Regional spending out of control?

This story’s all over the national press:

MacKay doubles Liberal spending on corporate welfare
CanWest News Service

Conservatives under fire for regional spending figures
StarPhoenix, Canada – June 12, 2006

Tory spending favours east, analysis shows
$90M outlay in Atlantic Canada tops among regional funding programs

Ottawa Citizen

Interesting that the CanWest News Service journalists don’t mention the $189 million given to CAE in one friggin’ shot this week but will pick apart $90 million over a six month period across four provinces across hundreds of projects.

A lot of journalists, I am convinced, have the intellectual capacity of a lollipop. They read somewhere, sometime, that Atlantic Canada is a corporate welfare bum and that has stuck. You could wave hundreds of reports and analyses showing the opposite but why even bother to entertain the concept? Positioning Atlantic Canada as a welfare bum sells papers across the country.