Adopt-a-Grant Personalizes the Waste

Our governments constantly boast of their handling of our taxes as wise and above reproach, but we’re all too familiar with the cases of extreme incompetence, abuse and even, sometimes, corruption. You know, those things called "boondoggles".

When they collect about 250 billion dollars a year in taxes, and spend about 250 billion dollars a year, you have to know that financial controls are going to miss their mark once in a while.

My favourite example of flushing taxpayers' money down the loo for nebulous benefit is the nefarious HRDC grant program from several years ago. That program may no longer exist in "name", but the billion of dollars we supposedly saved in its cancellation hasn’t come back to us in tax relief has it – it’s still being spent out there somewhere!

So, I’ve decided that the best way to awaken my fellow Canadians to the waste is to personalize the costs of these give-aways. It would be useful to understand the impact on us, personally. It’s too easy to go numb when the phrase "millions of dollars for thousands of grants" is thrown at us.

To accomplish this worthy objective, I have devised the Adopt-a-Grant program. That is, take your individual tax payments for any year or years and compare them to a grant handed out by the government. Pretend to take on the responsibility to nurture and manage that grant all by yourself and figure out what it took, and what you got for your money.

Think about it carefully.

Knowing that 1 cent of your taxes went to each of thousands of grants is not very inspirational. But it most certainly is if you were to imagine that 100 percent of your taxes for, say, the past five years went to one extremely worthwhile project or study! I guarantee that you will feel closer to democracy and in greater partnership with your elected government after you perform this exercise.

I have selected my adopted grant and I know you are interested in hearing what it is.

For me, it has to be the $50 thousand stripper study done by that professor out in British Columbia.

You see, this was not just "any" stripper study. Evidently, the objective was not to find out why such sorry folk worked in such a sorry profession. This might have given pause to others considering it or to help experts figure some causes or remedies. No, instead, as I understand it, the study was simply an analysis of the numbers of strippers, their history, practises and techniques.

I said "as I understand it", because although it is my Adopt-a-Grant, and I paid for it, I’ve not received a copy of the finished study for perusal. I don’t know if it was even made public! I guess I just have to trust that it was even written.

So I encourage all, far and wide, to Adopt-a-Grant or, if you make lots of money and pay lots of taxes, Adopt-a-Whole-Program. There's some lonely, orphan grant out there that needs a sponsor or guardian.

It’s a personal, powerful expression of our democratic right …