“More than half of the organizations that we visited did not have sufficient receipts available to support the amounts they said they had spent.”
- from the 2011 Auditor General’s Report

QUEEN’S PARK – Ontarians don’t need an economist or “blue-ribbon panel” to spell out the extent of McGuinty government waste and mismanagement, Ontario PC Deputy Leader Christine Elliott said today.

“Somewhere in Mr. Drummond’s 400 pages we’ll look for the section: ‘Dalton McGuinty’s Alphabet Soup of Waste’,” Elliott said, referring to the province’s 600-plus agencies, boards and commissions (ABCs) and the enormous funds they expend – often with little or no oversight.

“The Trillium Foundation deserves a chapter to itself. Here is the perfect example of our Ontario PC plan to fix a broken agency that could be fixed – and to review others to determine if they still work as intended, or need to be done away with completely to save taxpayers’ money.”

Elliott pointed to the damning content of the Auditor General’s 2011 report on how the Foundation handled a funding envelope of $124 million for grants to not-for-profits and charitable organizations, as well as for administrative costs. His findings revealed:

• grant recipients who couldn’t substantiate information on what they did with the money
• a $120,000 grant to an organization with exactly one staff member
• a $222,000 grant to establish a “community garden program”, and
• no requirement by the Foundation for site visits to assess what had been accomplished with Trillium funds

Elliott added that the Trillium Foundation also gave $1.5 million to a non-profit organization that spent $200,000 on election advertising – and $82,000 to hire a “volunteer” and coordinator for a program to help reduce bird strikes against building windows.

“With shenanigans like these, who believes that Dalton McGuinty can get the much bigger things right?” Elliott asked. “Nor do we need a Drummond report to call for action that the Ontario PC Caucus has advocated for months: A review of every one of Ontario’s agencies, boards and commissions to assess value-for-money for Ontario taxpayers.”

That plan calls for a straightforward test on these bodies, Elliott explained: “If they work, leave them alone. If they’re broken, fix them. If they serve no useful purpose, eliminate them.”