Admin skills absolutely. Don't claim you are transferring funds until the cheque is ready to be signed. Otherwise, like most things said in a scrum or at a podium, they are worthless wafts of hot air that just happen to vibrate the eardrums of the media and the converted.

How did the feds become the bad guys in this story -- besides politics, of course?

Jeesh - grow up, David. It's the only worthy response to that sort of claptrap.

If you as a business person say you will do something and then don't for, say, a couple of years you are the bad actor. If you are a politician who says you will do something and then don't for, say, a couple of years you are the bad actor.

Who else is the bad guy? Me I suppose. Or Dion. That's it. Blame Dion.

You're joking right? The feds and the provinces are negotiating something and have not yet reached an agreement. There's not a single thing (besides tone) in the article suggests this is somehow because the federal government is not "governing well". Perhaps -- even likely -- the provincial government wants this money no strings attached and the federal government is insisting it be used for what is being budgeted for.

Did the prov crew announce "we are currently in negotiations to resolve framework issues after which we will receive $X from the feds which we will spend on Y,Z and Q?".. no. It was the feds who jumped up to the mic to brag about their generosity to get the glory first. Were it not for the glory, they'd have made a joint statement at the time of transfer.

What do you mean bragging to get glory? You mean they announced funding -- that's generally what you do when you allocate funds to something: you announce it. This looks like a not-so-complicated "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Don't spend money, Harper doesn't care about infrastructure. Announce spending: you're bragging for glory. Don't make sure the money is going to be spent on what it's announced for: misallocating money. Try to make sure the money will be spent properly: not fulfilling promises. Walk on water: Harper can't swim.

Being someone who has actually read Federal funding agreements for over ten years, I can assure you they are no-brainer templates that have been long fixed in form by Department of Justice lawyers. What is likely being negotiated is the scope of projects to be included in a schedule to a standard form 98% of which is also used over and over. And 98% of the schedule should have been established by the Feds before the announcement seeing as this is a Federal initiative to fund a focused sort of activity.

Are they micro-managing which roads get the funding? Which towns? What else? Because it doesn't take two years to do this sort of thing - unless your ideology tells you it does. Then things get easy. Best not to think too much. I blame Dion. Best to keep things simplistic.

Why blame Dion, or you? Why not someone involved, say ... McGuinty in the case of Ontario? How about a Harper-hostile professional bureaucracy? But here's a better idea: maybe there's no one to blame. I'm just going to throw that out there since it seems necessary to spell things out. It's ideology that's making you point fingers; however since you want to make this adversarial as possible, allow me to provide the punching bag:

For those not familiar with the centre of the universe, Mississauga is a bedroom community immediately to the west of Toronto. As a city, it's pretty well the posterboy for how not to create a modern city. Streets are designed with cars only in mind. Housing is designed in the suburbian worm-street model, with strips malls dotting major intersections for major services. Public transit is via bus, expensive to provide (because of sprawl), poorly thought out, and no provisions have been made for the future visa vi subways or streetcar or even right-of-ways for the same. Costs to citizens have been minimized as social costs that real cities experience are offloaded to Toronto. The city itself ... up until recently ... has provided a percentage of funding by monies provided by developers to open new blocks of suburbs. Businesses in the city are often tax refugees from Toronto, which of course has to provide all sorts of services that M. doesn't and is burdened by something called the "business concentration tax" which, though nominally fair, actually only applies to businesses in Toronto.

(continued in next comment)

In short, M. is a mess, made worse now by the fact that the city has no more space for developments and decaying streets and suburbs have suddenly made neglected infrastructure a priority to stop parts of the city dissolving into slums. Interestingly, the way M. is is almost the sole responsibility of a single person, one Hazel McCallion who has been mayor since confederation (almost).

And well lookie here: who's doing the most crying and blaming of the federal government, sorry, the Harper government for her self-designed infrastructure failures? Why, it's Ms. McCallion. Allow me to suggest that I wouldn't give her $2.50 to go to the strip mall to pick up a Coke and a bag of Fritos without sorting out that last 2% of what exactly she's going to do with the money.

Hard cases make bad law - While you're bending over backwards, could you also research, say, Vaughn, who has over the past few years developed a fairly decent sustainable city growth plan? Have they seen dime one either?

David:

1. is there a maximum length to a comment?
2. what does the bad planning of Mississauga have anything to do with the inability of the Finance Minister to get a deal negotiated?

That isn't ideological, it's just unrelated.

Frankly, I blame urban planning for 78% of everything. Why can't I walk to a pub? Well, I can but only by fluke and I have to cross a four lane.

Renee: what, I write a couple of thousand words on M. and now I have to write about Vaughn[*]? ;-)
Al: 2048 words
Al: The M. mayor is one of the prime quotes / complainers in the article. I was trying to demonstrate that that she has been more than willing in the past to sacrifice infrastructure for whatever political expediency she wanted. If the feds are going to spend money on infrastructure, isn't it ... just for example ... important that they make sure the money actually gets spent rather than rerouting money to another budget item. This may make time to negotiate.

[*] aka "Toronto's Ass Hat"

To address Renee's point further: I assume the negotiations are not an the municipal level, just the concerns.

I assume that, too, which made me wonder about the Mississauga tangent - even in the article.

Why 2048?

I believe most infrastructure concerns are at the municipal level, rather than the highway level and if I understand this correctly, municipal projects are managed at that level.

2048 is 2^11; talk to your blog people why it's there tho.

But municipalities are not at the "negotiation" table as this is Fed to Province funding. The common element in the ten negotiation is the Ministry of Finance. If it were a problem of one premier, one would expect nine signed deals and plenty of building elsewhere.