MP’s name is on it but ‘I don’t do cheques’

This is the photo cited by NDP candidate Michael Crawford in connection with partisan use of public funding announcements. MLA Shirley Bond and MP Cathy McLeod stand in the centre. Their names, and Premier Gordon Campbell’s, are printed on the cheque but McLeod said Wednesday she had no involvement in use of the novelty cheque.

By MIKE YOUDS

Daily News Staff Reporter

A local NDP candidate-in-waiting has come out swinging over the so-called Logogate scandal, asking for an apology from MP Cathy McLeod over a recent funding announcement.

But McLeod is adamant about such gladhandling: “I don’t do cheques,” she said Wednesday.

Conservative MPs have been accused of misleading the public by using their party’s logo on novelty cheques when announcing federal funding for projects in their ridings. Novelty cheques are the oversized facsimiles used for photo takes.

Opposition MPs have attacked the practice as a flagrantly partisan exploitation of taxpayer dollars.

Michael Crawford issued a press release Wednesday that cites a photo taken recently of an infrastructure funding announcement in Valemount.

In a photo posted on the website of Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond, McLeod and Bond are among a group of representatives holding a novelty cheque for $209,000. Their names, and Premier Gordon Campbell’s, are printed on the signature line of the oversized cheque.

“Our local MP surely knew when she presented a cheque to the mayor of Valemount that she should not have put her name on the cheque, that doing so was wrong and misleading,” Crawford said in a press release Wednesday. “I hope she can assure people in this riding that it won’t happen again and perhaps she will offer an apology for taking such crass partisan advantage with public funds.”

He compared the practice of using a party logo on a cheque representing public funds to the federal Liberal involvement in the sponsorship scandal.

In Ottawa, McLeod said the novelty cheque was Bond’s doing and she had nothing to do with the names printed on it.

“Shirley Bond actually created that cheque because I don’t do cheques,” McLeod said. She doesn’t feel the optics of the occasion are as importance as the substance of the announcement.

“What is important is what the initiative is going to provide to the community.”

McLeod downplayed the significance of the Tory logos use during federal funding announcements.

“The logo, I believe, was used in one or two instances,” she said. “The prime minister very clearly spoke against it as soon as it came to light that it was inappropriate to use the logo.”

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has claimed that the logo was used by 55 Tory MPs in what he called “a dubious strategy.”

The parliamentary ethics commissioner has launched a formal investigation of opposition complaints about the practice of MPs putting their own names and party logo on economic stimulus cheques.

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