Oda, Oh Dear

The Mark Newsroom is "not" cool with Bev Oda "not" coming clean about her decision "not" to fund Kairos.

The National Post’s Adrian McNair says that the real cause for concern in the whole Bev Oda affair is not that she appears to have doctored a form to reverse CIDA’s approval for funding of the Kairos aid group, but how difficult it apparently is for ministers to overturn bureaucrats’ decisions that aren’t in the best interests of the country. “Did Bev Oda really feel the only way to remove funding from Kairos was to overrule her department?” he asks. “Shocked and concerned? Yes, that CIDA had signed off on continuing to fund this blatantly partisan organization despite clear evidence it had become vocal in ‘Israeli apartheid’ rhetoric and ‘buycott’ activism.”

To us in The Mark Newsroom, whether Kairos deserves taxpayer funding is debatable, but a more pressing concern is that this seems to be only the latest and most blatant example of the Conservatives disregarding the advice of experts, and then pretending that they’re following it. When the Tories scrapped the long-form census they claimed StatsCan had signed off on it, prompting statistics chief Munir Sheikh to resign in protest. Similarly, the government has launched a tough-on-crime program although StatsCan says crime is decreasing. Cue Stockwell Day warning of an “alarming” rise in unreported crime. And now we have Oda literally inserting the word “not” on a form signed by top CIDA bureaucrats, reversing their advice with a stroke of the pen, and then apparently lying about doing it.

If the Conservatives are going to govern purely according to their politics despite what people recognized as independent experts recommend, that’s their perogative. A lot of Canadians no doubt agree with their decisions, especially the defunding of Kairos. But why not be honest about it? Not doing so makes the government, and the civil service, look bad.

Anyway, now that we’ve got that out of our system, we strongly advise you check out this extremely funny post by macleans.ca blogger Scott Feschuk, the gist of which is that Oda’s doing her best to finally give scandal-starved Canadians the entertainment they deserve.

And courtesy of CBC’s Chris Carter, here’s the amusing strategy Kairos has to bounce back from its funding drought.