Terahertz

This story isn’t really that surprising to see from the bankrupt line of newspapers. Maybe they’re hoping that by putting more Tory-friendly news, they can get a bailout. Of course, that’s unlikely since Harper apparently doesn’t watch Canadian News.

Anyways, let’s dissect CanWest’s attempt to trace the money from the Knowledge Infrastructure Program to federal ridings.

From the Tory-Blue Industry Canada Website:

The Knowledge Infrastructure Program is a federal initiative to renew Canada’s college and university infrastructure. By making large-scale investments in infrastructure, the Government of Canada is providing significant short-term economic stimulus in local communities across the country.

So basically it’s $2 billion out of the $12 billion stimulus plan being targeted specifically at Universities in Canada.

CanWest then digs and digs, which they admit is ridiculously hard since Harper apparently hates the idea of being audited. They discover, remarkably, that most of the money going to Universities is going to opposition ridings, and is disproportionately higher than the percentage of ridings held by those parties federally.

This is a nice trick. If opposition parties control most of the universities (especially the NDP who “are getting more than twice what they would have got if the money was distributed based strictly on the number of seats each party holds.”) So who represents the universities?

From Universities Matter, we can discover what ridings we need to look up and then we get the following totals (spreadsheet here [xls]):

That’s 97 universities counted, and some ridings have more than one school. Nevertheless, we see that Liberals and NDP both hold 10% more universities than their seat percentages would reflect.

Therefore, unless the Conservatives were incredibly, overtly partisan, they couldn’t give money to universities without opposition ridings getting some.

Nevertheless, as the Jurist reports, they have no difficulty sending their candidate hacks in place of the democratically elected representative of that university.

No wonder the rumour in Edmonton Strathcona is that Linda Duncan isn’t that visible – she’s not invited to Government of Canada events in her own riding. Meanwhile, she continues to hold town halls that actually let the people there speak to someone who’s willing to listen rather than pontificate.