Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.What is a “boondoggle,” and how does it differ from a “scandal”? Although its modern meaning is “an extravagant, or useless project,” “boondoggle” originally came from the name that was given to the bracelets and neckerchief slides made by Boy Scouts a century ago, while “scandal” originally came from the Greek “to stumble” before eventually arriving at its modern meaning of “disgrace” or “wrongdoing”.Whatever the difference is, both boondoggles and scandals almost always involve the misuse of taxpayers’ money.And there have been plenty of both in Canadian history. An example is what became known as the Pacific Railway Scandal, and resulted in the fall of Sir John A. MacDonald’s Conservative government less than a decade after Confederation. It involved opportunists helping themselves to “free government money” that had been made too freely available by a Conservative government a bit too eager to complete its vital railroad project.More recently, we had what became known as the Sponsorship Scandal, as a result of which Jean Chretien’s Liberals were driven from power, when it became apparent that Liberal apparatchiks had played fast and loose with taxpayers’ money.But in both of those cases, the system functioned as it is supposed to. In the case of the Pacific Railway scandal, the Liberals were more than eager to expose the malfeasance of the Conservatives. In the case of the Sponsorship Scandal, it was the Conservatives who were happy to call out Liberal corruption. In both cases, governments fell after the scandalous details had been thoroughly debated in newspapers, in Parliament, and between ordinary Canadians on the street. .The point here is that the system worked because the Official Opposition parties were alert and doing their job. Canadians were simply not prepared to allow their hard-earned money to be wasted by greedy opportunists, and the “Official Opposition” parties responded and saved the day.But none of that is happening in the case of what is undoubtedly the greatest misuse of taxpayers’ money in Canada’s history — what has been termed “The Kamloops Hoax.”Whether it is a “hoax”, a “scandal” or “boondoggle” — or more likely, some combination of all three — there has never been anything that even comes close in our history in terms of the sheer amount of wasted “government” dollars. Professor Hymie Rubenstein has provided details of this strange episode in Canadian history in his recent Western Standard article, and further details can be found in Tom Flanagan and Chris Campion’s “Grave Error” (disclosure: I am one of the authors), so there is no need to provide further details in this short article.Suffice it to say that the ongoing drain on the taxpayer’s purse is staggering and dwarfs any of our previous scandals. The unchallenged false claim that 215 children were secretly buried at Kamloops — and “15-25,000 or more” — were secretly buried elsewhere across the country, has contributed to the passage of the ruinous UNDRIP. Plus, $70,000,000,000 of extra government spending on sketchy indigenous claims, and the tarnishing of Canada’s good name by our own Parliament, with its bogus “genocide” motion.Total costs are almost incalculable, and there is no sign that the expenditures will cease anytime soon. As Blacklock’s Reporter and Professor Rubenstein report, applicants are so eager to get a piece of the $320,000,000 that Trudeau’s government foolishly committed to this useless search — for secret graves that aren’t there — that the fund would have to be doubled for all the claims to be satisfied. And the demands on the public purse keep on coming.The Trudeau Liberals were very obviously guilty of major malfeasance in the making of the Kamloops claim. Justin Trudeau and Marc Miller inflated what should have been an easily dismissible claim — the kind of story children tell to scare their friends — into a national hysteria. They then proceeded to spend like drunken sailors on the bogus claim. Whether the Carney government will be as profligate as that of his predecessor remains to be seen..But where was the “Official Opposition” party in all of this? In the case of the Pacific Railway Scandal and the Sponsorship Scandal, the official opposition was ready, willing, and able to pounce on a government that was irresponsibly using taxpayer dollars.But in the case of the biggest misuse of taxpayer dollars in Canadian history — the Kamloops Hoax — the Conservatives have been as silent as mice. With the exception of a few hopeful words uttered by Pierre Poilievre, no Conservative has seriously challenged the false narrative that atrocities, including murder and secret burials, were inflicted on residential school students. In fact, the Conservatives made things even worse by unanimously supporting Leah Gazan’s motion based on that false claim and convicting Canada of genocide. Not one Conservative found the courage to oppose a motion they knew was based on false evidence that graves had been found, when they knew that only soil disturbances unrelated to graves had been detected.Think about that for a minute. A motion based on the false claim that 215 indigenous children had died under sinister circumstances and were then secretly buried by priests with the forced help of six-year-olds sailed through Parliament with every Conservative voting for it. This was not only the most shameful day in Parliamentary history, but it is also the most shameful day in the long history of the Conservative Party.It seems reasonably clear that Carney is prepared to simply continue this boondoggle largely created by his predecessor. This, in spite of the fact that his own distinguished father was intimately acquainted with the truth about residential schools, and would have laughed at the silly claim that people like him were committing atrocities on the students in their care.Eventually, there will be a reckoning for all of this. A public inquiry headed by a trusted person, of the status of a Preston Manning or a Jean Chretien, will give Canadians the true picture of what was allowed to occur under the utterly incompetent reign of Justin Trudeau.But in the meantime, individual Conservatives must find the courage to begin speaking up and questioning this madness if their leader refuses to do so. Surely the reluctance to offend indigenous sensibilities and that illusive “reconciliation” doesn’t justify the massive misuse of taxpayers’ money? Surely truth shouldn’t be sacrificed for political considerations?Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
