Angry in the Great White North

In my last several posts, I've been considering the mail sent ahead of Garth Turner's speaking tour. Here's what we know.

• The mail cames from 16 different MPs, including Garth Turner.
• These MPs sent mail, in envelopes, directly to specific addresses, addressed by family name.
• The envelope contained information about where Garth Turner would be speaking.

What is interesting is that enclosed in these envelopes are flyers. Flyers being delivered at full cost, like first class mail, with the cost being borne by the House of Commons, and by that, I mean by you and me.

Mail that has an MP's name on it and is delivered for free to and from the Parliament Hill is called franked mail.

These MPs have taken the time and trouble to send this franked mail to specific households, the contents consist of a single anonymous flyer. It announces when and where Garth Turner would be speaking after denouncing Jim Flaherty.

Flyers like these can be delivered under a different category. As a "10 percenter", Canada Post will deliver them at one-tenth the cost of franked mail, treating it as bulk mail. Now Garth Turner was very insistent that this tour would not cost the taxpayer anything. In the face of that promise, however, he and his fellow Liberal MPs have used the most expensive option open to them to deliver these flyers.

Well, most expensive to the taxpayer. Sending franked mail costs the Liberal Party nothing, nor are the costs deducted from the individual MPs' budgets.

So who are these MPs? We know the identity of two of them: John McCallum and Massimo Pacetti.

But Garth Turner has declined to identify the others.

So I'm going to table that question for now. Not thinking about. Nope.

Instead, I'm going to consider something completely different.

Did you know that Massimo Pacetti is the Vice Chair of the Standing Committee of Finance?

Did you know that John McCallum is a full member of the Standing Committee of Finance?

Did you know that there are exactly fifteen additional Liberal Party members and associate members of the Standing Committee of Finance?

• John McKay
• Robert Thibault
• Ruby Dhalla
• Michael Ignatieff
• Yasmin Ratansi
• Anthony Rota
• Judy Sgro
• Mario Silva
• Belinda Stronach
• Paul Szabo
• Maurizio Bevilacqua
• Roy Cullen
• Brent St Denis
• Lui Temelkovski
• Joe Volpe

Garth Turner is not a member nor an associate member of the Standing Committee of Finance. But before he was kicked out of the Conservative Party, Garth Turner was a full member of the Finance Committee. He served on that committee along with Massimo Pacetti and John McCallum. All three started serving on the committee in April 2006 (Turner as a Conservative and Pacetti and McCallum as Liberals). Garth Turner lost his spot on the Finance Committee when he was ejected from the Conservative caucus and sat as an independent, but after Turner joined the Liberal Party, Stephane Dion assigned Garth Turner to the Government Operations and Estimates Committee. Pacetti sits as an associate member on that committee.

Did you know the Finance Committee deals with questions such as income trusts? Did you know that when the Finance Committee delivered a report on the taxation announcement, the Liberal Party members, as a group, delivered a dissenting opinion?

I found that very interesting.

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