The friends of Gary Lunn

Minister of Natural [Oil] Resources Gary Lunn had some interesting third party advertising help in keeping his seat in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

Of the 52 third parties registered with Elections Canada to advertise for special interest groups, Andrew MacLeod at The Hook reports that four of them share the same address and phone number at the law offices of former Alliance Party candidate Bruce Hallsor who, along with the four, was working to re-elect Lunn.

The office receptionist had never heard of them.
Well, we have.
Patricia Trottier, Elections Canada contact person for one of the four, the "Economic Advisory Council of Saanich", is an oil and gas consultant married to Gwyn Morgan, former CEO of EnCana Corp. where he is still a director.

Hallsor, a former member of the B.C. Chief Electoral Officer's Advisory Committee, is also named in Election Canada documents in the alleged Con in-an-out scheme, in which moneys were transferred to local candidates, who then transferred the funds back to the federal party to spend on more advertising for the national campaign. Elections Canada maintains that in this way the Cons exceeded their spending limit by more than $1 million in the previous election.

More Saanich-Gulf Islands shenanigans.
Mike Watkins writes about the automated phone calls allegedly impersonating the NDP and urging voters to vote for an NDP candidate who had already stepped down, thus further splitting the vote.
The removed NDP candidate received 3, 667 votes ; second place Liberal Briony Penn lost to Lunn by 2,621 votes.

PNWER and Cascadia

"I think there is a very strong, natural pull of the region called Cascadia," Premier Gordon Campbell says in an article on the Discovery Institute website last year.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, rather better known for its crusade to teach intelligent design/creationism in schools, is a Cascadia partner with PNWER, a US-Canada public-private sector regional lobby group composed of legislators and business leaders from Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, B.C., Alberta, and the Yukon Territory. They are sponsored in this endeavor by Exxon, Enbridge, Encana, British Petroleum, Terasen, Cominco, - well, you get the general idea.

Gordon Campbell is hosting this year's PNWER event starting Sunday July 20 at the Bayshore. Speakers include Stockwell Day, Gary Lunn, Monte Solberg, US Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins, Canadian Ambassador to the US Michael Wilson, and industry stakeholders.

So let's hear it from the fans :

Premier Gordon Campbell : "Working together means we're working on both sides of the border to achieve our goals."

Stockwell Day : "PNWER has had a profound impact on policymaking."

PNWER executive director American Matt Morrison on TILMA : “We did have something to do with the B.C.-Alberta agreement, which I think is a great model that needs to be expanded."

Gosh, I guess that means PNWER is to TILMA what CCCE was to the SPP.

To follow the money : a great post at Owls and Roosters.

Exxon Valdez ruling - a licence to spill

Twenty years ago the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound off Alaska, killing 250,000 seabirds, 3,000 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 killer whales. Not to mention what it did to First Nations' livelihood.

A 1994 federal jury in Alaska originally awarded $5 billion in punitive damages. A federal judge later reduced it to $4.5 billion, and the appeals court further cut it to $2.5 billion.

On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the $2.5-billion ruling and the new figure is $507.5 million in damages.

It takes Exxon less than two days to make $2.5 billion in revenue.

In 1969 the Valdez Port was purchased from the Chugach Natives for $1 and Exxon's promise to protect their fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil, including the use of "state -of-the-art" radar equipment.

Greg Palast :

"At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

...the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.
Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."

Palast continues here.

Couldn't happen again though, right?

Two words, my friend : Gary Lunn

Shun Lunn

Update : Greg Palast link fixed.

Kady O'Malley rocks the House

with her totally brilliant live-blogging of the Chalk River nukes fiasco hearings over at Macleans.ca,
in which she catches Health-is-BigBiz-and-I-got-me-lots-of-shares-in-it-Minister Tony Clement bemoaning the fate of "the best laid plans of mice, women and men."
*snerk*

Our story so far :
~Back in July, Natural Resources (and by "Natural" we are of course including nuking the tar sands and reinstating oil supertanker runs up and down the BC coast Inside Passage) Minister Gary Lunn holds a press conference to announce he is moments away from successfully inking a deal to sell half the publicly-owned crown corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.to General Electric. Oddly this bit of news fails to even break wind in the mainscream media.
~Nov./Dec. : Linda Keen and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission extend the AEC shutdown of the 50 year old Chalk River nuclear reactor for safety violations.
~All parties, repeat, all parties pass legislation to reopen it after some bullshit story about it being the world's only supplier of medical isotopes for diagnosing cancer patients is briefly circulated before being refuted by, you know, actual doctors.
~Gary Lunn, the Natural Resources minister, fires Linda Keen, head of Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, for doing her job, at 15 minutes to midnight the night before she is to testify before an emergency session of the Natural Resources committee which has been specially convened to look into the Chalk River nukes fiasco.
~Jan 29, 2008 : Linda Keen testifies! Tough, forthright, eminently credible, she makes considerable use of sneaky tricks like statistics and logic and her own expertise to confound her Con critics, who, sadly, are apparently reduced to mangling John Steinbeck.

Take it away, Kady!

P.S. : OK, the top of Kady's blog is now featuring a story about Harper's deputy press secretary Dimitri Soudas' part in a backroom federal contract real estate deal intended to suck up votes from Montreal's Hassidic community!!!, but if you scroll down past this latest bit of Con Accountability Act violation, you'll get to her Tales of the Isotopes etc.

Still catching up on what's happened while I was...whoa! - WTF!

Wait.
In July the Toronto Star reported that the federal government was negotiating to sell part of the Crown-owned Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to General Electric, with Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn leading the privatization discussions.
"Lunn is driving this himself," one source told the Star. "GE is very confident that this is a done deal."


Next we hear that Canada's nuclear watchdog, Linda Keen, president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, has been fired for doing her job - in this case shutting down the Chalk River nuclear facility for safety infractions - and that the feds have reopened it again anyway over her objections.
Gary Lunn : "The federal government has lost confidence in Ms Keen's leadership abilities."

Marc Zwelling of Vector Research : "In polls Canadians express wariness over selling the government-owned nuclear facilities, probably because voters are afraid private companies would cut corners in the name of profit and risk meltdowns and Chernobyl-type disasters."

Yeah. So you can just imagine how we feel about friggin government cutting corners in the name of profit and the chance to sell off yet another Crown corporation that we've already paid for once.

Fucking unbelievable.