Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

You're doin' a heckuva job, Ablonczy

by Aaron Wherry on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 5:27pm - 17 Comments

Tony Clement did an interview with Dave Rutherford on Calgary’s AM770 this morning and addressed the Divers-Cite situation. Here’s a transcript of that conversation.

Rutherford: This guy gets to hand out checks, even while doing serious business, he gets to hand out checks. Did one in Calgary yesterday. Even gets to hand out checks when he’s not there, one was handed out in Ottawa today on his behalf, 210,000 bucks to the Chamber Fest ’09. It’s all part of this marquee funding tourism events program that Tony Clement’s department is responsible for. Handing out money is a lot of fun, but Tony you’re getting some heat today from the gay community in Montreal because you didn’t give their arts festival any money, but you did give money to the Toronto gay pride parade. What’s the difference?

Clement: Well, you know, we look at each individual application, Dave, and we also look to make sure that there’s some regional fairness. The fact of the matter is, in Montreal, there’d already been eight million dollars handed out for various fairs and festivals. I think Quebec has had a hitherto total of about 42% of the funds. So basically there’s lot of applications, only about 26% of the applicants actually get the money, no matter how worthy their proposal might be. So I think in the sense of regional fairness, we want to make sure that Western Canada gets some of the money, Eastern Canada gets some of the money and that’s how you make sure that we are helping tourism and helping the economy all throughout the country.

Rutherford: So nothing to do with the fact that it’s a gay and lesbian festival in Montreal?

Clement: Well, no, I mean we’re here to make a decision on a case-by-case basis. And, you know, I thank them for the application, but the fact of the matter is we’re very over-subscribed in Montreal with applications and I just did an announcement yesterday for the Calgary Folk Festival, they got some money from us, and I’ll be in Edmonton on Friday for the (inaudible) announcement there, so I think that’s only fair—that we spread the money around, increase tourism, increase economic activity throughout the country.

Rutherford: I ask the question because clearly you know about the Diane Ablonczy scenario, who was taken off the file of handing out the money after the Toronto Pride week festival got its money and there was some criticism from Brad Trost, a small-c conservative MP from Saskatchewan, who said, oh now, we’re not going to be supporting those kinds of people. So you’re saying that this is not a fallout from that?

Clement: No, listen, Diane’s doing a great job. She’s the minister of state for tourism, the minister of state for small business, they operate out of Industry Canada, so she and I have a lot of collaboration together and she’s working really hard on this national tourism strategy that we’re trying to get going. I think it is responsible for government though, once you get a new program up and running, to review that program, and that’s my responsibility as Industry Minister, to review the program, make sure it’s meeting our accountability targets and our efficiency targets, and that’s how you make sure you spend money in a defensible way.

Rutherford: So was the Montreal denial part of the review?

Clement: No, it was part of the next wave—we had these large tourism events, like the Calgary Stampede is a good example, then we had these smaller events that typically attract 50,000, 70,000 participants. And the Montreal event was in that category, but we had a lot of applications for that particular category and not everybody’s going to be approved.

Rutherford: You know, Minister, looking at the Ablonczy situation, I’m going to move on to other things, but we were baffled by the fact that Ablonczy was up doing the check-handing-out, distributing some of the money for the Marquee Tourism Events Program and then taken off after Brad Trost complained about Toronto. Are you saying there was no connection between those two events?

Clement: I guess what I can tell you is we’re reviewing the file. I think that’s my place to do that. When I say file, I mean all of the Marquee Tourism file. That’s my place as Industry Minister and, yeah, I think Diane’s doing a great job as minister of state for tourism and she’s still minister of state for tourism. She’s got a really big project on this national tourism strategy and that’s what she’s spending her time on.

Rutherford: Because money was given to gay pride parades in the past, right?

Clement: Not from this program because it’s a—

Rutherford: —Not from this program, but from your government.

Clement: Heritage Canada, they’ve had various programs where they’ve given money for artistic festivals and things like that. So, you know, I think what we’ve got to make sure is that we’re fair to everybody and I want to make sure not all the money goes to Toronto, not all the money goes to Montreal. Some of it should of course because they’re major tourist centres for us. But we’ve got to also balance things out and make sure that Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, you name it, if they’ve got a viable project that meets the criteria, they should be able to get a crack at the funding too.

Tags: AM770, Brad Trost, Calgary, Dave Rutherford, Diane Ablonczy, Divers-Cite, Edmonton, Gay Pride, Marquee Tourism Events Program, Montreal, Pride, Pride parade, Tony Clement, Toronto, Toronto Pride, tourism

More by Aaron Wherry

http://intensedebate.com/people/Crit_Reasoning Crit_Reasoning

Tony Clement is clearly trying to avoid talking about the government's commendable record of providing public funding for gay-themed parades and festivals. I think Kady overestimated McVety's influence in her earlier blog post, but there is clearly a contingent of social conservatives still grumbling about the pride parade funding.
http://www.intensedebate.com/people/Crit_Reasoning Crit_Reasoning

Tony Clement is clearly trying to avoid talking about the government's commendable record of providing public funding for gay-themed parades and festivals. I think Kady overestimated McVety's influence in her earlier blog post, but there is obviously a contingent of social conservatives still grumbling about the pride parade funding.
Wayne

The fact of the matter is, in Montreal, there’d already been eight million dollars handed out for various fairs and festivals. I think Quebec has had a hitherto total of about 42% of the funds. = WOW I had no idea of this .. and they are complaining good grief!

Scott M.

The Marquis Tourism Events Fund was designed for Marquis (very large) events. Fact is that Quebec has more of those events than any other province, by far. Then comes Ontario. The rest of Canada is far, far behind.

You can't produce a major event in the time from April to June. They take over a year to prepare, so only existing events can make use of these funds… you can't cobble together something at the last minute. These events have year-round staff and offices, etc.

If there's a complaint about regionalism, it should be directed to the founders of the program who decided that the money should only go to these major events. The Squamish Mountain Festival wouldn't fit in the criteria, nor would Red Deer's CentreFest. That's not the fault of the Ottawa Bluesfest or Montreal's Just For Laughs festivals, that's the fault of the program itself.

Stewart

Wayne, The fact of the matter is that decisions on whether to grant or not grant hundreds of thousands of dollars for various fairs and festivals are being made at the last minute. Money is handed over for promotion with less than 1 week to go = WOW I had no idea the conservatives didn't give a crap about taking care of our money. Why aren't you complaining, good grief!

sbt

Scolding the Conservatives for wasting our money were be alot more effective if all the opposition parties weren't insisting that they waste even more.

http://intensedebate.com/people/Stewart_Smith Stewart_Smith

Two points:
1) The opposition may be pushing for more money being spent, but that does not mean they want it handed out at the last minute (see previous Well's posting regarding Ottawa music event).
2) The opposition do not form the government and the government is responsible for managing how money is spent

sbt

The points are valid of course. However, with all the cries for stimulus measures and the need to push the money out the door as quickly as possible it's hard to imagine any of the other parties doing a better (maybe less incompetent is the better term) job. Maybe I'm an unimaginative person though.

http://intensedebate.com/people/Stewart_Smith Stewart_Smith

I actually believe the stimulus funding would have been less if the Liberals formed the government. When Liberal governments have a strong Conservative opposition they are pushed towards prudent fiscal approaches. It was actually decades of Conservative leaders pushing the cost of administering the debt into the public eye that enabled Martin to make the brutal cuts necessary to eliminate the deficit. When Conservatives form the government they see all of their opposition on the left. There is a natural tendency to abandon their principles and increase spending to try to broaden their support. The problem is they are crappy at spending money well and so the more they spend the worse off we are.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Ed_Sweeney Ed_Sweeney

Its a myth the Martin ever made brutal cuts, unless you were a provincial finance minister. Martin's cuts were primarily to transfer payments.
http://www.intensedebate.com/people/Ed_Sweeney Ed_Sweeney

It's a myth that Martin ever made brutal cuts, unless you were a provincial finance minister. Martin's cuts were primarily to transfer payments.
http://intensedebate.com/people/futurepm matthew

Those would be the Canada Health and Social Transfer payments…which, you know, pay for health and social programs. When he slashed the transfers, he cut into the ability of provinces (and, by extension, municipalities) to pay for the programs. I'm not seeing the "myth"…
http://intensedebate.com/people/Ed_Sweeney Ed_Sweeney

The myth is that Martin made any of those hard program cutting choices, as I implied in my post, it was the provincial finance ministers that had to do the dirty work, and the provinces, not the feds, that had to deal with the fallout.

http://intensedebate.com/people/NotStephen Not Stephen Colbert

That's only true if "scolding the Conservatives" and "defending one or more opposition parties" have to go together. They do not.

http://intensedebate.com/people/Ed_Sweeney Ed_Sweeney

For a program that was only announced April 6, I would consider a turnaround of three months on the entire process to be rather efficient.

If you are really arguing about whether the money should be spent at all, or in such a hurried fashion, then I agree with you.