Angry in the Great White North
A funding decision
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 at 02:55 PM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post
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From the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives home page :

The CCPA is an independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social and economic justice. Our research and analysis show that there are workable solutions to the policy questions facing Canadians today.

Just how independent are you when you are on the government dole? The CCPA gets nearly a half-million in yearly funding from the federal government. Of course, that means the Liberal Party, which might explain these "policy" titles:

Will the CCPA switch gears now that the Conservatives are in power? Not likely. More interestingly, will the Conservative government take away funding, letting the CCPA get funding from private supporters?

But then the fundamental working principle of the CCPA is that government funding is prefered over private sector funding, that somehow that makes a hard-left think tank "non-partisan".

Total nonsense, of course.

So the CCPA is fundamentally at odds with the the principles of small-c conservatism. But look to the CCPA to put the government on the defensive. Withdrawing funding is a partisan move. Never mind that right-wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute accept no funds from the government.

It leads to the question that can a small-c conservative party ever really be suited to government, given that government is antithetical in many ways to government function? I think the answer is yes, but then the details are likely to come out of the research from the Fraser Institute than from the CCPA. If the government has no intention of ever implementing, or even listening to, the ideas from the CCPA, funding them seems to be a waste of money.

And wasting money is another one of those things small-c conservatives hate to do.

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