NOTE: This has been edited from a previous version.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement is Ottawa’s budget hawk, tasked with reining in $280 billion in federal spending to bring the deficit under control. But this hawk won’t soar. His credibility is under fire from opposition MPs who claim he’s an old-fashioned pork barreller who doled out $45 million in taxpayers’ dollars to favoured mayors and towns in his Parry Sound-Muskoka riding last year, conveniently in time for the federal election this spring.

After refusing for months to answer questions in Parliament about his role in the Group of Eight summit spending, Clement finally turned up at the Commons public accounts committee this week to clear the air. But he succeeded only in stirring more fury. Opposition MPs accused him of breach of trust, questioned his veracity and ridiculed him for claiming “the dog ate my homework.”

Is Prime Minister Stephen Harper getting a queasy feeling? He should be. This isn’t pretty.

Clement acknowledged that he played a “coordination” role between Muskoka’s mayors and Ottawa in carving up a $50 million legacy fund for a gazebo, planters, toilets and other projects. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, who was infrastructure minister at the time, recalled that Clement “identified, recommended” 33 projects to his office from a far bigger list. Clement now agrees that Baird’s department should have vetted the entire list, for transparency’s sake.

Still, Clement insisted he was “not involved in selecting the projects.” He says he merely liaised with Muskoka mayors, advised them to pare down their original $500 million wish list of 242 projects to a more realistic number, then had his constituency office ship their 33 priority proposals to Baird’s department, where 32 were approved.

Unfortunately Clement couldn’t provide the paper trail the committee sought to verify his version of events. “The paperwork … was not perfect,” he said lamely. That left New Democrat MP Charlie Angus venting the irritation of many. “Not perfect? It doesn’t exist,” he shouted. He accused Clement of “a breach of public trust” and “creating a parallel process” to bypass normal vetting procedures.

Fellow New Democrat Alexandre Boulerice wasn’t impressed, either. “You managed to set up an opaque parallel process for distributing $50 million in your riding,” he said. There is “no document, no minute,” he added. “We have no idea of what went on.”

That’s not reassuring. Clement is tackling a $36-billion deficit. It would be good to know what’s going on.