The $100 million "honey pot"

Today's hair-raising account of how Ottawa manages your money:

A shadowy fund earmarked to help save Canada was such a state secret that its existence was never revealed in any budget document and its name never spoken to Paul Martin in his years as finance minister. At least that's the way federal officials explained it today after announcing that the National Unity Reserve would be scrapped, saving the government a projected $100 million over three years... Federal officials couldn't initially say what year the fund was created, how much of its contents were spent in Quebec, or even whether it was meant as a tool to combat nationalist sentiment in that province. They said only that the fund was created in the mid-1990s to encourage national unity, and that its annual budget fluctuated depending on the immediate need. Finance Minister Ralph Goodale pegged the annual value of the fund at $40 million - but hastened to add that Martin never used it since becoming prime minister Dec. 12. "We think, quite frankly, that it had outlived its usefulness," Goodale told a post-budget news conference... Another senior government official was somewhat more blunt. "It was a honey pot," he said on condition of anonymity. "It wasn't clear what the controls were, what the criteria were for accessing it. It's just not consistent with the values of sound fiscal management."