In what could only be described as a slow newsday, many of the media outlets are reporting and recycling as breaking “news”, some partisan political grandstanding that the governing federal conservative party of Canada owes the taxpayers $45 million for “partisan government advertising.”

Liberal critic Siobhan Coady released a mock invoice for the amount in reaction to a report by The Canadian Press that found the government went ahead with a Tory-blue website in spite of civil-service concerns.

The spectacle would have more merit had the same Liberals not been involved in another advertising scandal of their own making in recent memory. One, that their own former leader described as “civil servants who authorized paying advertising companies with close Liberal Party ties some $100 million in return for little or no work must have done so under political direction”. (Someone has to be asking ”What were you thinking”)

Viewing the “The Economic Action Plan ” website, my initial reaction was that this indeed is “butt a$$ ugly”, and reminiscent of much earlier web site design from the early 80's. The media articles had stated that the website had been the focus of criticism and complaints over what many say is its overtly partisan appearance and tone. I'll leave that to the pundits and readers to decide, but if true, would certainly explain the lack luster appeal of the ruling government party to the nations youth! Compare conservative.ca  vs actionplan.gc.ca

Without bias, I continued to objectively click through the links looking for the source of the “mock invoice”. While I was impressed with the speed of the servers (the gov has their own little cloud), I was unable to clearly see the source of the Liberal ire and what had prompted the mock invoice for $45 M.

I did manage to uncover a cost of $56,200 for creating the website, thanks to an astute inquiry by Sukh Dhaliwal, the Honorable member from Newton-North Delta BC. Hostjury has asked Sukh Dhaliwal office for more information on his findings.

IntoDNS also uncovered some potential security issues with the server configurations.

The website is not machine readable for the visually impaired and will require substantial modifications to meet these imposed guidelines. 

The site had a total of 31,891 unique visitors from November 2009 to November 2010. In November of 2010 there was 159 hits. Even the search engine robots appear to have found more interesting things to follow!