Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks #7

Welcome, Con chief counsel Arthur Hamilton, to Perps with Perks for your part in the Senate scandal - Wrighting a cheque to Mike Duffy's lawyer -  "CON FUNDS $13,560" - while Duffy was under investigation to pay off his legal bills and shut him up so as not to arouse the Wrath of Cons.
"Cheque(s)" actually because we haven't yet seen the other Hamilton cheque stub Duffy mentioned last week, along with all the other paperwork the PMO assured CBC doesn't exist.

About that CON FUND mentioned on Hamilton's cheque - flashback to 2011 re the Cons' in-and-out scheme when Hamilton was counsel for that too.

"There were six people in charge of the Conservative Fund. Four are now charged. Nigel Wright is the fifth, and while two of them were rewarded with plush Senate seats, he's the chief of staff to the Prime Minister."

Previously, Hamilton is best known to us for ignoring Elections Canada entreaties to look into Con election fraud events perped in the days just prior to the last election, taking months to set up interviews with witnesses in Elections Canada's Guelph robocall investigation, and pre-empting the witnesses' lawyers when they finally got underway under his supervision.
To quote federal court judge Richard Mosley in the legal challenge alleging widespread voter suppression in the last federal election, the Cons, represented by Hamilton, "engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits."

Yesterday we heard Steve on the radio saying he'd "dismissed" Nigel Wright. 
What a long ways we've come from the Con story in May when "good Samaritan" Wright was only trying to protect taxpayers by writing a cheque for his good ole buddy Duffy. Steve was "very clear" he knew nothing at all about it and "immediately made this information public" after CTV had already reported it. Heh. 
Steve then "accepted Wright's resignation with regret".
Now Steve says he fired Wright and "a few" people in the PMO were in the know - 13 according to Robert Fife. 

So it seems the Con Party chief counsel Arthur Hamilton was in on it from the very beginning, unless of course Hamilton had no idea why he was writing the cheque to Duffy out of the Con Fund.
Maybe, like Steve, no one ever tells him anything either. 
.
Previous Perps with Perks with bios.

Mon evening update : Thinking about Steve's recent indignant law and order rhetoric re Duffy - presumably for the benefit of his base prior to their annual national convention next week. The delicious irony here is now he has to explain to them why their party donations were used to pay off the legal bills Duffy incurred due to PMO-directed Senate investigations against him.
.

RoboConfetti : WWMD?

Right now the Cons are "reviewing tapes of every call made by the Responsive Marketing Group call centre in Thunder Bay in the last election before Elections Canada investigators arrive next week," reports CBC, before adding the Cons deny it.

Presumably Steve would be in search of exactly where to place his own 18 minutes of tape hiss or RoboConfetti.

So after four decades of simply adding the suffix -gate onto the scandal du jour - from cleavagegate to gazebogate - Canada finally gets to watch Steve watergate the question : What Would Milhous Do?

On Tuesday Steve pledged to get to the bottom of the lone, single, solitary, isolated, rogue robocalling incident, but by yesterday - with thousands of voters reporting electoral fraud clear across the country - their new story is that it's all just a case of "Liberal and NDP sleaze", a giant RoboConspiracy!

AssMin of National Defence Julian Fantino, who is aghast his name cropped up in the Guelph burner phone logs search warrants at Item #39, is going with the "smear campaign" story, while in-and-out scandal alumnus and the Cons' campaign chair emeritus during the last election, Senator Doug Finley, nails the argument for Con Party innocence : 

“This is the whole point : the central campaign does not know because they had absolutely no idea it was happening.”

Thank you, Senator Finley, for that moment of lucid RoboContemplation.

Speaking of in-and-out shenanigans, here's the new robocalling edition. Quebec Con candidate Bertin-Denis told Le Devoir and two radio stations yesterday that $15,000.01 was funneled into his riding and right back out again in the last election, ostensibly for local RMG poll research that he never saw.
Really? A Con candidate said that?
Oh wait, he has since mysteriously recanted that accusation - a RoboConcaving.

More RoboContenders. Last Friday, after being fingered by Sun TV for complicity in the Guelph robocall shenanigans, Con parliamentary staffer Michael Sona quit his job. Two days later DefMin Airshow MacKay announced "the party doesn't need to investigate any further" because : 

"I think they've identified the individual that was involved in this," he said.

But I guess the God of the Rescue Helicopter Taxi Service wasn't listening because by Tuesday Mr. Sona was publicly protesting his innocence and expressing his hope the real guilty party would be caught. 

In QP yesterday the Cons sent out Mr Creosote to accuse the Libs of sabotaging their own ridings by using a North Dakota automated calling firm :

“These calls were made on behalf of the Liberal party,” Del Mastro said.
“I see that they used this company quite a bit. It seems that they were robodialing quite a number of people on behalf of the Liberal party.”

Unfortunately for Mr Creosote, it was immediately pointed out he had confused the name of a US firm with the completely unrelated but identically named Canadian one used by the Libs, but no matter : Corporate Television Vehicle ran with it anyway.  RoboComplicity.

Still, you can see why the Cons instinctively turned to their the-Libs-do-it-too defence. 
However clownish, it was a pre-emptive strike to protect their robodialing ReformAlliance/Mike Harris/Republican buddies at RMG, which worked on 97 individual Conservative candidate campaigns in the last election after a 2010 merger with Xentel under IMarketing Solutions Group :

Conservative call centre company has checkered legal history in U.S. 

The company that handles the Conservative Party’s computerized voter-identification system and powerful fundraising machine has a checkered legal history in the United States, where it operates call centres that have repeatedly been the subject of lawsuits and complaints over its telemarketing practices.

Longtime key Conservative organizer Stewart Braddick is listed on RMG’s web site as director of the company’s Focused Direct Response program. Braddick is also listed as director, Focused Direct Response, for the American company Target Outreach Inc., which works for Republican campaigns.

The Cons think they are playing us for suckers. They think we're all rubes, that we won't get it, that we'll put up with their imported Rovian Republican tactics. So - are we rubes? Are we going to let them get away with it this time?

Last word on this goes to Nixon Watergate dirty trickster Donald Segretti, yesterday.
His assessment? : "Worse than Watergate."

“We never tried to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote,” he said. “That goes beyond a prank. It’s just wrong, on many levels.” 

Their dirty tricks campaign, Mr. Segretti claimed, was designed to disrupt the Democrats, not hoodwink voters."

.

This week in neocon nonsense

Just this week :

In a pre-emptive election strike, Bill C-484, Con MP Ken Epps' trial balloon bill for recriminalizing abortion, is shot down by Justice Minister Bob Nicholson, who voted for it. Twice.
Nicholson says the Cons will instead table a bill to "punish criminals who commit violence against pregnant women, but do so in a way that leaves no room for the introduction of fetal rights." Which is exactly the same thing they said about C-484.


The whistle blower who was fired for revealing that the Cons' deregulation of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency allows "industry to implement food safety control programs" is threatened with legal action by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.
Meanwhile the president of the CFIA inspectors union states : "the agency is so short-staffed that food inspections and follow-up audits simply aren't taking place".
With 12 dead of listeriosis so far, Maple Leaf Foods waits four days to inform the public their sliced meat is contaminated. So much for self-regulation.



Canada First? Not so much.
The Cons have "quietly scuttled the navy's $2.9-billion project to replace its aging supply ships" and "cancelled a tender call for the purchase of 12 mid-shore patrol ships for the Coast Guard".
So why is Harper going up to the Arctic again this week to talk about Arctic sovereignty and Operation Nanook, a military-led Arctic sovereignty exercise?
"As part of the Harper government's plans to expand Canada's presence in the North, MacKay is expected to announce on Thursday several million in funding over five years for the Junior Canadian Rangers, the youth wing of the part-time reserve force that patrols the Arctic."


Sports! -it's the new arts and culture , featuring branding without the swears!
Besides, with sports you can "invest $20-million toward the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in order to ensure that the event adequately reflects the priorities of the Government and helps to achieve its domestic and international branding goals."


Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary, on the refusal of 26 Cons to obey summons to appear before the Ethics committee to answer questions about the in and out scheme in which the Cons exceeded their 2006 election spending limit by $1.1 mil­lion by transferring money into the campaign bank ac­counts of 67 selected local candidates and then immediately transferring the money back out again : "No one takes Ethics Committee summons seriously"
Without ever once actually using the phrase "executive privilege", Harper keeps threatening an election, presumably at least in part to bring about an end to the questions. Oh, the "dysfunction"!


Harper's statement on civilian deaths in Afghanistan : see below.


Just. this. week.