Welcome back, Mr. Togneri

BC Premier Christie Clark's government ran into a spot of bother of late over the triple-deleting of emails and the BC Information and Privacy Commissioner's consequent report into their serious breaches of access-to-information laws. 

Additionally, as noted in May by Laila Yuile , two days before former executive assistant to BC's Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Tim Duncan blew the whistle on what he contends is a widespread practice of email deletion within the Clark government, that same Clark government "removed penalties for staff who improperly destroy documents". 

Clark's deputy chief of staff retains "almost no sent emails" so presumably Christie's personal predilection for governing by post-it note remains unaffected.

Once upon a time in the west, bloggers like Dave at The Galloping Beaver, RossK at the Gazetteer, myself, and others used to track the various FedCons being cycled out of Harper's employ through the BC government and back to the Harper homeland again. Ken Boessenkool, Chuck Strahl, Sara McIntyre, Dimitri Pantazopoulos, and Nina Chiarelli all helped BC Premier Christie Clark form the BC Libs into a west coast subsidiary of whatever-it-is-the-FedCons-want-now.

So it's interesting to note amid all this controversy around breeches of access-to-information laws that former FedCon access-to-information squashing alumnus Sebastien Togneri  joined Christie Clark's government in February this year as Executive Assistant to the BC Minister of Energy and Mines.

Togneri, you will recall :

"...set off a political firestorm when it was revealed by The Canadian Press that he, as a senior aide to then Public Works Minister Christian Paradis, had ordered the "unrelease" of a sensitive document that the department was set to provide to the news agency after a request under the Access to Information Act. 

As a result, he was the subject of a year-long probe by Canada's information commissioner in 2011 in which he was found to have meddled in a number of access-to-information files in 2010. He quit the federal government as a result."

Between these two stints as senior aide in the Harper and Clark governments, Togneri worked for two years as the caucus whip for the Alberta Wildrose Party and did a stint as an election observer in 2012 for US Republican Senator John McCain's International Republican Institute. 
In May and again last month he monitored elections in the Ukraine for the OSCE.

Canada's Foreign Affairs Dept donated $8M to the International Republican Institute in 2014 "to increase transparency ... and awareness of best practices in local governance" in Ukraine.

Welcome back to the fold, Mr. Togneri
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Steve has been "very clear" ...

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Harper vs. Harper ... vs. Mulcair

Yes, about that ...



It's peculiar that Harper keeps insisting he first heard about his chief of staff Nigel Wright's $90,000 payment to Duffy on May 15 following "speculation in the media", given that CTV's Robert Fife had contacted the PMO the previous day to confirm it and the PMO responded. 
And you gotta love Steve taking credit for it coming out to the public here.



Asked whether he had spoken with his former press secretary now Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen, seen at top shielding Steve from reporters and who successfully moved to whitewash the report on Duffy, Steve replied he had not but that he agreed with the Senate recommendations - which were, of course, whitewashed.

He answered subsequent questions with "The Senate committee report is the Senate committee report." Nothing to do with cabinet or government, says Steve.

OK, that would be the Senate committee report that according to its Harper-appointed chair David Tkachuk :

"... 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 talked to people in the PMO ... " 

Q: Can you say though that any of the Prime Minister’s Office’s advice ended up impacting how that report was written? 

A: Well, I don’t know, I suppose. It’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to say. Only because I asked for advice from many, many people, so it’s all in the report.

Meanwhile the Senate has responded to having its rewrite outed by putting the deleted parts back in and handing the whole thing over to the RCMP. 
Will all RCMP communications still need to be vetted by Vic Toews as per his 2011 mandate? 
Will all subsequent questions from anyone else be greeted with the usual  'Can't talk about it because it's now under investigation' ?



ETA : From Kristy Kirkup, national affairs editor for Sun Media




On Duffy's email that after he was paid off,  he was "staying silent on orders from the Prime Minister's Office", Steve doesn't know anything about that : “Mr. Speaker, these are not matters that I am privy to” - a Privy Council reference, perhaps? - and besides "Mike Duffy is no longer a member of our caucus."

Was Duffy's non-cooperation with Deloitte after receiving payment from the PMO part of the deal?

Steve doesn't even try for that one : "Mr. Duffy received no money from the PMO or the taxpayers of Canada." 
No, Mr. Duffy is just the beneficiary of the extraordinary largesse of Steve's own chief of staff over an issue that "was hurting us politically." Duffy used the payoff to stop co-operating with auditors and that allowed an all too willing senate steering committee to use it as the excuse to whitewash their report.

Mulcair : "When the chief of staff of the Prime Minister, in the course of his functions from the Prime Minister's Office, gives $90,000 to shut up a sitting senator, that's out of the Prime Minister's Office."

Well done, Mulcair. Best question period ever.
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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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Updated Perps with perks and their 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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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.

Everybody loves a SIRCus

In response to media reports that CSIS had been complicit in the detention of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik in Sudan, outgoing CSIS director Jim Judd requested that CSIS watchdog and review panel, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, "investigate and report on the performance of the Service’s [CSIS's] duties and functions with respect to the case of Abousofian Abdelrazik at the earliest opportunity". That was in March 2009.

Three months later Federal Court Justice Russel Zinn ruled that CSIS was indeed "complicit in the detention" of Abdelrazik in Sudan. Then in September of this year, newly released CSIS documents revealed the spy agency's attempts to delay Abdelrazik's return to Canada long enough for the CIA to spirit him off to Guantanamo, even as Foreign Affairs diplomats were arranging for his return, making this the biggest known Canadian  intelligence agency scandal since Maher Arar.

So how's that full investigation by SIRC requested by Judd coming along then? 

Dead in the water apparently.

Steve promoted Dr. Arthur Porter, the SIRC committee member charged with leading the Abdelrazik investigation, to chair of the committee in June last year, and then accepted his resignation this month following a NaPo story regarding Dr Porter's offshore cash payment to a former Israeli arms trafficker - now acting as a lobbyist for the Russian Federation - to sell infrastructure deals to Sierra Leone where Porter has mining interests and holds the title of "His Excellency, Ambassador Plenipotentiary, Republic of Sierra Leone".

"I wish to state for the record that I have fulfilled with diligence my mandate," 

wrote Dr. Porter in his letter of resignation to Steve.


... which got me to wondering just what was so gosh-darned important in SIRC's mandate last year that it bumped the Abdelrazik investigation requested by CSIS right off the list.

From the Security Intelligence Review Committee 2010-2011 Annual Report
Checks and Balances : Viewing Security Intelligence Through the Lens of Accountability

The Lens of Accountability interested itself in five SIRC-initiated reviews and three public complaints.
The Reviews :

~ a pitch for "retooloing" SIRC to allow for "independent review" of Canada's other intelligence agencies as well as CSIS

~ "SIRC also followed through on its commitment to pay close attention to CSIS’s expanding foreign investigative activities. Although overseas operations unfold in unique circumstances and present different challenges, CSIS should strive to ensure that the management of its operations abroad mirrors, to the extent practicable, the standards of administration and account­ability that are maintained domestically."

~ "Today the Service is also reaching out to non-traditional partners, such as the private sector."

"In SIRC’s opinion, an effective strategy would involve identifying those sectors with the greatest potential to be of investigative value to the Service. ... the Service strives to engage and support the private sector’s security needs in other ways. Efforts are also underway to increase the number of security clearances for individuals in the private sector."

~ "an appreciation of the way in which the internet supports CSIS’s activities"
although it notes :

" At issue was the volume of information pertaining to young people being retained by CSIS as part of its operational reporting."

~ A positive review of CSIS’s cooperation "with a “Five Eyes” partner" - which could be either the US, UK, Australia, or NZ.

Note to SIRC : If you have to use evasive terminology like "a Five Eyes partner" in your "positive review" rather than actually name the country you are feeling positive about, it's not really much of a public account, is it?

~ "a positive impression of RCMP–CSIS cooperation"

"The relationship between CSIS and the RCMP, in particular, has moved to the forefront following the passage of the Anti-terrorism Act (2001). As a result of this legislation, CSIS and the RCMP have had to work more closely together"

~ "Canada is experiencing levels of espionage compa­rable to the height of the Cold War."

~ Afghan detainees.

" In particular, SIRC’s review found no indication that in the period during which CSIS conducted detainee interviews, CSIS officers posted to Afghanistan had any first-hand knowledge of the alleged abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees by Afghan authorities."

however :

"SIRC noted that CSIS did not comprehen­sively document its role in the interviews of Afghan detainees by keeping records that would confirm the numbers and details of all of the detainee interviews"

SIRC also handles citizen complaints against CSIS. This year three were investigated and written up, which included the following complaints :
CSIS failing to identify itself as CSIS, harrassment of family members, suggesting to interviewee that a lawyer was not necessary, delay in providing security assessment for a site access, and allegedly providing an "unjust, unfounded, and unethical" assessment to Citizenship and Immigration Canada regarding  a complainant's application for permanent  resident status.

Aside from providing some gentle advice, like that in its reports to Citizenship and Immigration Canada "the Service not include certain information unless it has been corroborated", SIRC did not find anything unduly alarming in its public report of the three out of 48 new and carried-over complaints.


I'm sure the four out of five health industry experts that comprise SIRC's review panel on CSIS did the best they could with their unwieldy $3-million Lens of Accountability. Unfortunately that lens is looking the other way in the case Abousfian Abdelrazik, the largest CSIS intelligence scandal since Maher Arar.
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Update : SIRC reviewed CSIS re Abdelrazik for their 2012-2013 report, covering the period from March 2003 to December 2004. 
It found "no indication that CSIS had requested Sudanese authorities to arrest or detain Abousfian Abdelrazik" , but that "CSIS inappropriately and, in contravention of CSIS policy, disclosed personal and classified information." Further, "in mid-2004 in preparation for Mr. Abdelrazik’s possible release, SIRC found that CSIS assessments to its government partners contained exaggerated and inaccurately conveyed information" and that "CSIS excessively reported, and hence retained in its operational databases, a significant amount of information not related to the threat, originating from individuals who were not targets."
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The Treasury Board President of Gazebos and Funny Funneling

Steve was evidently so pleased with ShamWow Tony Clement's ability to put one over on Auditor General Sheila Fraser by leaving no paper trail of the funneling of $50M of our tax dollars through his own riding office - money purportedly intended for G8 border security - that right after the election Steve made him the boss of all our money - President of the Treasury Board - responsible for ethics, transparency, accountability, and the financial and administrative management of government.

Collateral damage : the compromising of public servants from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Industry Canada, and Infrastructure Canada who may or may not have helped him do it. Now we'll never know. Certainly they denied their involvement to Sheila Fraser but they were there at the meetings with ShamWow Tony, the mayor, and the manager of the Deerhurst Resort when - as Minister of Pork, Gazebos, and Funny Funneling - Clement recommended 33 local projects to then Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Accountability John Baird, who approved 32 of them.

According to the new AG John Wiersema, apparently having a majority means never having to say you're sorry.

Hill Times . Toronto Star . Pogge. 
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Wednesday Update : Hill Times again.
Seems the municipal leaders in Tony's select gazebo-vetting committee awarded their own projects $41.4-million of the $50-million total. Municipalities not on the committee got to share the $2.5-million remainder.
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Bill C-300 : AWOL Libs were lobbied by mining industry

A week ago the Liberal Bill C-300, An Act respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries, went down to defeat 140 to 134 because 13 Liberals including Ignatieff, 4 Bloc, and 4 NDP skipped the vote.

According to Embassy Mag today, for the month prior to the vote, opposition MPs were lobbied by consultants hired by Barrick Gold, IAMGold, Vale Canada, the Mining Association of Canada, and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.

Barrick hired former Liberal cabinet minister Don Boudria, now a lobbyist with Hill and Knowlton, to target 15 Libs "multiple times" for two weeks - 13 of whom did not show up for the final vote.

The Liberal sponsor of the bill, John McKay, says he does not think that there will be "another attempt at a bill looking at corporate social responsibility for the mining sector until after another election."

You're shocked, I'm sure.
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G20 Martial Law - a few questions

We have always known in Canada that laws lying in wait to trash the Charter of Rights hover just beyond the sight lines of the courts. The Public Works Protection Act is just such a law, allowing, albeit for a limited time, otherwise illegal searches and seizures and arrests.

Here, constitutional lawyer Paul Cavalluzzo, lead commission council at the Walkerton and Maher Arar inquiries, goes through the act with Paul Jay of The Real News. Transcript here.

I have some further questions.

If I live within an arbitrarily designated "public works area", can Blackwater or a mall rent-a-cop or any other appointed "guard" legally enter my home and arrest me for attempting to deny them entry? Will they be armed?

If I don't consent to being ID'd and searched on my way to work, can I legally be prevented from going to work? I cannot prove this, as it is only anecdotal, but during the Vancouver Olympics, a contractor told me he lost an employee due to said employee being denied passage through Vancouver by the police for the duration of the Olympics for having written an anti-Olympics letter to the local paper that was never published.

If any of the protesters/shoppers/citizens arrested and detained in handcuffs for 24 hours and jammed in a 10 by 12 by 20 foot cage along with 40 other men are not formally charged and given their day in court, will there be no other opportunity to challenge these arbitrary Charter-free zones until the next time they are dusted off for a globalization bunfest?

And finally, why is Chief Bill Blair on the hot seat for having been given these extraordinary powers he didn't ask for when it was presumably the PMO that told the Ontario cabinet to ask for them?

Any responses from legal experts gratefully accepted.
In the meantime, the Toronto's Police Services Board, the public body which holds Toronto Police to account, predictably sees no need for a public inquiry.

Please support the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's petition to "repeal or amendment of the Public Works Protection Act to meet basic constitutional standards"
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Poilievre : "No one takes Ethics Committee summons seriously"

"At the end of the day, [Ethics Committee Chair]Paul Szabo and this kangaroo court have no credibility and no one takes their summons seriously."

So said Con MP Pierre Poilievre in August two years ago when he was only an associate member of the Ethics Committee.
Since becoming fully-fledged, and also Parliamentary Secretary to Steve, his job there is apparently to pipe up "Point of order" every few minutes like some demented Energizer bunny until the Chair finally cuts his mike.

Lib Wayne Easter's spirited response to John Baird's surprise appearance before the Ethics Committee on Tuesday in place of Dimitri Soudas as scheduled has already been well covered.

Chair Paul Szabo first let Baird speak, setting off an hour of angry motions to dismiss the usurper - interspersed with Poilievre's points! of! order! - versus the Con committee members dutifully bent over their brand new talking points on "ministerial responsibility for their staffers", carefully read aloud heads bowed down, when it was their turn to speak.
Eventually Szabo broke a tie vote over whether or not to let Baird stay and booted him out.

Well sure. After all, as Minister of Transport, Baird is not Soudas' boss and would not be able to answer any of the questions the committee was intending to ask Soudas, despite Baird's sinister hand waving about something he called "collective responsibility".
And as Bloc Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac pointed out, the last time a minister appeared before the committee on behalf of one of their staffers - that would be Christian Paradis, Minister of Asbestos - his idea of "ministerial responsibility" was to just blame the staffer.

Bloc Carole Freeman brought up committees' right to subpoena witnesses, reminding that Soudas

"is an ordinary citizen and should be treated as such. A house leader does not have the power to change existing rules simply by standing up in the House and making a statement."

But then there was another tie vote following that I haven't seen discussed.

What to do about the many named bureaucrats already scheduled to appear in the few weeks remaining before the committee last meets on June 22? And what to do if their ministers wanted to show up in their staffers' place?

Chair Szabo asked for a motion to give him authority to summon the witnesses already scheduled to appear ... if necessary ... even if it meant allowing those witnesses' ministers to come as substitutes in their stead.

A pretty weak motion but as he explained, they were waiting on an expected future ruling by the Speaker on such witness substitutions. And he was only asking for either the scheduled witness or his/her minister to appear if that's what was offered.

OK so it was an astoundingly weak motion to exercise parliamentary committees' right to summon witnesses, but you know what? That vote was tied up 5 to 5 - the Cons vs everyone else - and only passed because the Chair broke it by voting in favour.

Pierre Poilievre suggested what he called "a friendly amendment" to solve the impasse over the next scheduled witness :

"just replace the name of the political staffer in question with the name of the Minister."

Your moment of hideous irony : The work currently before the committee is looking into "allegations of systematic political interference by ministers' offices to block, delay, or obstruct the release of information to the public regarding the operation of government departments".
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Cons ban staff from testifying at committees

Obviously Con political staffers couldn't continue to rely a fire alarm going off every time they were summoned to testify before a parliamentary committee, so on Tuesday morning Government House leader Jay Hill will announce a new policy in the House of Commons exempting them from ever appearing at all.
[Jay Hill, amiable defender of the Cons 2007 manual on disrupting committees, once "lavished praise on the committee chairs who caused disruptions and admonished those who prefer to lead through consensus".]

"The Conservative cabinet has decided to ban its political staffers from appearing as witnesses before committees ....
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, explained the new policy Sunday during an appearance on CTV’s Question Period.
“Ministers are the ones who are accountable and answer to Parliament,” said Mr. Soudas"

That would be the same Dimitri Soudas whose appearance before the House of Commons ethics committee was sadly pre-empted last Tuesday by a fire alarm bell going off just moments before he was due to testify about the government's crap handling of Access to Information requests.

Yes, it's only the ministers who are accountable to Parliament, but as Accidental Deliberations points out:

"The Cons' new policy is that all committee questions must be directed toward the lone group of people who can't be subpoenaed to testify."

Well, Steve has never been overly fond of either Parliament or its committees, has he?

We will of course still be hearing from government staffers through the Cons' new hasbara program for Facebook and message boards :

"The next time you post an opinion in an online forum or a Facebook group message board, don't be surprised if you get a rebuttal from a federal employee.

The government is looking for ways to monitor online chatter about political issues and correct what it perceives as misinformation.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has paid [Social Media Group] $75,000 "to monitor social activity and help identify ... areas where misinformation is being presented and repeated as fact," Simone MacAndrew, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

The firm alerts the government to questionable online comments and then employees in Foreign Affairs or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who have recently been trained in online posting, point the authors to information the government considers more accurate."

Foreign Affairs employees "recently trained in online posting ..."
Ho boy. Are they all gonna be called Bob from Burnaby or will we have to figure who the bots are for ourselves? Bot from Burnaby - coming soon to a Facebook page near you.
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h/t Waterbaby by email
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Chairman Braun before the Rights and Democracy committee.

The Rights and Democracy chair, vice-chair, and two board members got their say before the Foreign Affairs committee today.

The main problem, said Vice-Chair Jacques Gautier, is that too much power accrued to the former now deceased chair Remy Beauregard, and the organization also lacked transparency, accountability, and oversight and just did not follow the rules.

Item : In the past few weeks, the new recalibrated R&D board has hired 1)the law firm Borden Ladner Gervais, 2)the security firm Groupe Sirco, 3)the auditing firm Deloitte and Touche, 4)the PR firm Prima Communications, and 5)a new CEO.

Item : "Under current rules, the agency is required to call for tenders for contracts worth more than $10,000; must seek at least three tenders; and justify the choice “taking into account the price, the services offered and their quality."

NDP Paul Dewar was annoyed docs had not been supplied to the committee as requested. Were these contracts for more than $10,000?
After considerable prodding from Dewar to the effect that it was just not credible that an acting president have no idea what five contracts handed out under his watch might be worth, Vice Chair and interim President Gauthier eventually answered: Yes. Certainly more than $10,000.
Dewar : And were they tendered?
Gauthier : Um, no.

Oh dear.
But no worries. A week ago Chairman Aurel Braun recommended a bylaw change which would exempt the R&D president from having to follow those rules when "engaging agents, consultants and advisors."
Probably will need to be backdated to cover these five contracts from back in January and February though. And would this not in itself constitute the dreaded "accruing more power and control to the president"?

Chairman Aurel Braun's largely incoherent answers bore little relevance to the questions put to him but did at every opportunity inveigh against past R&D funding given to Al Haq in the West Bank, Al Mezan in Gaza, and B'Tselem in Israel, which he called "terrorist organizations which pretend to be human rights orgs". Al Haq, according to Braun, is a front for terrorists and also money has gone to the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and this is apparently anti-Israel and a bad thing. War crimes were mentioned, he said, and other things "not within the conscience of the Canadian people."

Libs Bob Rae and Bernard Patry and Bloc Johanne Deschamps both try to nail this anti-Israel business down, pointing out that the Israeli NGO B'Tselem is universally respected by virtually every government in Europe and the Israeli army, but as Board member and B'nai Brith lawyer David Matas pointed out while advising the committee to read his book - presumably Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism - "the Palestinians are called civilians but they throw stones."

Honourable mention for skating around in circles as far away from the puck as possible goes to Con Peter Goldring in collaboration with former Con candidate, missionary, and R&D board member Brad Farquhar. Goldring asked about political party development - some countries have 40 or 50 parties! - and how about Haiti, huh? Haiti has a serious lack of understanding about how democracy works. Farquhar was more than happy to answer at length a question having nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. What is an election platform? he asks rhetorically. "In Tajikistan we had to teach them how to go out and doorknock and they weren't sure they were even allowed to do that. The transition from a former totalitarian state to a democratic state ... . We brought people from Bolivia to help in Haiti..." Oh look - time's up!

Overall the board's statements were remarkably short on the "documented facts" they kept insisting were their only concern despite the fact they hadn't brought any, not counting Matas' book. Braun charged that 46 out of 48 R&D staff who signed a letter calling for the resignations of board members were possibly coerced into signing it in exchange for a "rushed collective agreement". Much was made of the fact the board was not advised of the collective agreement. Mention was made of a contract awarded to a past R&D employee. Braun blamed the staff for the break-in and the stolen computers. The one thing none of them much wanted to discuss was Tuesday's gong show editorial written by the fifth R&D board member Marco Navarro-Genie not present at the meeting today.

Grisly blow-by-blow ably live-blogged by Kady.
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Man of Steel vs Government of Silly Putty

On Friday the government adjourned for three months because they have to get started on their barbie bunfests for next fall's election and hell there's not much going on in Canada right now anyway, right?

Today we learn :

"In a significant policy shift, the Canadian government now believes that telling the country's taxpayers the future cost of the war in Afghanistan would be a threat to national security.
... Julie Jansen, the director of the military's access branch, cited "the defence of Canada or any state allied" with it, in justifying the withholding of the figures for the three next fiscal years."

Three years? WTF?

"The military's new secrecy comes after the financial cost of the mission became a major issue for several days during last fall's federal election campaign."

Right. That would the report from our fearless first-ever Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, aka Jennifer's Man 'o Steel, the guy who .. well, let's let Jennifer explain :

"Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released his accounting of the true costs of the Afghanistan War , which to nobody's surprise turned out to be somewhat higher than Stephen Harper's guestimate."

Page's first report, released during last fall's election, calculated that the cost of the Afghanistan mission not including military equipment will be about $18.1 billion by 2011.

The second, published shortly before Diamond Jim Flaherty vowed there was absolutely no chance of a deficit in 2009, projected a serious deficit for 2009.

Parliamentary Librarian William Young and House and Senate Speakers Peter Milliken and Noel Kinsella referred to these corrections of the government's mistakes as evidence that Page was "exceeding his mandate".

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....Wait for it ... don't rush it ...

Parliament wants to gut first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office's independence, say observers

"The Joint Library of Parliament Committee's report will gut Canada's first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office of its transparency and independence and is a simple power play to keep Kevin Page in line because he embarrassed the federal Department of Finance, says Parliamentary observers and some MPs.

"What they've done is put Kevin Page in a box, haven't they?" Concordia University professor Jim McLean told The Hill Times last week.
"The whole idea of the Parliamentary budget officer was to have an arm's length assessment, to have a person and a group backing up that person of highly-qualified people who could make independent assessments and do it in a transparent fashion. Independence and transparency has been stripped out of this, all together."

McLean : "Twelve people in an office embarrassed the thousand thinkers in the Department of Finance and that's where the politics of the whole thing started to work against Kevin Page."

The muzzling of Kevin Page is a bipartisan effort with both Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Peter Milliken wanting him reined in :

"The parliamentary library operates on a solicitor-client basis. This means any research the library collects for MPs and senators is "privileged" and can be withheld at their request. As an adjunct of the library, Mr. Page's reports would be done for MPs and committees who then can could use the information as they want."

Privileged. Withheld at their request. As they want.

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Well it will make a nice change from all that transparency and accountability we've been dealing with lately.

McLean : "the office is going to be buried, very, very deep."

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Time for Jennifer to fire up her forces again.

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Welcome to the Banana Republic of Canada

In the wake of the O'Connor and Iacobucci public inquiries into the role CSIS played in the torture of Canadians overseas, a new government rulebook of guidelines was issued to CSIS and blandishments were offered by the ministers in charge.

What's in the new rulebook? Pogge blogged yesterday about a copy obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act that is so heavily censored it is impossible to tell whether the new guidelines adequately address the recommendations laid out by O'Connor and Iacobucci to prevent future torture such as that visited upon Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin. As Pogge wrote :

"When representatives of government and its agencies assure us that they're playing by the rules, it's a little difficult to judge the accuracy of their claims when we're not allowed to know what those rules are."

This was also the position our elected representatives on the Committee on Public Safety and National Security found themselves in back in March during its Review of the Findings and Recommendations of the Iacobucci and O'Connor Reports. Despite persistent straightforward questions from the Liberals and Bloc members - Do we condone torture? Do we still use information derived from torture? - the dodging and weaving from CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O'Brian left these questions largely unanswered.

A brief media flurry resulted from his opening statements that there is no absolute ban on the use of information derived from torture when "lives are at stake", but this was immediately laid to rest the next day when the word "knowingly" was added by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan", as in "we don't knowingly use info extracted by torture". It's the Don't ask, Don't tell Intel.

As O'Brian explained to the committee : "Three individuals are suing the government for several hundred million dollars, therefore we cannot discuss anything that would indicate that the government is in agreement with Iacobucci's findings."

He is aided in this avoidance of accountability by the six Con members on the committee running interference on tough questions from the Libs and the Bloc. From my notes of that session -not exact quotes :

Maria Mourani, Bloc : I'd like to ask about our questioning of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo ...
Dave MacKenzie, Con : Point of order : what's the relevance?
Mourani : Khadr was tortured and Canadians paid CSIS to contribute.
Chair Garry Breitkreuz, Con : I don't understand the relevance.
Mourani : I want to know did CSIS use information from Khadr obtained under torture?
MacKenzie : Point of order - Mourani is on a fishing trip.
I'll just give you a moment to let that one sink in.

Mourani : I'll rephrase the question : Is information obtained under torture?
Chair, Breitkreuz : Witnesses cannot comment on individual cases.
Mark Holland, Lib : But the questiuon is central to this inquiry.
Rathgeber, Con : Point of order. Not relevant. Stick to Iacobucci and O'Connor reports.

Which, you will recall, O'Brian has already said cannot be commented on due to ongoing litigation.

Menard, Bloc : Mourani is right. This is central to the O'Connor and Iacobucci reports. What we want to know is: Is torture still endorsed?
Mourani : Answer my question.

O'Brian, eventually : "I reject the premise of the question"

And thus CSIS informs elected members of parliament - the peoples' representatives - sitting on a committee whose mandate is to provide public oversight on intelligence agencies - to stuff it.


A couple of years ago I was sitting in a bar in the States discussing politics with some university students. "How are things up there after the coup?" one of them asked.
Me : *blink* *blink*
"Perhaps you don't call it a coup," said another helpfully.
We not only don't call it a coup, we don't even ever refer to it.
In 2006 as Liberal PM Paul Martin was set to be re-elected, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli went public with a criminal investigation into rumoured leaks of the Liberal decision not to tax income trusts and that was the end of the Libs. Nothing came of the investigation save one lone bureaucrat pocketing some loot. No inquiry was ever launched into why the head of the national police force, himself later disgraced over Arar, in effect threw the outcome of a national election.

And exactly which intelligence agencies are responsible for the continued incarceration of Omar Khadr and the ongoing banishment of Abousfian Abdelrazik? Well we don't really know.

What we do know is that we have lost public oversight over our police and intelligence agencies. Isn't this the kind of thing we used to sneer at "banana republics" for?
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Man of Steel vs. the Incredible Shrinking Mandate

One of the crowning glories of Steve's Five Priorities Four Pillars Three Little Pigs Accountability Act was his paean to Canada's Gnu Government transparency - the creation of the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide independent analysis of the national economy and the government's fiscal position.

First budget officer Kevin Page, or "Man of Steel" as Jennifer calls him, has produced two reports since March, both critical of the government.
The first, released during the election, calculated that the cost of the Afghanistan mission not including military equipment will be about $18.1 billion by 2011.
The second, published shortly before Diamond Jim Flaherty vowed there would absolutely be no chance of a deficit next year, projected a deficit for next year.

"In his economic statement, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty projected a budget surplus of $100 million for 2009-10 based on the sale of about $2 billion in assets that he didn't identify."

Mr. Flatulence has since reluctantly come around to Kevin Page's assessment, predicting a $15-billion deficit, only to be contradicted himself by Steve who is now calling for a $20 to $30-billion deficit.

So it won't come as much of a surprise to hear that in the matter of the Department of Finance vs the Parliamentary Budget Office, old Kev has had his budget frozen -( h/t Steve ) - presumably because accurate financial forecasts are a dime a dozen lately in Steve's Fiscal Funhouse.

Actually it's a testament to Mr. Page's perseverence that he has got this far. Both Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Peter Milliken want him reined in, arguing that the "budget office is simply an extension of the services the Library [of Parliament] already offers."

"The parliamentary library operates on a solicitor-client basis. This means any research the library collects for MPs and senators is "privileged" and can be withheld at their request. As an adjunct of the library, Mr. Page's reports would be done for MPs and committees who then can could use the information as they want."

Privileged. Witheld at their request. As they want.

In 2006 a document at the Library of Parliament outlined the various forms the Parliamentary Budget Office could take and decided it should not be granted the same independence enjoyed by the Auditor General. Evidently no one informed the Man of Steel.

Hey Harpercrites, how's that famous Accountability Act coming along?

Not content with merely taking months to release heavily redacted documents obtained via freedom-of-information requests, the Cons have decided that when it comes to cabinet ministers, they would prefer it if you didn't ask questions at all.

Tories do turnabout, go to court to block access to ministerial offices
"Opening the offices of cabinet ministers to scrutiny under freedom-of-information legislation could compromise sensitive material that ought to remain private, the Harper government is telling Federal Court.
The argument is a sharp turnaround for the federal Conservatives, who complained bitterly in opposition about Liberal secrecy and vowed to reform the Access to Information Act to fix the problem."

And just what case examples are the Cons using to illustrate what a terrible violation of ministerial privacy such freedom-of-info requests really are?
Four access requests, three of which originated with Alliance and Con party members.

"The Conservatives promised, in their last election platform, to bring in amendments making it clear that cabinet offices come under the law, but they have failed to deliver on the pledge."

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.

All yr elekshnz is belong 2 us

Not this time, buddy.

Major kudos to Blogging a Dead Horse for his post a week ago : "Conservatives begin replacing opposition MPs with the Pod People" The link to BC Con Caucus Chair and MP Dick Harris's little presser on appointing an unelected Con party hack to virtually replace the elected NDP MP Nathan Cullen kicked off a blogstorm that eventually woke up the paper(tiger)media.

Frank Frink has an excellent DKos diary post up, detailing the whole affair from BaDH, through the blogswarm to :

Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver Sun : "Realistic" Conservatives try to bypass an elected MP.
"Throwing in the waste bin the principles that make representative government in Canada function"

Globe&Mail : Want services? Forget your MP, Tory chair says.
"Dick Harris tells radio listeners to go to Conservative candidate instead of NDP MP."

and CTV : Tories backtrack from candidate as representative

The 'candidate' in question intends to run as a Con in the next election, but is currently just a mayor.
Attempting to gain distance from Harris's maneuver, PMO spokesman Ryan Sparrow said, "He just kind of did that himself.''

I see. The BC Chair of the Conservative Caucus has gone all Lee Harvey Oswald on the party.
Unfortunately for Sparrow's little disclaimer, bloggers have already discovered other such examples of unelected fake Con MPs. What about those Pod People? I guess they are all acting on their own too.

Dear G&M : The frontpage we'd rather see

Accidental Deliberations - The early edition
Ken Chapman explains how it worked.
.Red Tory annoys me with a much superior photoshop