Elliott's Undeserving Plum

The Ottawa Citizen is reporting that former RCMP Commissioner William Elliott is billing taxpayers about $8000 a month for an apartment in New York; a short walk from his RCMP paid $200,000-plus salary as a special representative for Interpol at the United Nations. While getting a plum job is not that unusual for senior government employees when they depart, the circumstances surrounding Elliott’s departure from the RCMP suggests that it was not based on a job well-done. As it was the Conservative government that appointed Elliott to the RCMP, it was likely in their best interests to keep a lid on matters and shuffle Elliott off to New York agreeing to what he wanted. If Elliott did not replace anyone at the U.N. and a job was created simply to make a problem disappear, that ends up being an expensive solution to a problem that could have been addressed with the normal executive phrase of “your services are no longer required”. But that would have exposed the government to criticism that they did not do a very good job in selecting Elliott in the first instance. This makes the Senate scandal a minor event, from a taxpayer perspective.