Yet more Conservative Corruption.

First that the practice is apparently wide spread. The municipality in question is only unique in that it has gotten caught. That tax dollars are being used to basically fund the Alberta PC party is a troubling revelation. It shows just how entrenched the party has become and the level of entitlement it feels it has when it comes to receiving taxpayer money. It makes one wonder about what other taxpayer funds are being funnelled into PC party coffers.

The second depressing and scary part of this is that, based on the information in the article, the reason municipalities do this is to ensure funding in the municipality. So basically, if you are a municipality in Alberta and want to guarantee your provincial funding, it would seem that you have to pony up some bucks to the Alberta PC party to grease the wheels. Want to repair that pothole in front of the Town Hall? A new rec centre? No problem, a few hundred taxpayer dollars to the PC's and you're in for some dough from the province. This is an incredible amount of corruption that one would only expect in some dictatorial developing country.

Finally, the officials in question apparently think that there's nothing wrong with the practice. That it is ethically ok to just hand taxpayer money to one particular political party in return for favours from that party while it is in office. It also means that up to this point, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party also had no problems with he practice as it kept accepting the money. It's only since this story has broke that the newly minted Premier, Allison Redford, suggested that she'll look into the matter and see that it's stopped, suggesting that it was ok as long as it didn't make the papers.

Amongst the commenters at the CBC, the Tory hacks have been trying to defend the practice with basically four arguments, first that unions are allowed to give funds to political parties, second that other parties do it or that all politicians are corrupt, third that the people that run the Alberta PC's aren't "real" conservatives and finally that the "Liberal" CBC just has it in for Conservatives. Looking at these in turn:

Unions, like corporations are private entities. Also like corporations they are, in Alberta, legally entitled to support political parties. Further neither of these entities use taxpayer money to do this. The money used is private and it is up to the members of the union and the board of the company what they do with that money. If you don't like where they put their money you can go work in a non-union shop or not do business with a particular corporation.

The "other parties do it" or "all politicians are corrupt" are attempts to deflect from what someone knows to be wrong. It shows a complete lack of ethics on the part of the political party and it's supporters as they hope to smear everyone with the brush that has been rightly smearing them. The irony of this position is that we should all still vote for them since they're just as bad or worse than everyone else.

The "real" Conservative angle isn't new. This "argument" is often trotted out whenever some group has been found to be doing something nefarious. Group members will look all put out and state that the people that they have been supporting up to this point aren't really members of the group in question, be it a religion or political party. The irony of this argument is that these same people have no problem stating that everyone in an opposing group is a certain way based on the actions of one member. In the case of the Alberta PC's, the party has been accepting money from municipalities for years. This isn't an isolated instance of one bad apple, this is institutionalized corruption.

Finally it's all the CBC's fault. This argument doesn't even make sense. All the CBC did was report what was happening. This is like blaming the police officer for pulling you over because you were doing 80 in a 50 zone. It's not bias on the part of the CBC to report this. It would be bias if they didn't. Wanna bet there'll be no mention this on Sun TV?

So at the end of this we have more confirmation that the Alberta PC's are corrupt. Unfortunately this isn't really a surprise. The worrying thing is that many of the people who run the Alberta PC's are also the same people that run the federal Conservative party. This means that it is likely that the federal Tories will also see nothing wrong with stuff like this happening. So there is now the distinct possibility that other levels of government will now be expected to fork over taxpayer dollars to the Conservative Party of Canada in return for federal funding. No "donation", no dollars. Sad really.