Vomit Comet

Even after all these years, there are still times when I think to myself that if I see anything dumber than this today, I’ll be surprised. This is one of them.

A man in Phoenix, Arizona, was taken to the hospital with serious burns after being found near a car that was also on fire. A friend of the victim, who was also burned but not as badly, told police that the car was his, and that it had been stolen by someone who had burned him with something before taking off. His friend had witnessed the theft and jumped in his own car to follow. When the “robbery victim” caught up with them, he found that his pal and his car were both on fire.

However, when police talked to witnesses, the story started to unravel. Those witnesses did mention a third man, but that man didn’t sound at all like the one who had supposedly taken and torched the car. And so it was that they talked to the “robbery victim” again and the truth finally emerged.

Police later found out the victim had asked his two friends to get gasoline since one of their cars was empty. The men filled several plastic grocery bags with gasoline before loading them into their car. They then picked up the victim and drove where the second vehicle was parked. However, before they arrived, the bags of gasoline ignited with the three men inside the car, causing the vehicle to erupt in flames.

You know, if I had to admit that two of my buddies and I weren’t smart enough not to set ourselves on fire by driving around with grocery bags full of fuel, I might try the fake car theft route too.

Seriously, grocery bags?

This reminds me of the time I pulled the screens out of my windows and left the doors wide open to keep thieves out of my house. Ottawa paid nearly $670,000 for KPMG’s advice on cutting consultant costs

Apologies to any thieves reading this for the comparison.

The federal government hired KPMG consultants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for advice on how to save money on consultants, documents show.

New spending details tabled in Parliament show the department of Natural Resources, led by minister Jonathan Wilkinson, approved $669,650 for KPMG, a global professional services company, to provide managing consulting advice.

The department said this work involved developing “recommendations that could be considered as options to ensure that Canadians’ tax dollars are being used efficiently and being invested in the priorities that matter most to them.”

Treasury Board President Anita Anand is currently leading a federal effort to save about $15-billion over five years from existing spending plans. She has promised to release the first wave of details this month. The Natural Resources contract work was part of that department’s contribution to the spending reduction effort.

It may not surprise you (especially if you voted based on the promise of election reform back in 2015) to hear that since the Liberals pledged in that same year to cut back on things like consultants and outsourcing, that the amount spent on those things has gone up, like, a lot.

Recently tabled figures for the 2022-23 fiscal year show federal spending on outsourcing has continued its upward trend. Ottawa spent $15.7-billion on professional and special services that year, a broad category that includes outsourcing spending in areas such as IT services and management consultants.

That is a nearly 88-per-cent increase over outsourcing levels in 2015-16, when Ottawa spent $8.35-billion. The Liberal Party promised in the 2015 federal election campaign to cut back on the use of external consultants.

To add insult to insult, part of the reason we’re getting this information is that the government operations committee is holding hearings into why the ArriveCan app cost so damn much. How much? How about more than $54 million? If you’ve seen that thing in action, it’s hard to believe that they spent $54 on it, let alone that and a pile of zeros.