Shifting targets and a foggy budget
Times Colonist
Jody Paterson
March 5, 2010

The lockup this week was such a stellar example of obfuscation that I wondered whether that's somebody's job in government. So much changes budget to budget that a genuine comparison is virtually impossible unless you're a financial analyst, and I imagine even some of them are tripped up in the fog that politics brings to an exercise like this.

One thing that's clear in the budget is the Liberals' misuse of their own "performance measures" initiative. I thought it was a great idea when you started establishing measurements for government performance when you first took office, but what's the point when you keep changing the goal posts year to year?

I keep vowing I'm going to spread out all the service plans from past budgets and count how many times performance measurements have changed, been severely diluted or just plain vanished since the initiative started almost a decade ago. I think it would be quite an eye-opener.