Businesses pay a lot of taxes. It comes with the territory. But the dollars they pay into the public purse aren’t always put to the best of use. Atlantic Canada is no different, and with the help of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Atlantic Canada director, Kevin Lacey, we’ve come up with some notable examples of the public sector’s fi scal blunders.

Hangargate
Newfoundland and Labrador’s auditor general found that government staff used two aircraft hangars in Gander intended for storage of governmentowned aircraft to house personal items: automobiles, campers, motorcycles, boats, golf carts, allterrain vehicles and snowmobiles. The government paid $1.58 million to lease the two hangars in 2013. “I’m not sure how the carts were getting from the hangar to the golf course, but there you have it,” Lacey says.

The unwanted
A new $19-million city-funded parking garage isn’t proving popular with Saint John motorists. In December of 2013, the CBC found the seven-story garage in New Brunswick’s biggest city had just 13 cars using the lot one day even though it has 446 spaces. The CBC also said the garage was over 90 per cent empty on most days. “This was intended to help bring more business to downtown Saint John. It’s become a real boondoggle instead,” Lacey says. “This is a lot of money for the city, which has been facing some serious fi nancial hardships.”

Disappearing act
In April of 2013, Summerside, P.E.I.’s town council dropped its legal action against a California-based promoter in an attempt to recover $1.3 million it paid her agency to put on a Michael Jackson tribute concert that never happened. “It was supposed to be a big pop show and it turned out to be a really big fraud,” Lacey says. “That’s one of the issues with this type of economic development. They are high risk.”

Roadkill
The Federation found that the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation road crews cost taxpayers $7,397.97 per kilometer of completed work instead of $3,669.59 per kilometer of work that the government (the ousted New Democratic Party) originally budgeted for. “In this case, the government got involved in something to solve a problem and made it worse,” Lacey says.