Queen's Park
Spending scandals seldom an election issue
Eric Dowd

For decades, Ontario governments have allowed many they engage to live a high life on the public payroll, and at least until now they've been able to get away with it.

All parties in government, now including Premier Dalton McGuinty's Liberals, have failed to prevent many of those who are already overpaid in public posts from billing taxpayers for golf club memberships, filet mignon steaks and babysitters throughout the 46 years this writer has covered the legislature, but this never has been a major issue in a dozen elections.

This in no way excuses the Liberals, and voters should consider it among reasons for turfing them out in the 2011 election, but it shows how easy it has been to fail to protect taxpayers and escape the consequences.

Governments allowing many they appoint to agencies - the current main concern - and elected politicians and civil servants to live lavishly off taxpayers is as much a tradition as ringing the bells to start legislature sessions.

William Davis, premier from 1971 to 1985, appointed the autocratic TV interviewer Adrienne Clarkson, later an autocratic governor general, as the province's agent-general in Paris, where she threw receptions Louis XIV would have considered lavish.

Davis hired almost every Conservative lawyer and public relations man in Toronto as a consultant and gave contracts to friends without offering them to tender, as McGuinty's Liberals have now been found doing. When one of his ministers, Doug Wiseman, protested, the premier solved the problem by firing the interfering busybody.

Such abuse went unnoticed in the four elections Davis won by maintaining that only his Conservatives, with their sharp eye for business and saving money, could keep the economy strong.

After he left, Liberal premier David Peterson, a habitué of the arts scene, appointed David Silcox, a mover and shaker in it, as deputy minister of culture, but he became known as "Diamond Dave" and spent $65,000 in 18 months on travel and entertainment on top of a handsome salary.

When Peterson appointed the former well-connected federal mandarin Bernard Ostry as chair of TVOntario, he ran up $74,000-a-year travel and business expenses and explained haughtily when asked why he also needed a government car and driver who picked up his wife's laundry, "I am not in the welfare business."

These and other Peterson generosities to those he liked were not mentioned in the 1990 election, which Peterson lost mainly because he called it a year early and spent too much time trying to placate Quebec in Confederation, in which Ontarians had lost interest.

The winner, New Democrat premier Bob Rae, felt keeping public servants in such luxury would not appeal to his supporters, who thought they were living high when they bought a hamburger at McDonald's. But he was not penny-pinching with friends and paid Ontario Hydro chairman Maurice Strong, a former business entrepreneur with whom he became a strange bedfellow, nearly $100,000 expenses a year on top of his $425,000 salary, and a deputy minister crony $102,000 expenses in two years.

These were not mentioned in the 2000 election the NDP lost, because opponents had bigger targets, its $10-billion-plus annual budget deficits.

The last Conservative premier, Ernie Eves, fired a minister because he spent too freely wining and dining, but lost an election mainly because his predecessor, Mike Harris, had weakened services.

In the 2007 election, McGuinty's Liberals already were seen lax in supervising spending, particularly because programs for needy children were short of funds while their supervisors trundled around in costly SUVs, but the Conservatives' proposal to fund faith-based schools dominated.

Voters often have lost interest in such excessive spending when elections come around, feeling all parties permit it anyway, and issues of wider impact come up to supersede it.

But the Liberals have been scared more than any government before by being caught in three major scandals involving those in public posts billing taxpayers for such extras as Weight-watchers' memberships and chewing gum, and governments will find it harder to get away with it in future.