Inside Politics

PBO Stimulus Spending Watch: Reply hazy, ask again later

by Kady O'Malley Posted: December 11, 2009 3:18 PM Last Updated: December 11, 2009 4:22 PM
For the last few months, the Parliamentary Budget Office has been busily engaged in tracking the various and sundry new spending programs that were launched under the Conservatives' much-(self)-ballyhooed Economic Action! Plan. Well, that's what the PBO has been trying to do, anyway  -- but according to the latest update, which posted to the parliamentary website today, they just don't have enough raw data to "assess the success" of at least one of those programs.  

The Infrastructure Stimulus Fund, which was supposed to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into "construction-ready infrastructure rehabilitation projects." Alas, as the PBO somewhat dolefully notes, despite the fact that "the principal objectives of the ISF were to stimulate economic  growth and 'to create jobs' [...] the government has yet to provide a performance reporting framework to assess the success of the ISF in achieving these objectives:" 

 As of September 30, 2009, only 54% of approved projects (76% of those outside Quebec) have  submitted a quarterly report.  We also understand from officials at Infrastructure Canada that the data on  project completion rates is unreliable because of inconsistent and incomplete reporting.  As a result, at this  point, the PBO is unable to provide an assessment of the ISF's progress.  It is important that the data  quality and gaps be addressed so that Parliamentarians will be provided adequate and reliable information on completion rates. 

Here's hoping that the answers will be buried in the bottom of one of the three bankers' boxes of raw data that Transport Minister John Baird dropped off at PBO HQ earlier this fall. After all, it seems like the preliminary crunching that they were able to do on the little data currently available actually bolsters the government's claims: 

Drawing from the approved applications dataset, we note that 68% of the approved projects are related to  roads and wastewater (sewers).  We also note that the average value of all of the projects, at $2.5M, can  be considered to be small.  It can be argued that these findings would be consistent with the program  objectives of providing economic stimulus in that typically, these types of projects tend to be of short  duration, low complexity and lend themselves to more rapid implementation than other types of  infrastructure projects. 

The full tables are available at the end of the briefing note, so feel free to roll your own analysis in the comments. 

Tags: blackberry jungle, pbowatch