Information Services Corporation (ISC) has become a punching bag for media and pundits in Saskatchewan as stories documenting almost comical glitches, massive cost overruns and endless bureaucratic hassles emerge. The battered crown corporation has earned the unfortunate moniker "Saskatchewan's gun registry."

Pundits have every right to point out the cost overruns, and the junkets to foreign countries like the one ISC official took to Albania. However, the root cause of the ISC debacle is philosophical in nature -- a misguided social policy embraced by NDP governments for decades. The government is trapped in a depression-era paradigm where politicians know best, and the economy needs the not-so-gentle hand of government to help it along.

Before the creation of ISC, a problem was identified: the province's 100-year old land registry system needed to be modernized. From there, everything went down hill. The idea behind ISC was (and still is in some circles) to spin the registry system into a crown corporation, commercialize it with public seed money, and then take the resultant expertise and market it around the world. Hence, the vacations, er- business trips to Hong Kong, Australia, Albania, etc.

What began as an $18 million renovation project, has now become a $107 million money pit.

This dubious scheme began to show cracks when ISC was flooded with complaints from users, who were trapped in a bureaucratic morass. What was once a simple land title change process became an epic nightmare - especially for rural users. Our ISC sales people chose to focus on international sales, while the system at home was giving people carpal tunnel syndrome from writing letters of complaint. Not even Albania will buy a land registry system that doesn't work.

ISC has abandoned their ambitious plans for land registry world domination, and is now earnestly focusing on improving the system at home, keeping costs down and addressing user complaints. But don't expect ISC to ever break even - not with the current rate structure. You got it - rates are going up.

What has government learned from this failed pursuit They same thing they learned from Spudco and a litany of other failed ventures by crown corporations in the past - zilch. Even with a second consecutive massive deficit on the horizon, the government continues to stick their noses into every moist crevice of the Saskatchewan economy.

On the same day the province secretly slipped ISC an additional $6.3 million to keep it afloat, they invested another $2 million in Mind's Eye - a Saskatchewan film production company who, in conjunction with other film industry types, successfully lobbied various levels of government to build an $11.9 million soundstage in Regina that stands empty most of the time.

In a very telling quote in the Regina Leader Post, Saskfilm CEO and soundstage overseer Val Creighton confirmed exactly what naysayers have said all along: there is no solid business plan for the Regina Soundstage, and there never was.

"Will we meet the full targets for operating " asked Creighton. "Your guess is as good as mine."

While ISC and film industry subsidies are very different subjects, there is a distinct connection. ISC represents a dramatic failure in government policies of the past, and the soundstage shows the government has learned nothing from those experiences. It's time to turn the page on depression-era government intervention. This is the 21st century, not the 1930's.