The old excuse: It's a different budget

 

Raj Sherman stuck gold and doesn't even know it, in his queries about Thomas Lukaszuk and his $11,000 spend to renovate his office space.

I don't know if Lukaszuk needed new décor or not, but the real issue here is not the spend it is the means I have mentioned many times: There is only one budget, one tax payer and whether or not an $11,000.00 renovation is necessary or not the fact it was undertaken in the midst of a significant curtailment of post secondary funding tell me simply, The Deputy Premier does not get it.

 

He does not understand the difference between entitlement and necessity, his expenditures might have been necessary but to publicly suggest they were a "different budget" clearly paints him with the brush of entitlement.

 

I'm happy his mantle matches the table, I know how incongruous it is to work in a place where they don't. It is disruptive of the staff morale and causes people who first enter his office to wonder "my god how does he work in such a place? That mantle does not match that table.":

 

Entitlement all the way. Nothing but, no restraint, no regard for modeling the behavior expected of the leaders of this economy, nope, just a regard for self and servants at the expense of all others.

 

This is why I left;  40+ years of PC mismanagement, including things like renovating offices that don't need to be renovated is not a question of resource allocation, it's a question of entitlement.

 

It is living above and beyond the optics of decisions. Oh I know it's only $11,000.00 and that is not enough to fund much of anything, yet to suggest that because it is a different budget is absurd, juvenile and, much more importantly an optical illusion.

 

Thomas's strategy, if he had one was to assume this will blow over and it likely will but it and 10,000 other good examples will tell us why, in no uncertain terms, this government has lived beyond it's mandate. The Mandarin class do not like to share in the suffering they impose on the masses and this is yet another example of why they don't have to.

 

There is only one taxpayer and it is me. I have no objection to government have decent working conditions but I do object to that being a priority when, obviously, cash is tight.

 

Try this stuff in the private sector and your office renovation would be your last, but in government this kind of stuff goes on all the time.

 

Thanks Thomas, you set one hell of an example.