Gilles Duceppe is the gift that keeps on taking. During 20 years in Ottawa he worked selflessly to destroy the country that made him, to undermine the system that paid him, and to break up the society that gave him the opportunity to enjoy a lifetime of security by complaining endlessly about how unappreciated he was.
Now he has been recognized by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation for a lifetime achievement award at its 14th annual recognition of wasteful government spending.
And well deserved, too, we might say. Competition for wastefulness in Ottawa is fierce, but through all his years as a Member of Parliament, Mr. Duceppe never flagged in his determination to do nothing useful for Canada. First elected to Parliament in 1996, after an unimpressive career as a hospital orderly, communist activist and anti-capitalist, be became leader of the Bloc Quebecois in 1996 and launched his second career as a pointless separatist agitator.
It was a perfect position to be in for someone who had rarely done anything in life except oppose. The separatist cause had just lost its second referendum on independence and was starting down a long road of increased irrelevance. The Bloc had no chance of ever being anything but a minority party in Parliament, and was thus safe from ever having to make decisions or implement policy. It could count on disaffected Quebec voters to regularly return it to Ottawa to continue endlessly demanding more from the rest of the country, measuring its “success” by how many times it had moaned about how Canadians failed to appreciate the province. Later, a system of vote subsidies ensured that it didn’t even have to raise any money to sustain itself — the good people of Canada would provide the funding that allowed it to lay around in Ottawa bellyaching full time.
The high point of Mr. Duceppe’s career was unquestionably the moment when he was invited to join a coalition including Liberal leader Stephane Dion and NDP leader Jack Layton, in hopes of ousting the Conservative government and taking its place. Mr. Duceppe would thus have accomplished the feat of affiliation with the government of a country he hoped to leave forever, while getting paid to do so. Less successful was his final campaign, in which his party was reduced from 47 seats to four, as Quebecers looked for someone new to do their complaining. Mr. Duceppe lost his own seat, and soon after made an aborted play for the leadership of the Parti Quebecois, which would have achieved the rare feat of earning him two government pensions without ever having done anything useful.
In awarding him the lifetime achievement award, Taxpayers Federation director Gregory Thomas noted:
Mr. Duceppe lost his seat in Parliament, but he’s still collecting $140,765 every year for life from Canadian taxpayers, the gift of a grateful nation for a lifetime of devoted service to trying to break it up. That’s after his Bloc collected $23.5 million from taxpayers and his put the party’s executive director on the Parliamentary payroll.
He noted that, in addition to his MP’s salary, Duceppe put his party’s historian on the taxpayers’ payroll to write a vanity book marking the 20th anniversary of his election to Parliament, and put his party’s executive director on the payroll even though taxpayers were already subsidizing the party.
Other award winners included Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, which spent $284-million program to reduce tobacco farming, but actually doubled the number of farmers, Alberta MLAs for accepting $1,000 a month to sit on a committee that doesn’t meet, and the City of Montreal for sending snowplows to clear streets when there was no snow.
None can approach the individual accomplishments of Mr. Duceppe, however.
National Post
