Another week, another edition of the Monday Morning Quarterback – five things we’re pondering in the B.C. office this week.

1. Corporate welfare is alive and well in the weeks before the provincial election. The Comox Valley Record reports that provincial taxpayers have given a $100,000 grant to a company called Sunshine Organics for a campaign to promote local farm products. Get this: the company has been around for more than a decade but only has 160 customers buying groceries – but the B.C. government thinks them worthy of $100,000 of our money. Ridiculous, and completely unfair to the companies trying to make an honest go of it without taxpayer money.

2. For more on corporate welfare, check out Mark Milke’s analysis of the federal budget here. It’s nauseating.

3. The Province had a great example of health care bureaucracy costing us money. A few years ago, a private clinic in Dawson Creek opened with the only MRI machine in the region. Yet the Northern Health Authority spends a fortune sending patients to either Prince George or Alberta:

Last year, 924 out of 1,031 exams referred in the Peace were performed in Alberta at a cost of $666 per exam or about $615,000 a year.

4. I’ve been asked for this quite a bit recently, so here it is again: the pension numbers for the 26 B.C. MLAs who are not running for re-election.

5. Finally, Margaret Wente has a killer piece looking at federal government employee entitlements:

Something is ailing the people who work for the federal government. They have among the highest absenteeism rates of any workers in Canada. Every day, about 19,000 of them are off on some form of sick leave. Federal civil servants, according to the Treasury Board, take off an average of 18 days a year because of sickness or disability – more than twice as many days as people who work in the private sector and nearly three times more than people who work in small businesses.

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Thirty years of winks and nods and passing the buck to the next generation of taxpayers have produced a two-tier system of workers: people on the public payroll, and everyone else. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the average federal public servant now costs $114,000 a year in salary, benefits and pensions. Their banked sick leave alone amounts to a $5-billion liability.

The entitlements accumulated by public-sector workers are like barnacles encrusted on the ship of state. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to get rid of them. But if we don’t, the ship will sink – and so will our grandchildren.