Steve, the Accountability Guy

That was Stand Up Comedy for Canada from Mr. Accountability Guy, Stephen Harper, in 2006.

Yesterday Steve never mentioned the under-the-table Perrin/Wright/Duffy hush money cheque, nor the cheque issuer or recipient in his speech about it to his caucus.  But just a little over 100 words into his 1000 word speech, Steve did spare a moment to mention Adscam and his pissy mood about what he did not mention, before blowing off the whole unmentionable thing as a "distraction" and winding up with "Let's get back to work".

Today, however, from the distance of some 6000 kms away in Peru, Steve, the most micro-managing PM in Canadian history, explained he knew nothing at all about any of this till he heard about it in the media. 

So how's that one flying for him? CBC poll , Wednesday 7pm:

Bonus Steve from 2005 :
 [h/t North Van's Grumps in comments]

"There's going to be a new code on Parliament Hill: bend the rules, you will be punished; break the law, you will be charged; abuse the public trust, you will go to prison," warned Harper.

Yeah, sure thing.


Update : From Stephen Lautens' Parking Space : Ethical Amnesia

“At worst, he personally ordered it done and chose the people who executed the plan. At the very least, he fostered an attitude within the party [...], chose the managers of the people who committed these crimes and completely and utterly failed to exercise any oversight, supervision or leadership. In the end, it doesn’t really matter where [his] actions or lack of them fall on that scale. He is the leader and a leader is responsible for the actions of the people he leads. If he had a right or honourable bone in his body, he’d admit that and resign immediately.”

Stephen Harper during the Gomery investigation

Thursday noon update : The link above to Stephen Lautens and the Harper/Gomery quote now redirects to a correction from Lautens stating he can't cite an original source for the above quote.  Appears to have been originally written by Kev who did not attribute it to Harper.

Thursday AM update : Dear Mr Mulcair : Stop giving Steve an assist by helping him frame this as being just about the need to reform/abolish the Senate.  Bigger fish here, Tom.  Knock it off.
Thursday noon : More on that from Pogge.
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Thursday 3PM update : Excerpts from Aaron Wherry's very interesting interview with Senator David Tkachuk, chair of the three person Senate steering committee, on whitewashing the audit on Duffy's expenses. 
Tkachuk also "didn't know about the cheque until I found out about it in the media."

A: I mean, you’ve got to remember I would have been having a number of discussions with Nigel, I had a few of them. He didn’t tell me to do anything, really. We discussed Mike and the situation that he was in. I mean, the Prime Minister’s Office was very concerned about this. They don’t like this scandal going on. It was hurting us politically. ... I got advice from all kinds of people. I’m not going to tell you who they are, but let’s put it this way: I talked to people in the PMO ...

Q: But did Nigel Wright ever suggest to you how the report should be written? 

A: Nigel Wright did not. 

Q: Did anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office ever suggest to you how the report should be written? 

A: Not really. 

Q: What does that mean? 

A: Because when I ask for advice, people will give advice. I did ask for advice, I’m not denying that. But all I’m saying is, no one gave me any orders, no one came to my room and told me what to do.

And there goes Steve's story that this was some obscure private deal between just Nigel Wright and Duffy that no one else knew anything about.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 3

Please welcome Nigel Wright, Steve's chief of staff on loan from Onex Corp and the latest member of Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks, for secretly cutting Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to paper over the senate investigation and Deloitte audit into Mike Duffy's creative housing expense claims and reports he billed the Senate for travel while campaigning for the Cons .

Duffy isn't co-operating with the investigations now he has the cash but that didn't stop House leader Peter Van Loan from praising him for his "leadership" in returning money that didn't belong to him. 
Duffy : 

"It's become a major distraction so my wife and I discussed it and we decided that in order to turn the page and put all this behind us, we are going to voluntarily pay back the living expenses related to the house we have in Ottawa"

Ah yes the Royal Bank loan and the PMO instruction to keep his little head down.
Unfortunately Duffy then blabbed around town about his secret cheque from Wright.

So which is it then? A bank loan or a personal cheque from Steve's chief of staff? 
Both? Given he purportedly has secured the bank loan to cover the senate repayment, what's the cash bonanza from Nigel Wright for exactly?

“The PM was not aware of the specifics,” Andrew MacDougall, Mr. Harper’s director of communications, has said of this transaction when asked.

I think that's called implausible deniability.

Nigel Wright, a founding director of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, has resigned.
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Previous Perps with perks bios.

Arrgh update. Typo correction : That should have been "a founding director"; without that "a", it made him sound like the only one.  Apologies.
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Christy Clark and the Manning Centre for Building Conservatives

In March 2012, Christy Clark gave the opening remarks to the Ottawa Manning Centre Networking Conference, the yearly "conservative family reunion".

She was introduced by her then chief of staff, former senior Harper advisor, Enbridge lobbyist, and Alberta 'firewall manifesto' signatory Ken Boessenkool, who was her very first campaign manager back in 2010. 

"We have a duty to Canada" to easy the flow of products to Asia, she told her audience at the Manning Centre [a year ago]. "We support pipelines in British Columbia."

BC Conservative leader John Cummins was not invited.

Manning has in the past said he doesn’t support the political ambitions of Cummins, who was elected as a Reformer with Manning in the 1993 election, because vote-splitting on the centre-right always makes it easier for the NDP to assume power.

One-time Harper government cabinet minister, Jay Hill, also said Friday he’s backing Clark’s leadership. “I’ll do whatever I can to support her and support the B.C. Liberals."

Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and President of the Manning Centre, is also a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.

Jay Hill was in charge of the Cons 200 page dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt and stonewall parliamentary committees back in 2007.

Also helping Christy's campaign was Chuck Strahl, former BC Reform and Con MP, now chair of the Manning Centre and chair of CSIS watchdog the Security Intelligence Review Committee since last June, at which time he had to give up working for Christy.

The only pollster to accurately predict Tuesday's election result was Christy's principal secretary and ADM in charge of "Intergovernmental Relations" till a year ago and now on contract to Christy, former Reform and Republican policy advisor Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Premier’s Office targeted crucial election ridings for the B.C. Liberals — all on government time and your dime

"Premier Christy Clark’s former principal secretary, Dimitri Pantazopolous, and former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad were among those involved in a comprehensive strategy that used government staff and resources to try to win swing ridings for the BC Liberals ...  serious misconduct by government employees and misuse of government funds.   

“Dimitri was the driving force behind the swing teams, from its inception through to the operational phase."

Pantazoploulos also runs the Manning Centre Municipal Governance Project and is mentioned by Calgary developer Cal Wenzel in the now infamous cel vid about buying the campaigns of developer-friendly municipal candidates in order to defeat Calgary Mayor Nenshi.

On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - Christy's former chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign win.  
The third partner in the firm is BC NDP campaign director Brian Topp.

and a quick tweet from Rob Ford's chief of staff Mark Towhey:

You do remember Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research,  don't you ? 

In addition to being Rob Ford's election architect, Kouvalis is a regular speaker at ... wait for it ... the Manning Centre yearly bunfest.

Fun fact :  Founding directors of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy :

• Nigel Wright, Harper's chief of staff, currently in the news for cutting Con senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to cover money the Duffster owed to the Senate for inappropriately claimed living expenses for the past four years while Duffy was being investigated for it,  and 
• Gwyn Morgan, Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin til May 2 this year, the company being investigated for fraud in four countries on three continents, was Steve's choice for heading up his brand new Accountability commission in 2006.

Manning Centre : "Congratulations to Christy Clark on a spectacular victory. The election of a non-socialist government in BC is in the best interests of BC and Canada."
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Shorter Green-supporter Christy Clark

Shorter Christie snorter : 'Hey leftie enviros! If you're not gonna vote for 2nd-place me directly, please at least split the vote by voting for the 3rd place Green instead, promoted right here at the top of my full page ad in the Times Colonist and paid for by "Today's BC Liberal Party".'




Gotta love that "Today's BC Liberals". 
Nothing at all to do with Gordon Campbell's "Yesterday's Liberals" presumably, from whom Christie inherited her unelected premiership. 

Hat tip to RossK for Ian Bailey's pic of the Liberals' Times Colonist ad, to CBC for the May 9th Ipsos Reid poll, and most especially to :

• those $500-a-ticket fundraisers held for Christy at the Calgary Petroleum Club "targeting deep-pocketed oil patch players", 
• Gwyn Morgan of Encana for smoothing over the transition from the unre-electable Gordo to the unelected Christy, and 
• Encana itself for donating over half a million dollars to Christy's Liberals in the last three years while simultaneously lobbying the BC government about LNG terminals and fracking.

Update : And right here I was going to post Kevin Logan's video about how a combination of 

1) the June 2010 "Equivalency Agreement" between Harper and the BC Liberals and 

2) the TILMA/New West Partnership Agreement between BC and Alberta 

effectively prevents BC from prohibiting pipelines from being built across BC to the coast. 

But Norm at Northern Insight has posted it along with a nice short precis of the New West Partnership Agreement so go watch it there.
Video creator Kevin Logan's links to back up his research at his own site here.

A little background on the two gents portrayed in Christy's infomercial embedded in Logan's vid from The Tyee.

Economist Robyn Allan says BC could legally cancel the Equivalency Agreement with 30 days written notice on pipeline projects not yet approved, but first of course the Libs would have to acknowledge the effing agreement exists, which would naturally lead to questions about their non-disclosure agreements with their oilbidness buddies even as they simultaneously try to portray themselves as somehow representing the people of BC .

No mention at all of the Liberals locking BC into pipeline agreements before they are even inked in the BC media election coverage leading up to the May 14 BC election unless you count this Vancouver Sun report a whole freaking year ago.  You're shocked, I'm sure.

Monday update : Changed my mind - here's Logan's vid for all you non-clicking-through guys :

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Wednesday update : Voter turnout - 48% 

Elections BC 
Seat count : Libs - 50, NDP - 33, Green - 1, Independent - 1
% of popular vote : Libs - 44.4%, NDP - 39.5%, Green - 8%, Con - 4.8%, 
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DILBIT : Propaganda

More money for government ads in budget supplement

More DILBIT.

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Justin Trudeau : Do the Math

Thursday May 16 international launch of 42 minute doc Do the Math: The Movie, 

"the story of the rising movement to change the terrifying math of the climate crisis and fight the fossil fuel industry."

In Vancouver it's showing at Langara and four other venues. To find one near you, look here.

Meanwhile Justin Trudeau tours western Canada giving pressers criticizing Harper for not doing enough to promote Keystone XL. I get the strategy. Don't give Steve anything to hit and eventually when Steve implodes, the oil industry will have a really popular hopey changey corporate guy in their pocket - a Canadian Obama for us. Someone who supports arbitrary arrest and detainment for three days without charge while being questioned and held without trial for a year if you don't co-operate, but who we will at least like better than we like Steve. Would that be better than having Steve? 
Makes it hard to take seriously the idea of anybody-but-Steve electoral co-operation.

Purple Library Guy said something interesting at Dawg's :

"I'd find the whole thing a bit easier to swallow if it were phrased a bit differently. Say you said "getting the left and centre-right to co-operate against the fascists". The moment someone says "getting the left to co-operate" when we're talking about Liberals, I conclude someone's trying to scam me."

Seconded. 
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Cons : "Well you didn't ask us."

In response to NDP questions on Monday regarding the missing $3.1 billion in public security and anti-terrorism spending and why even the words "public security and anti-terrorism" hadn't shown up in nine years of public accounts, Tony Gazebo of the Treasury Board blamed the opposition for not guessing the right question :

“If NDP caucus members from the years from 2001 to 2009 did not ask the right questions then that is their problem, not the problem on this side of the House.”

In February, Public SafetyMin Vic Toews used the same tactic. When questioned as to how the Cons managed to appoint Dr Arthur Porter - subject of an arrest warrant for fraud, money laundering and bribes/kickbacks in connection with SNC Lavelin - to head up the CSIS watchdog agency SIRC in 2010 without doing a sufficiently diligent security clearance on him first, Toews blamed the opposition parties for not stopping them from appointing a crook by not asking the right question :

"If there were any concerns that he had, he could have brought it to the attention of the appropriate authorities and simply asked the question. He failed in his responsibilities."

So from now on, all the opposition has to do is to try to guess which right questions are cleverly hidden under the Con security blanket.

Noon update : And even when reporters ask Tony Gazebo the right questions about government outsourcing ...

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

The Tax Free Tour - tax havens and outsourcing

A doc about the stateless offshore world of tax havens. 

Why does Apple only pay 1.9% tax?
The Big Four : Price Waterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG

Former KPMG man : "They are the constant feature of every tax haven. Without one of those firms, or maybe all of those firms being present, you really will not have a tax haven."

He describes how the Big Four as he calls them are hired by governments to guide financial rules that benefit the Big Four.

So remember back in Sept 2011 when Steve gave Deloitte a $20-million contract to advise federal cabinet and senior officials on how to trim $4 billion from government program spending in order to balance the books by 2014?  

Ah -an outsourcing firm is being hired to recommend more outsourcing we said at the time, remembering a 2010 CBC report on the 80% increase in a parallel civil service made up of consulting firms.

At the same time, Deloitte, CORE-outsourcing, and Ryerson's Ted Rogers School of Management teamed up to produce a joint research initiative using Deloitte's "proprietary outsourcing maturity model". It was called The 3 E's of Effective Outsourcing Governance -Experience, Essentials, and Empathy -because that sounds better than Externalizing accountability, Eff Off Unions, and Economic entropy.

They projected that "almost $25 billion worth of outsourcing contracts in Canada [are] to be renewed or renegotiated over the next three years."

Pictured at the top of their 3 E's report are Ray Lavitt, President of CORE; Ian Chan, Principal at Deloitte; and Ron Babin, Professor at Ryerson.  
All three have outsourcing and/or offshoring creds : 

• Lavitt was "VP, Global Sourcing at CIBC" before becoming CEO of CORE
• Chan is "Leader of Deloitte Canada's Outsourcing Advisory Practice" and 
• Babin was "a partner at Accenture and at KPMG", according to his Ryerson bio, and "his area of research is IT Planning and IT Governance with a specific focus on IT outsourcing and off-shore delivery."

Lavitt and Babin featured in an article a month ago at CBC : Offshore outsourcing 'not always a negative thing'

Lavitt is President of CORE; Chan and Babin are CORE board members.

So how did Steve's outsourcing report from Deloitte work out for us?
FinMin Jim Flaherty announced a trim to Ottawa’s annual spending by $5 billion a year in budget cutbacks in programs and services to eliminate the $26-billion deficit by 2015.

As of Dec. 31, 2012, 16,220 public service positions were eliminated, even though according to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2011 :

Over the past five years, personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79%. While federal departments have had their budgets capped, expenditures on outside consultants have not been touched and remain above $1 billion a year,” says Macdonald.

Wednesday May 8 update : 

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

Thursday May 9 update :
Hundreds of public servants at seven departments received notices today that their jobs are on the block as part of the Conservative government’s ongoing spending cuts

Watch the doc. 
See also International Consortium of Investigative Journalists/offshore
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The invisible hand of the market outsourcing

CBC Go Public's Kathy Tomlinson on The Current :

 "A single mom, an experienced IT worker, couldn't find work for seven months. She heard one of the Indian firms had a project going at one of the banks here so she asked the manager who she knew who was here from India to hire her to oversee it. He said he'd think about it. Then she says he called back to say he would give her the job if she would agree to kickback $8 an hour from her salary to him - a cash commission, he called it. She took the deal because she says she'd rather pay him to work than not have the job."

So Canadians are now having to pay off the insourced scam artists who cost them their jobs to get work at all, even as foreign temporary workers have increased 700% since 2001 and Ottawa is currently inking a trade deal with India to increase labour mobility.

Jason Kenney : 

"Intra-company transfers in the vast majority of cases are a completely normal part of international commerce ... The obligations we have have for intra-company transfars are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

Conspokesbot Kellie Leitch, parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, responds to Anna Maria Tremonti's specific question about companies bypassing government labour market opinions to get fast-tracked on international intra-company transfers :

"The program's intent is not to replace Canadian workers ... We had concerns with respect to what was happening with iGATE and the government acted extremely quickly to begin an investigation to make sure that those labour market opinions were being used appropriately."

which of course entirely bypassed Tremonti's question about employers bypassing LMOs.

Meanwhile in February this year the BC Government Labour Market and Immigration Division was holding classes on how to do it :
(italics mine)

"Is your business experiencing a labour or skills shortage?

If you are an employer interested in learning how to use an alternative approach than the LMO process to recruit and retain foreign workers, this is your chance to find out directly from program staff. "

I guess the BC gov program staff is pretty good at it.
At the now cancelled April 2013 CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE, one of the listed presenters was 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, 
Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, 
whose CORE bio advertized provided "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

And a year ago, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation finalized a $22-million deal with iGATE to provide IT workers for its Road User Safety Modernization Initiative, the department in charge of "road user safety, provincial highways management, and transportation policy and planning including transit." 

Last month iGATE hired a lobbyist to lobby :

• Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)
• Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
• Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)
• Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC)
• Industry Canada (IC)
• Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
• Privy Council Office (PCO

on "the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and proposed government changes to the program."

We'll see how well they do with that.

Northern Reflections : One May Smile  and Smile

with files from : Boycott Royal Bank of Canada and Outsource Canada
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Update : Wednesday, May 8 :

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

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$3.1-billion : Now is the time to commit accounting

The Sixth Estate : Who is the Auditor General Protecting on $3 Billion Boondoggle?

Auditor General Michael Ferguson on As It Happens yesterday :

"... or maybe in fact it was spent on things other than the public, uh, the anti-terrorism-type initiatives. Now there was also the ability for government, for departments, to get approval to re-allocate some of the funding so that could have been part of the story as well."

So $3.1-billion, nearly 25% of the Public Security and Anti-Terrorism Initiative, was perhaps re-allocated and spent on "things other than the anti-terrorism initiative" it was budgeted for.  Then in 2010, the Treasury Board stopped tracking it altogether.

Awesome.

Fun fact : The day before 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a presser to "declare war on the Pentagon bureaucracy", citing that the Pentagon's own auditors couldn't account for 25% of their spending either.

But this is Canada so instead we have an auditor general who says : "We didn’t find anything that gave us cause for concern that money was used in any way it should not have been."
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