Avalon

The political bombshell that our MLAs expensed ‘inappropriate’ items as political expenses came first, next which items belonged to who was resolved, in some cases painfully. Now as the public picks through the items we have a new issue. MLAs have gifted $332,000 of taxpayers’ money for teen dances, church events, hockey teams and charities. In what has becoming a truly disturbing trend of deny everything first then apologize only as needed throughout this whole affair, MLAs this week have been defending this practice. Can’t a MLA support the local church or community hockey team?

Of course not.

Why? Because political expenses are only for facilitating the public’s access to their representatives. Handing out ‘gifts’ puts a partisan MLA as the direct mediator of largesse thereby raising their community status as an aid for re-election. This is vote buying similar to a lot of business subsidies and regional development in this province. The only difference is the higher visibility of gifts.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.