Kennedy screws Ignatieff again.

Epic fail. Gerard Kennedy screws Ignatieff again!

David Atkin is reporting that Liberal and NDP MPs are getting more than their fair share of a $2-billion federal infrastructure fund. More detail and a defense of his data and methods can be found at his great blog here. This all coming on the heels of The Canadian Press reporting that Opposition ridings have received more stimulus funding than the governing party. Specifically "the major infrastructure component of the Building Canada program has allocated $1.4 billion to large projects in opposition ridings in Ontario, and just $436 million to Conservative ridings. The CP has another report here with more details. Combined with last weeks claims by Ontario Infrastructure Minister Smitherman and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities saying the same thing, the Liberal claims are dead.

Another embarrassment to the Ignatieff led Liberal Party courtesy of infrastructure critic Gerard Kennedy who was the point man for the Liberals leading the charge on stimulus pork-barreling.

How many times has that been now for Kennedy?

He first did it to Ignatieff during the convention when he conspired with Dion to give over his delegates to him during the LPC convention destroying Rae, and putting Dion over the top in a head to head vote against Ignatieff.

He did it a month ago when he dragged Ignatieff out into the wrong field in Burlington for a photo op where Ignatieff looked like a fool by pointing to a field where no work was scheduled to be done for 7 years.

And now we have this fiasco which the Liberals are going to have to burn the midnight oil trying to figure out how to spin their way out of by the time the news cycle starts Monday.

Good luck with that my Liberal friends and if you want some free advice here are a couple of tips.

#1 Don't try to now claim that the Conservatives spending more money in opposition ridings is only an attempt to bribe opposition voters into voting conservative. It will ring hollow and even your media buddies will call you on it if you are silly enough to try it.

#2 Don't take any more advice from Gerard Kennedy or put him in charge of any more research projects.


h/t Sandy


Update: Former Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish, now a councilor in Mississauga, Ont.: She says that having first-hand knowledge of political “spin” and the “slings and arrows of the press,” she is a non-partisan now who can set the record straight. Ms. Parrish says that Mississauga is receiving a huge amount of dollars from various stimulus programs and it was city staff, not federal and provincial politicians, who decided which projects to fund. So there! “The feds and the province decided how much we’d get. Council decided where it would be spent. And we are grateful for that autonomy,” she writes.

I never thought I would write something positive about Carolyn Parrish but I guess it is true; Ignatieff unites rather than divides =)