll find the most bizarre purchases of like, oh, wow,
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they just bought, you know, 97 office chairs that year.
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It's like they're doing things that are literally like you've just given some hyped up kid a credit
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But this is just the way of doing business for them.
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You'll see stories in the newspaper, like in the first couple quarters of the year saying
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federal government on its way to post a surplus.
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And then all of a sudden you end up with a $50 billion deficit.
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Where did, where did things go wrong in the year?
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Like this isn't for getting to carry the two, you know what I mean?
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And look, the reason is kind of the, well, there's two reasons.
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Number one is the incentive structure in place.
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If a department doesn't blow the money and they end up with surpluses in the department,
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then the politician says, great, they don't need the extra money.
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And then the next year, the department doesn't get the money.
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So the entire incentive structure is for that department to blow through the money and then
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Now, the second problem is the problem that we're especially facing here in Ottawa is that
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the political class, the politicians and the staffers just either don't care about the
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fact that they're spending your money like crazy and running these huge deficits and
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these huge interest charges and these huge debts, or they just lost the muscle for fiscal
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And if I can just go back to kind of what Chris was talking about, the makers and the
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takers, because I think that was another big issue here in 2023.
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If you can remember the Peace Act union, the largest federal government union went on
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strike and some of the things that they were pushing for were absolutely crazy.
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Remember, they were pushing for up to 47% compensation increases over three years, right?
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They want an education fund of up to $17,000 for laid off employees.
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They wanted taxpayer contributions into a social justice fund.
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Folks, they wanted a shift premium because they wanted more money to work past 4 p.m.
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Andrew, you know what most office people call working past 4 p.m.?
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So this kind of just goes to some of the crazy benefits.
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Even the conservatives didn't really oppose the union demands coming from those government
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And that's why it was so important for advocacy groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation,
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for different independent media outlets to actually cover what was going on.
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Just incidentally, that Peace Act union, do we as taxpayers end up saving any money by all
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the time that these workers were not working or do we get hosed either way?
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I mean, there might be some later analysis to look at this, but I highly doubt it.
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I mean, look, the one saving grace is that the amount of money that they ended up getting
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was significantly, significantly lower than what they were initially asking for.
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And can I just go back to one other thing to build on this maker versus takers?
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As Chris was saying, the federal bureaucracy has ballooned, right?
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The Trudeau government added 98,000 bureaucrats since coming to power, a 40% increase.
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Nobody's getting 40% more value from the federal government, maybe 40% longer wait times.
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The Trudeau government has dished out $1.3 billion in bonuses since 2015, even though departments
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are meeting half of their own performance targets.
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Okay, you have these crown corporations like the CBC handing out $16 million in bonuses last
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year, the Bank of Canada handing out tens of millions of dollars of bonuses over the
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last couple of years, even though they failed to meet their own objective of keeping inflation
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low, even though they raised interest rates a number of times, even though they printed
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hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, making your life more expensive.
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The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, same story, bonuses, tens of millions of dollars
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and bonuses, even though Canadians can't afford a home.
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So folks, at least the way it's working right now, it certainly doesn't feel like these public
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And just to go back to this idea, Chris, I mean, people in the US in particular talk about
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this idea of a deep state, which is this, you know, these forces of all these three-letter
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agencies that are supposedly working against democracy.
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And when this was gaining steam in, you know, 2016, 2017, I sort of looked at it, I said,
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And, you know, we look at in Canada, the things Franco just spoke about, we had 10 years of
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a conservative government really didn't address that fundamental influence and size of the
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And even if you were to have a very fiscally prudent, fiscally conservative, hawkish conservative
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government come in, they still have this thing to deal with.
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And I wanted to ask how that's working out in Alberta, because you have Danielle Smith
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that's been able to make some changes to the AHS governance and whatever.
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But the size of government is not the size of the people at the top.
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It's the size of the people in the middle, these faceless folks that we never see.
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Yeah, we very often, and rightly so, will take premiers and their size of cabinet to task.
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So right now, unfortunately, Premier Danielle Smith has a pretty sizable cabinet.
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We would like to see her cut it, because cabinet ministers make, you know, just under $200,000
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I will point out that the mayors of Edmonton and Calgary are paid more than the Premier of
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So, but to be fair, those are the obvious targets, right?
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Those are the MLAs and who become then cabinet ministers who have to face the electorate all the
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time. And here in Alberta, not only do they need to face them at the regular voting day,
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we have recall legislation here in the province of Alberta.
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So if they screw up in spectacular fashion, the people of their riding can then force a
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by-election and maybe fire those folks from their jobs.
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So in essence, it's the front-facing retail politicians who are actually held to more account.
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To your point on the so-called deep state, right, that's happening in Washington, and
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That is the permanent, faceless level and form of government.
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And I'm really glad that Franco pointed out that the Trudeau government has added almost
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That is the population of Lethbridge, where I'm sitting right now.
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That's the population of red deer who are now on government payroll.
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And to the whole point about what Grover Norquist was arguing for smaller government, when you
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allow that thing to expand, not only does it cost you more money, not only are they less
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accountable, but they then start holding more political power as a block.
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And I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I think that might have something to do with
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why the Conservatives didn't want to speak up against PSAC, because that is a growing,
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booming, powerful wing of the permanent form of government.
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Now, I have an essay here called Building Canada Through Freedom, which was written by a gentleman
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Yeah, he's there in the Rockies, the essay, Building Canada Through Freedom.
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A system of voter recall would be enacted to ensure that members of parliament were accountable
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Under this system, a representative would be forced to resign and seek re-election in
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the event that over a period of three months, 40% of voters in the riding signed a recall
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This would put voters in command of legislators, not the other way around.
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The essay was writing about what he would do as prime minister.
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Franco, is there any reason the Alberta approach to recall could not be brought to the federal
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And have you heard a commitment within the last 20 years from Pierre Polyev to a champion,
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So first, there's nothing technically stopping the federal government from introducing recall
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I mean, look, what Pierre wrote in that, in the sense of putting voters back in the driver's
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seat, is absolutely correct when it comes to recall legislation, right?
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Like, just imagine being a small business owner and saying, well, I can only fire my employees
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once every couple of years when there's an election.
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I mean, it would be run so bad, it would almost be like the business of government in Ottawa,
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Like, this is one of the problems, is that there's, like, almost no accountability over
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Because essentially, they can just do silly things.
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They can waste money, like $6,000 per night on a hotel, like, just hypothetically.
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And you've forgotten about it by the time the next election rolls around.
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Now, when it comes to a specific offering from Mr. Polyev, folks, the Canadian Taxpayers
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Federation interviewed Mr. Polyev when he was running for leadership of the Conservative
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But, hey, would you consider recall legislation?
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And, folks, I can't remember exactly what he said.
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Just check out the Canadian Taxpayers Federation page.
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But if I can remember correctly, he said that he would be open to recall legislation.
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He would have to work out or consider some of the pros and cons, some of the kinks and
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Of course, one of the issues is to make sure that political chaos doesn't ensue where there's
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But I think the fact that there's recall legislation in a couple provinces in Canada, British Columbia
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and Alberta, and there's recall legislation at many different levels of government all over
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the world providing these different examples that we can choose from, I think proves to me
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that there is no reason why a true federal government that wants to be democratically
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accountable to the people shouldn't want to put in recall legislation.
00:26:38.940
We will be back tomorrow to close out the week here on The Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's
00:26:47.560
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:26:50.100
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