Moments ago in Burlington, Michael Ignatieff and Infrastructure critic Gerard Kennedy released a report that shows how Stephen Harper’s flagship Infrastructure Stimulus Fund (ISF) disproportionately funnelled money to Conservative ridings – while delaying job-creating stimulus everywhere.
The report reviewed 946 projects, over half of the ISF’s 1697 initiatives, as of late August. The findings are eye opening:
- Just 12 percent of the flagship $4-billion was supporting any
construction as of the end of August, eight months after it was
announced. - Since the January Budget, the Harper government’s main job creation fund’s output is a rate of 160 jobs a week, while jobs are being lost at a pace of 5,800 a week.
- The progress to “shovels in the ground” reported is so recent that less than 1 percent of all projects have actually received any funds at all from the federal government.
- In the stimulus program for rehabilitation of community and recreation centres, the $500-million RInC, eighteen out of the top twenty ridings by number of projects granted in Ontario are held by Conservatives.
- In the $1.2-billion Building Canada Fund, in the Communities component for cities and towns under 100,000 population, Conservative ridings in 5 electorally competitive provinces (NS, Ontario, PEI, BC, MB) received an average of $8.8 million, compared to just $5 million for opposition-held areas.
Of course these findings may come as a shock to some Canadians, especially after Harper notably reported to Parliament in June 2009 that 80 percent of ISF spending was well underway – and spent millions of taxpayer dollars adverting this “fact” on television.
Apparently, it seems, Stephen Harper is all too happy to falsely advertise progress and take credit for non-ISF projects, some of which were first announced under the Liberals. The sad reality is that the real work of pushing out infrastructure funding – of creating jobs to help the 114,000 unemployed construction workers and their families – remains to be done.
We encourage you to read the whole report here and the raw data here.
