Thing is - Paul Calandra is right

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Paul Calandra responds :  

Harper's Parliamentary Secretary Paul Calandra is pleased to use Israel as a shield to avoid answering Mulcair's questions in the House of Commons about Canadian troop deployment in Iraq and we are all rightly appalled at both him and Andrew Scheer.

And yet ... thing is - Calandra is right. 

Questions about the current Canadian mission in Iraq *are* always about "Israel", the Cons' preferred collective term for the various neocon government officials that they like there. 

In 1996, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who went on to attain key positions in the George W. Bush administration, were working in an Israeli thinktank for Benjamin Netanyahu on Clean Break : A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It recommended reshaping the Middle East through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and "the containment of Syria by engaging in proxy warfare". Chaos and destabilization of the whole region, according to their "skittles theory", is the entire point. 

How's that working out so far? When will our Con neocons outgrow their slavering support for a two decades old strategy written in Israel and all the horror of endless reprisals and sectarian warfare it has wreaked on the world since?

Here, on Sept 12 2002 prior to the US invasion of Iraq and the Second Intifitada, Harper's BFF Netanyahu testifies to the US House of Representatives that Saddam Hussein is working on weapons of mass destruction and atomic bombs and urges them to invade Iraq to protect the USA. Nine year *cakewalk* ensues.

Calandra is right that the Con answer to questions about Canadian troop deployment to Iraq is to "stand up for Israel" - although in all likelihood, reading off his little paper from the PMO, he doesn't know why.

Update : The further adventures of Paul Calandra... Power and Politics tonight. 

Evan Solomon : "Do you think it’s your responsibility when you’re answering questions on behalf of the Prime Minister to at least make an attempt to answer on the topic you’re asked, as opposed to completely changing the topic?"

Calandra : "Well, I disagree with you that the topic was changed. The question was about foreign affairs, the question was about our fight against ISIL"

Meanwhile, Harper chose to announce a US request for further Canadian military involvement in Iraq from New York in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal before a live audience at Goldman Sachs.
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Friday update : Calandra gives weepy apology to the House and takes full responsibility.

"But sources tell CBC News that Calandra was handed material by Alykhan Velshi, director of issues management in the PMO, during the Conservatives' daily preparation for question period and was told to use it in his answer no matter what question was asked in the House."

So if CBC's sources are correct, first they ordered him to do it; then they made him take the fall for it and lie about it. 

Alykhan Velshi - American Enterprise Institute intern, dcomm to Jason Kenney and Baird, Ethical Oil head, Harper's planning director.
Awesome. 

In 2005 Alykhan was an intern at AEI, home to some of the scholars behind the Clean Break strategy for Netanyahu. 

At the time they wrote it in 1997, Velshi literally was in "short pants" but he has since written articles advocating their position re support for Israel and pre-emptive war on Iraq.

Photo : Velshi with Jeane Kirkpatrick at AEI.
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Laurie Hawn does Brad Butt

In the House on Monday, Con MP Laurie Hawn's memory appears to have picked up where Brad Butt's left off, repeating Butt's earlier allegations - later retracted - about voter information cards being picked up from apartment building lobbies for fraudulent voting purposes. 
Hawn, as per my vid excerpt above :

"In the 2006 election, I was called personally and offered hundreds of voter cards that had been left in apartment buildings and so on. Like an idiot, I said, “No, we don't do that sort of thing”. I should have said, “Yes, come on down”, and had the police waiting."

But according to Hill Times last night, in light of Mr. Hawn's 8 year old allegations :

"Elections Canada told The Hill Times the voter information card was not accepted as voter ID in the 2006 election, when it was used solely as mail-out information to voters about their poll locations and was not required at the polls even as a way to help polling officials direct voters to their polling station ballot box."

As it happens, on April 27 2006, the very year in question and three months after the election, Hawn brought up this same allegation with Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley at the PROC Committee. 
Hawn :

"During the last campaign, we got an e-mail from a prominent Edmonton lawyer about the fact that many individuals were enumerated at their downtown offices instead of at their homes. One individual bragged about how many times he had gotten to vote for my opponent based on the number of leases he had in the riding and therefore the number of voter cards he received. That number was fourteen."

Hawn had a team stay up all night to check into this and they uncovered "300 apparently spurious registrations and several hundred suspicious ones", including "karaoke bars, lingerie stores, dance lounges" :

"We found 100 non-existent addresses in Edmonton's downtown core. In some cases the addresses listed were fictional residences between two genuine buildings. We found hundreds of families registered to vote out of their law offices, medical offices, accounting offices, Government of Canada offices.

In some cases there may have been genuine errors involved, but in other cases married couples, including their children, were registered to vote out of high-rise office spaces. Dozens of people were registered to vote out of office towers, but suite numbers were not listed, making the addresses look like normal residential addresses. Some people were registered to vote in other ridings as well as ours. In some cases people were registered to vote only in Edmonton Centre when it was clear they lived in another riding. One of those included a candidate.

Dozens of people were registered to vote out of storage yards, and yet there's no legitimate way anybody can be registered to vote out of a storage yard. Eighteen people were registered to vote out of one truck stop. People were registered to vote out of karaoke bars, lingerie stores, dance lounges, galleries; you get the picture.

We had other observations with respect to the voter cards. Some nationalities routinely get multiple voter cards."

Then he gets round to voter info cards left in lobbies :

A lot of people in apartment buildings are fairly transient, and voter cards get left in stacks in lobbies of apartment buildings. The cards can then be picked up and used by anyone. Since we don't require identification at the polling station, anybody can be anybody. This election and last, in fact, we got phone calls--anonymous, naturally--offering us extra voter cards, for money, naturally. We, naturally, refused.

Voter cards for money? That's new.

After Kingsley explained he requires a written complaint and cannot investigate on the basis of just hearsay, he turned to voters having addresses in office buildings:

... for purposes of the income tax system, some people register their addresses as their accountant's, so we were getting the accountant's address as a genuine address. We were able to purge the lists of these before the election.

and then to Hawn's complaint about voter info cards left in lobbies. Remember, this is in 2006 :

"There is no voter card in this country. It's a voter information card. It's information that is provided. That card does not entitle one to vote. It certainly does not entitle one to vote multiple times."  

Undaunted, Hawn comes back to his lawyer example again later on :

"The example that I used in the beginning was that of a lawyer, who clearly knows better, bragging that he voted fourteen times for my opponent in the 2004 election because he had a voter card for each of the fourteen properties that he leased in the riding."

Huh. This must be another lawyer that Hawn's "prominent Edmonton lawyer" told him about.

CBC yesterday :

"Hawn's campaign actually issued a news release in January of 2006 to announce it had filed a complaint with the Commissioner of Elections Canada about "massive voter list irregularities" in his riding of Edmonton Centre, alleging that non-residential buildings or "non-existent" addresses were listed on the voter rolls. 

But the 2006 release does not make mention of an offer for voter identification cards."

Or money for turning them over. That's odd. Perhaps the Opposition could ask him about that today. Back to CBC :

About a week before the 2006 election, Hawn's campaign gave a list of suspect names found on the voters list to Elections Canada.

Hawn's campaign office "made such a stink about it" that Elections Canada put on extra staff in Edmonton Centre on voting day. Hawn won that election. 

A year later in January 2007, Elections Canada issued a release about the results of its investigation into Hawn's complaint. It found 93 voters who used what it called "non-residential addresses" and reports it interviewed "most of these electors."

The upshot of the investigation was that 23 voters who did not live in Edmonton Centre nonetheless voted there. Elections Canada found that all had "updated" their addresses, although the report doesn't say when that happened. The report says none voted twice and nor was any link found between them.

Perhaps because of Hawn's complaint, the report goes on to say, "On election day, electors listed at potential non-residential addresses, including these 21, were highlighted on the lists of electors, and election officers obtained proof of residence from these electors before they voted."

Blithering idiot parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Paul Calandra :

told the House that in the 2006 election, as a scrutineer for the Conservative Party, he had seen his dead mother's name on a list of voters who were recorded as having already voted.

"She had actually passed away in 2005, and when I asked the person why her name was checked off the list, she assured me that my mother had been in earlier in the day to vote. When I explained to her that was not possible, I was ushered out of the polling station," Calandra said.

Reached by phone late Tuesday, Calandra said he made a mistake when he said he was a scrutineer in that election. 

Sigh. Well, it is Calandra after all.

In 2007, new rules stipulated voters must provide specific ID, such as driver's licences, utility bills or other forms of identification, in order to cast a ballot.

For the 2011 election, the voter information cards were permitted to be used for proof of address, but only for specified groups, such as aboriginals, students and seniors in assisted living or retirement homes.

The Fair Elections Act [contrary to everyone but the Cons] eliminates the use of the voter information card..

Thursday update : Elections expert Harry Neufeld schools Laurie Hawn in 2 minute clip in PROC committee.
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CSEC : Spy vs. WiFi

So what exactly have we learned here from this 2012 CSEC pilot project that tracked wireless devices across airports, hotels, conference centres, coffee shops, and libraries, starting from a "single Canadian airport WiFi IP address" and "two weeks worth of IP-ID data" from a "Special Canadian Source", using ">300,000 active IDs over two weeks" in a "modest size city" as a control group?

1.  As Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, CSEC, and CSEC watchdog commissioner Plouffe have all now explained to us, CSEC wasn't "tracking" these Canadians because that would be illegal and our privacy is important to them.

2. If you haven't been issued a special decoder ring providing a CSECret definition of the words "tracking" and "metadata", whose fault is that?

3. If you are a hypothetical kidnapper from a rural area coming to the big city to make your three ransom phone calls - carefully spaced exactly 40 hours apart as seen in the nice CSEC powerpoint spreadsheet - at least try to blend in with the rest of the internet by forwarding some cat pictures around as well so your lone ransom calls don't stick out like a sore thumb.

If you don't much care for forwarding cat pictures, use a friggin' payphone.

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Sat AM update : For those of you wondering what the fuck Calandra meant in the House yesterday when he called Glenn Greenwald, co-journalist on the CBC exposé, "a porn spy" - it's the Canadian nonsense version of "espionage pornographer", used two weeks ago by American Enterprise Institute's Marc Thiessen to describe whistleblower Edward Snowden.  

I guess the PMO thought Thiessen's version sounded too elitist.    h/t Techdirt

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Sun AM update : Ryan Gallagher, one of the three journos on the original CBC piece, parses the CSEC and gov reaction. 

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The always incisive Lux Ex Umbra looks at how we should interpret CSEC's mandate now. 

If, as CSEC seems to maintain, its collection of metadata is both legally within its mandate and likely to be upheld by the courts, then it would appear :

1. there is no upper limit to collection of that data
2. the section of its mandate referring to not directing its operations "at Canadians or any person in Canada" does not apply, and  
3. given that part 3 of CSEC's mandate is to assist CSIS, the RCMP, CBSA, and other intelligence agencies, do those agencies require a separate warrant to access CSEC's metadata collection?

And a question of my own - Does this metadata automatically get shared with FiveEyes?

Or to put it more dramatically - is Skynet operational now?

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"Black shroud of secrecy" Walk of Shame

Yesterday, led by Harper's Parliamentary Secretary Paul Calandra, all seven Con MPs on the Ethics Committee voted to go in camera so the Canadian public wouldn't see them vote against conducting an investigation into what happened to those disappearing/reappearing emails of former PMO legal advisor Ben Perrin in the Senate scandal. 

This is the Ethics Committee, the Ethics Committee, and the Con members didn't want to be seen publicly covering up for the PMO.
With a majority on committee, their motion to hide out in what committee chair Pat Martin called "the black shroud of secrecy" passed 7-4. 



Chair Pat Martin : 

"I am struggling to see what possible justification, Mr. Calandra, you could have for asking this particular item of business to be moved in camera. The in-camera rule, as I understand it, is that it's to be used in cases of national security, invasion of privacy, commercial interests. It's not supposed to be the default position to save embarrassment to the government. 

[The public] have a right to know what their legislators are doing, and they have a right to know how their legislators are voting."

 Shame on all of those Cons above. 


A second black shroud of secrecy was revealed today by anonymous Hill whistleblower, Nanker Phelge - a lifetime Conflict of Interest, Loyalty, and Confidentiality Agreement gagging government staffers from ever disclosing what goes on in their ministry, even though their MPs are not similarly gagged.

Staffers must sign it in order to receive pay increases. At least one has refused so far : 

Self-muzzled Con MPs on the Ethics Committee at top, take note : This is what integrity looks like.

Perhaps we should drop them all a line reminding them about that :

paul.calandra@parl.gc.ca    jacques.gourde@parl.gc.ca   colin.mayes@parl.gc.ca    
earl.dreeshen@parl.gc.ca   John.Carmichael@parl.gc.ca   pat.davidson@parl.gc.ca
tilly.oneillgordon@parl.gc.ca

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Thursday Update : And on twitter :
https://twitter.com/PaulCalandra     https://twitter.com/JacquesGourde 
https://twitter.com/earl_dreeshen    https://twitter.com/JohnBCarmichael         
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Paul Calandra attacks Glenn Greenwald and CBC

I think Calandra read off his bit of paper from Steve rather well today, don't you? 
Love the bit about how :

"CBC only admitted to their cash-for-news scheme after The Wall Street Journal forced it out of them"

...  by cleverly reading Greenwald's byline alongside those of Greg Weston and Ryan Gallagher at the top of the CBC article.

A byline that has also graced the pages of The Guardian and the New York Times, where, presumably, Greenwald also got paid as a journalist.

And I'm sure the actual subject matter of the CBC article :

New Snowden docs show U.S. spied during G20 in Toronto 

"Stephen Harper's government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.  

An NSA briefing note describes the American agency's operational plans at the Toronto summit meeting and notes they were "closely co-ordinated with the Canadian partner."

had nothing at all to do with monkeynuts using his parliamentary privilege to refer to constitutional lawyer/author/journalist Glenn Greenwald as a "Brazilian-based former porn industry executive". 

Transcript ... for Steve's scrapbook : 
Mr. Paul Calandra, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister :

Mr. Speaker, the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices make clear that and I quote : 

To ensure we maintain our independence, we do not pay for information from a source in a story.  

When CBC’s The National aired a report about U.S. activities during the G8 and G20, neither Peter Mansbridge nor Greg Weston disclosed that they had paid their source, Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is a Brazilian based former porn industry executive, now assisting Edward Snowden leak national security information.  

CBC only admitted to their cash for news scheme after The Wall Street Journal forced it out of them. CBC is trying to justify the violation of their own ethical standards by claiming that Greenwald is a *freelancer*. 

Mr. Speaker Greenwald has strong and controversial opinions about national security and of course, that's his right, but when CBC pays for news, we have to ask why furthering Glenn Greenwald’s agenda and lining his Brazilian bank account more important than maintaining the public broadcaster’s journalistic integrity?

h/t Canadian Cynic for this link to Greenwald's blistering debunking of the unfortunate WSJ article referred to by Calandra :
 http://utdocuments.blogspot.ca/2013/11/wall-street-journals-alistair-macdonald.html
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