Hmm - Fighting Kiddie Porn or Helping Get Harper Re-elected? Decisions, Decisions.

Yes they are indeed the Royal Conservative Mounted Police.  That issue is put to rest by the CBC News report that the RCMP has been withholding millions of dollars earmarked to fight online child pornography in order to help Harper balance the budget in time for the federal election.

Seriously, you can't make this up.

CBC News has learned that over a five-year period, Canada's national police force Mounties withheld some $10 million in funds earmarked for its National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre and related projects, linchpins of the government's anti-child-pornography agenda.

The cuts, made partly as an RCMP contribution to the government's so-called deficit reduction action plan, have occurred even as the number of child-exploitation tips from the public increase exponentially.

The systematic underfunding is highlighted in a draft report prepared for Public Safety Canada, and obtained through the Access to Information Act.

It makes you wonder how much the Hank Paulson clown car trimmed from its budget for providing intelligence and security service to Canada's mainly American energy companies.

The Tories are dismissing criticism, claiming that the unspent money was "an accounting issue."  That's not what the Public Safety Canada report says.


The document, dated November last year, says the RCMP failed to spend its full $8-million annual budget to catch online child abusers throughout the five-year period ending in 2013.

"RCMP expenditures fell short of allocations by an average of about $2,000,000 (or about 26 per cent) per year," says the partly censored document.

"RCMP program and Finance staff indicated that the RCMP's systematic budget reset and re-allocation contributed to this situation, which resulted in reduced resources available."

The report says the Conservative government's 2011 deficit reduction action plan, or DRAP, an initiative to chop $4 billion from government spending by this year, was partly to blame for the reduced spending to fight child porn.

Liberal MP Judy Sgro said the news came on the same day the government requested an additional $11 million for "partisan TV ads" through the supplementary estimates tabled in Parliament.

Seems like the budget deficit doesn't mean squat when it comes to taxpayer-funded Conservative election ads but its a grand extravagance when it boils down to protecting vulnerable children.