Pig Feed

Farmers will tell you there is nothing worse than having pigs sneak out of their pen and start rummaging through your tomato garden looking for a late night snack. They're supposed to feed at their appointed times, eat their appointed food, grow big and fat, and then you get to slaughter the smelly things and get your money back.

Well farmers, it seems our pigs have been at the tomatoes again.

Yes, that sty otherwise known as Parliament Hill has the heady stench of patronage, fiscal mismanagement and all-round hubris that only a bunch of overfed hogs can generate after years of gorging themselves at the public trough. Yet, Canadians have never really bothered to take exception to all that eau de slop until just this last week, when we found out from Auditor-General Sheila Fraser that while well-fed they may be, some have been getting out for a little after-hours, illegal munching.

Forged documents, fake receipts, and suggestions of fraud have made us all stop what we're doing and finally ask what's behind those snorting sounds we've been hearing at night, and turned the forgone conclusion of another Liberal government into the all too real and frightening prospect of Stephen Harper or Tony Clement getting the keys to the pen.

One has to wonder what is so new and shocking about gross amounts of wasted funds being thrown at Quebec by our federal government that people are now attacking our new Prime Minister with such vitriolic glee that the man practically has a seizure on national television.

Paul Martin has used every facial contortion and body gesticulation this side of a manic-depressive mime, and just about any adjective you can think of to express how he feels about the goings on among his former fiscal underlings. He's "shocked," "outraged," "disgusted," "dismayed," "appalled," and one can only guess "winded" from all the interviews he's been giving this week to express the complete "horror" that he is experiencing over this "terrible" incident.

It's amazing how loud a pig can squeal when you give it a good kick, isn't it?

But where were those steel-toed boots when Ottawa blew a billion dollars and counting on our National Gun Registry program? Oh, sure, a few rednecks who didn't want to register their rifles, shotguns, and various other assault weapons managed the odd indignant grunt of displeasure, but the rest of us did little more than shrug and a give a "well, that's Ottawa" roll of the eyes before tuning in to watch CBC's $800-thousand-a-year bigot on Coach's Corner.

And just last month it was revealed that while Paul Martin was slashing health care, and every other social institution short of universal suffrage, his own company, CSL Group, was growing fat to the tune of $161 million; and while this had NDP Leader Jack Layton chirping louder than a canary caught in a bear trap, the rest of us just said "Oh well, it must be something in the Ottawa river that makes him do it."

As mad and possibly "gobsmacked" as our Prime Minister is now, I don't remember any "outrage," "disgust," or sweeping new agendas that would help "clean house" as he puts it, until last week.

The problem is that unlike Farmer Brown, we can't turn these people into bacon and recoup all those free lunches, business trips, or pension contributions, much less serious fiscal and managerial incompetence on a multi-billion dollar scale. Hell, when they're done screwing up in Ottawa, we ship them off to places like Denmark so they can screw up some more; publicly funded, of course

Filing a few fake receipts shows a lack of creativity and general ineptitude in what has been a time-honoured, and publicly tolerated tradition of patronage that does not deserve the attention it's getting while we still have 105 semi-conscious seniors slumbering in the senate, or while our nation's military is forced to use jeeps that would make a used car salesmen flinch and equipment that might have been state of the art in the Boer War, or while you're more likely to get an appointment with your mortician than with an MRI.

Let them have the damn tomatoes...worry about the trough.