[timun]

Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates

I see your point about whining without digging for context, but at the same time it's an unreasonable expectation that your average citizen go through this process for each government contract or budget item that gets awarded.
We need to be able to trust our elected officials are doing the appropriate bidding, tendering for quotes and selecting things wisely.

This passport thing is just a symptom of that larger problem, which is distrust in this government to spend fairly and appropriately, based on numerous examples of waste & cronyism contracts.
Now people want to pick at everything and the opposition wants to use everything as ammo.

They may have nailed the passport budget, maybe even saved us money, but people are understandably sceptical of them now.
I don't need to go through every government contract with a fine tooth comb to be entitled to say they're a wasteful government and I don't trust their finances.
The trust is gone, the ship has sailed.

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

It goes the opposite way as well.

If you pick at everything and try to use everything as ammo and it turns out you’re shooting blanks, people are going to start to believe you’re full of it and that the real, valid criticism isn’t worth paying attention to.

If everything is wasteful and everything is a scandal, nothing is. People complain about apathetic voters and people not caring about scandals, but don’t care to give a single thought as to why.

Bingo!

I get the frustration at the government spending—I'm not saying there aren't issues with out-of-control spending on some programs (e.g. ArriveCan maybe, definitely the new generation of frigates being built by Irving...). But when every single god-damned penny of government money being spent on anything is being made into a scandal, then... there are no scandals. It's all just nonsense at that point.

I've said this much before in this thread:

Originally Posted by timun

We've also become numb to these calls for resignations because the opposition parties call for it all the time, over just about anything. In this respect I think the alleged unwavering adherence to our "adversarial" Westminster parliamentary system is failing us. (I say "alleged" because I believe the opposition uses "we're just doing our job as opposition!" as an excuse for crappy governance, and a cudgel for political gains.) Conservatives are calling for Mendicino's resignation because that's what they do for just about anything and everything: they oppose everything the government does, paint them in the least flattering manner possible, and at a certain point its inevitable (to me) that all the bluster falls on deaf ears.

Originally Posted by timun

I think you missed my point. They don't just oppose the government "if they don't agree with what they're doing": they oppose everything for any reason whatsoever.

Originally Posted by timun

Nominally that's how our Westminster parliamentary system is "supposed" to work: the opposition is adversarial toward the government and out of this adversarial relationship the faults of the government's bills are debated and resolved and ideally "better" policy is passed into law.

In reality the opposition makes mountains out of everything let alone just molehills and as such their sometimes justifiable complaints go unnoticed. We the people are told everything the government does is terrible, whether it's actually reasonable policy or actually terrible policy, and in a sad sort of "boy-who-cried-wolf" situation a huge chunk of us tune out and don't really care.

Sadly the government uses as much parliamentary "privilege" as possible to pass things through without debate at all, whether it's reasonable policy or terrible policy, but especially when it's terrible policy. As a result of ineffectual opposition and government using (abusing?) its authority to its fullest extent we get crappy governance. Hooray!