OTTAWA—Conservative ridings disproportionately benefited from an election year fund aimed at improving community infrastructure such as parks and recreation centres, a Star analysis has found.

New data shows ridings won by the Conservatives in 2011 received 68.6 per cent of the roughly $106 million paid out in the first year of the Canada 150 community infrastructure program between June 2015 and June 2016.

Much of that money, about $46 million, was spent in seat-rich Ontario. British Columbia, a battleground in the last election, took in $17.5 million while the Conservative heartland of Alberta received $15.2 million.

Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province, had received only $3.7 million for projects as of June.

The Canada 150 community infrastructure program was announced by former prime minister Stephen Harper in the months leading up to the 2015 federal election. In May 2015, Harper told a crowd that the fund would benefit some 1,800 smaller-scale renovations and upgrades.

At the time, both the opposition New Democrats and Liberals called the program a “slush fund” for good news announcements leading up to the election. News releases from that summer touted dozens of announcements about upgrades to everything from schools to theatres to skating rinks.

Adam Vaughan, the Toronto MP and now parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, told the Star the fund under the Conservatives was overly restrictive and set timetables that were difficult for community organizations to meet.

“It was clear that the Conservatives had tipped off some on how to apply and kept others in the dark,” Vaughn said in an interview.

“They created extraordinarily complex guidelines, (a) very short period of time to apply and then went through and cherry-picked and gave to organizations that were close to the Conservative party.”

But Michelle Rempel, who was minister of western economic diversification in the Conservatives’ last year in government, said public servants decided which projects fit the criteria. There were political considerations involved in the decisions, Rempel said, to ensure the small pool of funding was fairly distributed over a large number of ridings.

“The program was oversubscribed … for example, we could have spent all the funding just in Metro Vancouver,” Rempel said in an interview outside the House of Commons last week.

“So you want to make sure there is some regional recognition because the pool was small. But what I relied on to make my decision was a departmental ranking based on criteria … I wanted to be very careful that it wasn’t perceived as a politically motivated decision.”

The data for the first year of the program, released to Parliament last month, isn’t perfect. Some regional development agencies, including in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, did not track funding by riding. The Star located individual projects in those regions and assigned them by riding.

The data extends only to June 2016, and some projects were announced after that date.

But the data provides the clearest picture MPs and Canadians have to show where the money went.

The Conservatives had 54 per cent of the seats after the 2011 election, but Conservative ridings took at least 68 per cent of the funding. The NDP, who had official Opposition status with 33 per cent of the seats in 2011, saw only 13.9 per cent of the funding flow to their ridings.

The Liberals won 11 per cent of seats in 2011 but received 5.5 per cent of the funding, mostly in the Atlantic provinces.

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Projects that spanned multiple ridings, or had insufficient information to identify a specific riding (such as funding for “the City of Ottawa”), made up $11.3 million, or 10.7 per cent of the total.

Some regions and ridings were much more successful than others in getting funding. The GTA’s Durham region, represented by Conservative leadership hopeful Erin O’Toole, received $3.5 million in funding — more than any two Atlantic provinces combined. O’Toole did not return multiple interview requests this week.

The Waterloo area, represented by former Conservative MP Peter Braid in the last parliament, received $2.9 million in funding. Braid, who was unseated by Liberal House leader Bardish Chagger and now works for a private tech company, said he considered it part of his job to push for projects in his riding.

“That program was no different than any other I would have been involved in, and I would have strongly advocated for projects that were put forth from my community,” Braid said in a telephone interview.

Some MPs were less successful in securing projects.

New Democrat MP Guy Caron, who requested the data through Parliament, said he learned the first project in his riding was approved only a couple of weeks ago.

“When you look at the numbers … basically half the money in Ontario, and then the bulk of it after that in British Columbia and Alberta, and Saskatchewan getting twice as much as Quebec, I really don’t know how the calculations were made,” Caron said.

“(The program) left a lot of room for arbitrary decisions. Obviously, I can’t demonstrate that there’s been political interference, but statistically I think it shows that it overwhelmingly went to Conservative ridings, and a lot of that money actually came a few weeks to a few days before the election was called (in early August 2015).”

The Liberal government opted to continue the infrastructure funding for another year, putting up another $150 million for a second phase of projects. But the government’s political priorities have been added as criteria — new projects should focus more on improving “the future for Indigenous peoples” or “promote a cleaner growth economy.”

A spokesperson for Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains, who was given responsibility for the second phase of Canada 150 infrastructure grants, said the Liberals had issues with the first phase being used for “possible electoral motivations.”

It will be difficult to assess how differently the program is operating under the Liberal government, however. Bains’ department is not obliged to release the kind of detailed regional breakdowns that were tabled in Parliament last month.

To receive an update, another MP would have to formally request the data once the second year of the program is over.

With files from Bruce Campion-Smith and The Canadian Press

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