Monday, February 18, 2013

This Day In Snookland (ctd)...Nevermind The Bollocks...


...Here Comes The Fiscal 'Fairness Advisor'.


All you Railgate Cultists out there will remember what a 'Fairness Advisor' is.

But for those who don't, it was a so-called blue chipper that was brought in, just before the BC Rail deal went down (and all the non-CN bidders were screaming bloody murder about how the fix was in) to write a little report that said everything was on the up-and-up.

Which the proMedia swallowed whole at the time.

Despite the fact that things were not.

On the up-and-up I mean.

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Anyway....

The mandateless (not)Premier and friends have had their own fiscal fairness advisor beavering away for a few days now, and he will release a little report this afternoon (i.e. just before the deal actually goes down tomorrow) telling us how wonderful everything is with the budget 'projections', etc.

Craig McInness reminded us about Ms. Clark's BFFA (see what we did there?) this morning in the VSun:

How crucial is Tuesday's budget going to be to the credibility of the Liberals in the provincial election campaign?

So crucial that the government has taken the extraordinary step of hiring an outside economist to validate its bragging rights to a balanced budget for the coming year. The report from Tim O'Neill, a former chief economist of the Bank of Montreal, is scheduled to be released Monday afternoon. He was tasked with looking at the somewhat subjective revenue side of the budget equation to assess whether the assumptions on which the projections are based are sound...



It sure will be interesting to see how this report gets swallowed by all those fine folks in the proMedia.

Personally, I have my own 'In-By-Nine/Out-By-Ten' response (i.e. my gag reflex) set on a hair trigger.

OK?


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And, just in case you missed it.....NVG asked a great, and extremely fair (given past performance), question over at his place this morning...
Meanwhile, the Minister (allegedly) responsible goes 'all gimmick, all the time'....What's the matter Mike, cookie dough not doin' it for you anymore?...And just what did happen to that YouTube video anyway?...

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2 comments:

Grant G said...

Tim Oneill reports "nothing glaring" in BC Budget, he also states LNG revenues have been overstated in 5 of the last 6 years..

Tim O`neill also urges "prudence" when forecasting natural gas revenues over the next 3 years.

The VSun story is very, very thin on details.


http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/Government+hired+economist+finds+nothing+glaring+budget/7981658/story.html

RossK said...

Sun story is very, very thin because it is wire copy.

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