If you don’t pay your tax bill do you think the Doer government would tell you not to worry about paying it? Yeah right. Statisticians would confirm you have a better chance of being eaten by a French poodle that has a penchant for sake and Dan Brown novels. Why then is Premier Doer’s party being allowed to keep taxpayer dollars it wrongfully received back in the 80’s and 90’s?
Consider that political parties get fifty cents from the government for every dollar they spend during an election. Clearly, the more a party claims as expenses, the more taxpayer dollars it receives.
Recently it was discovered that in the 1999 election, the NDP engaged in a complex scheme to funnel into party coffers as many tax dollars as it could. Basically, the NDP counted volunteer time as expenses to artificially inflate the funds they received from government. As a result of this scheme, the NDP received $76,000 of taxpayer money. Thankfully, they were caught and forced to return the funds from the 1999 election scheme.
However, what hasn’t been recovered are the taxpayer dollars that were handed to the NDP during previous elections. You see, an NDP Cabinet Minister and a former NDP campaign worker have stated the expense scheme had been going on for years. An auditor hired by Elections Manitoba stated the scheme went back to the “mid-1980’s.”
Keeping in mind that governments can be ruthless with taxpayers that don’t handover money they owe, why doesn’t the NDP have to pay back tax dollars they may have received during the 1986, 1988, 1990 and 1995 elections? You can’t have one rule for taxpayers who owe money and another rule for political parties. That’s just not fair.
A back of the envelope calculation reveals how much taxpayers could be owed. Given the scheme cost taxpayers $76,000 in 1999, let’s assume the NDP only received half that amount during the previous four elections. Including compounded interest at 2% per year, they could owe a whopping $223,016.51. Without an investigation we can’t know for sure. This speaks to a bigger issue of accountability and demonstrates that we’re probably not looking at a small amount of money.
Premier Doer found out the expense scheme was against the rules back in 2003, but as of 2009 it appears he still hasn’t made his party pay back the funds it received illegitimately from previous elections.
One has to wonder how many Manitoba taxpayers his government forced to pay money they owe over the same period.
So what’s Elections Manitoba saying about the scandal? Almost nothing. They’re refusing to release any documentation on their “investigation” or the legal opinions they received on the matter. Their Chief is also refusing to speak to the public and explain why this scandal was swept under the rug while they threw the book at a candidate on another matter for a relatively minor infraction.
The whole matter stinks. Premier Doer should do the right thing and call a public inquiry. He should also treat his party the same way his government treats taxpayers and make it pay back the money from this scandal.