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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RoboCon : Cross-border election shopping

A Republican operative convicted of perpetrating election phone fraud for the Republican National Committee told interviewer Stephen Maher that "fraudulent calls in the last Canadian election are likely an American import" and a "fairly sophisticated operation".


Allen Raymond wrote a book about his stint as a GOP dirty trickster called How to Rig an Election in which he explains the use of tactics like phone jamming political opponents - hey, did Elections Canada ever investigate the over 10,000 phone jamming calls used to disrupt the NDP's online leadership vote this year ? - as well as harassment live calls intended to discourage opponents from voting at all. 


Raymond says he was approached for the illegal phone work by an RNC field director he knew called Jim Tobin, a regional chairman of George Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
The RNC spent years and millions of dollars defending Tobin through umpteen court cases and appeals to choke off the flow of election fraud charges at just Raymond. When Raymond realized he was going under the bus alone, he talked.


Today the Ottawa Citizen and the G&M both report Elections Canada has confirmed 'Pierre Poutine' launched his fraudulent robocalls from the Guelph Con campaign election office.
Stephen Maher explains on CTV here.

It was Mr. Creosote on the Front Porch with a chequebook

Poor old Mr Creosote.
Steve sent his parliamentary secretary out into the House two days in a row last week to claim the Libs spent "millions of dollars" in the last election hiring a foreign voter telemarketing company with offices in North Dakota - which turned out not to be the case.

Then he put in a bizarre appearance on CBC to insist the Con Party only ever uses Canadian firms but deflected questions about their use by individual Con MPs.

Now of course it turns out to be Mr Creosote and 13 other Cons who hired an anti-choice US Republican voter contact firm, Front Porch Strategies, which made thousands of calls from Ohio in the last election and prints gushy editorials on their website about Steve : “the most powerful conservative leader in the Americas.”
Here Front Porch boasts of their success in the last Canadian election  :

“In May’s federal elections, Front Porch Strategies won all 14 of their races.”

with the help of Con MP Rick Dykstra's campaign manager Jim Ross, who also works for Front Porch as the Canadian liaison.

Today in the House the Mr Creosote got the job of demanding that the Libs release all records of calls made on their behalf during the last election, but stated the Cons have no intention of doing likewise. His reasoning?  

 “No, because obviously our party is not behind the calls. We know that." 

Meanwhile, Guy Giorno, Con campaign boss and former Steve chief of staff, condemns the recent voter suppression techniques as a “despicable, reprehensible practice,” and says he really hopes Elections Canada can get to the bottom of this problem in Guelph. 
Um, so we're back to just Guelph again, Guy? 
We hope EC can get to the bottom of it too, even though they will have to manage it without the additional investigative powers Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand requested to do the job but was denied in a secret vote by the majority of Cons on the PROC parliamentary committee a week ago.

NaPo quotes Giorno yesterday :

Tory staff couldn’t make ‘despicable’ robocalls without party knowing: campaign boss

Sigh. The plausible deniability defence again.
Once more with feeling ...

Aaron Lee Wudrick, now a Campaign Research Inc employee and campaign manager to Con MP Peter Braid (K-W), speaking about the effectiveness of dirty tricks in Con campus orgs in 2009  :

Don't think that the Party doesn't like that, because they do. They're things that will help the Party, but it looks like it's an organically-grown organization and it just stimulated from the grassroots spontaneously. They love that stuff. And they don't have to bear the burden of having any of it attached to their name."

Update : Briony Penn : I was the first robocalls victim
Yeah, we remember that one around here.
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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."

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Gutter politics, you say?

So the government which used the private medical records of Vets activist Sean Bruyea and Vets Review Board member Harold Leduc to smear them, and the private government correspondence of diplomat Richard Colvin to smear him - the same government which defended its dirty phone tricks campaign as "vital free speech" according to Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan - is now going all Angry Baird that someone twittered already publicly available info about Toews in response to his Awful Access internet spying Act.

Really?

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews wants an investigation into someone repeating stuff about him that was already published in the MSM nearly four years ago?

What an absolutely awesome example of how they would use their Awful Access Act.
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Saturday. Updates from my betters :
CBC : Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother
Canadian Privacy Law Blog : The hidden gag order of Bill C-30

The very funny Tabatha Southey : If only Tory caucus walls could talk 

Jeff Jedras : Vikileaks and the death of the journalist as news gatekeeper

Not Quite Unhinged : Stop This Amateur IP Tracing Bullshit Now 

404 System Error : #OpKillBillz C-30


Dave and Boris , Dr. Dawg , Montreal Simon, Jeff Jedras , Dammit Janet!, Jymn, and Jymn 

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Campaign Research Con cats are out of the bag

[Tuesday update below]

Campaign Research client and House Speaker Andrew Scheer ruled it "reprehensible" while Campaign Research client and Con House Leader Peter Van Loan defended it as "vital free speech", but Campaign Research cofounder Nick Kouvalis put it best when he described his firm's now infamous phone calls to Lib MP Irwin Cotler's constituents :  

“We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it.”

Since 2003. For 39 Conservative candidates in the last federal election alone.

Kouvalis, who managed Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's successful campaign, was also election day chair for Kitchener-Waterloo Con MP Peter Braid.

Other Campaign Research staff currently include the other co-founder Richard Ciano*** now president of the Ontario Con Party, and Aaron Lee-Wudrick, campaign manager for Con MP Peter Braid. 

In 2009, Ciano, Wudrick and Braid participated in a series of workshops hosted by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association and the Preston Manning's Manning Centre for Building Democracy, ** (see update below) where Ciano was Executive Director of Practical Politics til Feb 2010 . At one such training session in February 2009, Wudrick and  Ryan O'Connor, 9th VP of the Ontario Con Party, were taped instructing students to set up Con-friendly "shell organizations" and "front groups" :
Wikileaks : 

"With the apparent support of representatives from both the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and the Conservative Party of Canada, the OPCCA is attempting to covertly influence the political climate of Ontario's university campuses. 

Presenters and participants are caught on tape advocating for the creation of front groups for the Conservative Party to masquerade as non-partisan grassroots organizations, influencing the political discourse on campus, stacking student elections with Party members, and conspiring to defeat non-profit organizations because of political differences, all with the intention of hiding their affiliations to the Party in the process."

(37:10) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : I say we, because, even though [Ryan O'Connor] was the forced neutral [as Student President] and me as the Tory president, it was all orchestrated obviously behind closed doors, and it actually worked out well because it looked like different groups of stakeholders, like I'm the outsider coming in, and you guys were just the responsible student government and we had other members of council, a guy he appointed to council, he got speaking rights but he wasn't an elected member, but just as another voice at the table, it made it look like there were all kinds of different corners where in fact we were all on the same team. 

(42:14) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : Campus Radicals for Action on Zimbabwe Yes, or something like that, they were a great shell group. Feel free to use Campus Coalition for Liberty, that's ours so we have a logo and everything. 

(50:05) Ryan O'Connor : When Aaron was doing the petition campaign, which "I knew nothing about;" I was printing them in my frickin office in student government, of course I knew about it, of course we were behind it, I couldn't take a public position on that issue because although I wasn't running for reelection, this was three months before the end of my mandate ... if we had made them an issue, no Tory would ever get elected to student government again.  

Ryan O'Connor : Sometimes you can't attach the party's name to something. You just can't. If it's a really controversial issue on campus or something that might show up in the newspaper, you want to be careful. You just have your shell organization and have the Campus Coalition for Liberty and two other Tory front groups which are front organizations, all of those groups might actually qualify for funding too. 

Aaron Lee-Wudrick : Don't think that the Party doesn't like that, because they do. They're things that will help the Party, but it looks like it's an organically-grown organization and it just stimulated from the grassroots spontaneously. They love that stuff. And they don't have to bear the burden of having any of it attached to their name."

You know, like pretending to be spontaneous grassroots fake twitterer Karen Philby or making anonymous calls to talk radio. (h/t Montreal Simon) 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la fucking même chose, eh?

Bonus : Out here in BC, Campaign Research was "the single largest beneficiary of the HST contracts, pulling down $167,000 of the $250,000 total budget for "conducting telephone town hall meetings" related to the implementation of the controversial tax change". 

They were hired on by BC rightwinger Suzanne Anton in her unsuccessful Vancouver mayoralty bid, and also set up a fake website mocking Christy Clark for signing up a cat as part of her party membership drive in their campaign work for her rival George Abbott :

In the source code, the author of the website was identified as Bo Chen, who works for Toronto-based Campaign Research

The Campaign Research Con cats are definitely out of the bag.
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Tuesday Dec. 20 Update : Phone calls to presumed Liberal voters in Con MP Peter Braid's riding advising them of false polling station location changes in the days days before the May 2 federal election have been traced to a "Conservative Party of Canada voicemail".

“I used them for a very specific and limited purpose and that was phone calling to constituents and voter identification,” said Braid.  “Nick [Kouvalis] has a particular expertise in this and that’s why it was helpful to have him involved.”

Braid said he’d consider using Campaign Research again, citing its excellent record with live phone calls. He added “It doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with everything they do.”

Presumably another example of Jason Kenney's "vital free speech" argument.
Despite evidence of just how entwined the history between the Cons and Campaign Research has become, expect imminent use of distancing weasel words like "over-zealous" and "party volunteer" from the Cons any moment now.

h/t The Record.
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Mar 6, 2012 8am Update : Correction at **
I've deleted "Manning Centre for Building Democracy" from the post. As noted by a commenter here, MCBD did not host the OPCCA strategy meeting held by Con MP Peter Braid, his campaign manager Aaron Wudrick, and his constituency assistant Eric Merkley, as apparently mistakenly reported in UofT Free Press.
Although both the OPCCA seesions and MCBD sessions shared some participants, like Richard Ciano - Campaign Research Inc CEO, Ontario CPC president, and Manning Centre Executive Director of Practical Politics - the Manning Centre for Democracy Networking Conference was held in Ottawa a week later.
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*** Link Defunct. Richard Ciano's page appears to have been expunged from the Campaign research website.
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Patrick Muttart trail leads back to US dirty tricksters

Sun News headline, April 20, Brian Lilley  : Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning

"As a politician in Canada, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has said that he was on the sidelines of the Iraq war, but new information reveals he was on the front lines of pre-invasion planning when he worked in the U.S."

Well, it is Sun News, aka Fox News North, after all, wot?

But then yesterday morning Sun Media Corp President Pierre Karl Peladeau published a photo that Sun News VP and former Harper spokesy Kory Teneycke had received from Harper's former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart.

It was "a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002", together with "a clip from a Pentagon press briefing in which an American colonel thanked Michael Ignatieff specifically for his work in preparation for the invasion" on the day before the invasion.

Trouble was - it wasn't Iggy in the photo, a discovery credited to Teneycke by Peladeau.

Peladeau :

"It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff's campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News."

Later in the day Muttart's present employer, the US PR company Mercury Public Affairs, responded to Peladeau :

"At no point did Muttart tell Sun Media that he had positively identified Ignatieff in the photo in question."

and went on to describe Muttart's work in helping set up the branding of Sun News :

For the record, Mercury was hired by Quebecor to assist Sun News with its pre-license branding and positioning. Muttart worked with a creative agency to develop the network's original logo (a modified version is currently in use). And he was the original source for the network's "hard news" and "straight talk" framing language."

including Muttart's pro bono work for Sun News after his contract ended!

Of particular interest here is that while all this was going on, Muttart was also working for the Harper re-election campaign :

"mostly from his Chicago home base where he has worked for an American public affairs firm since 2009, returning occasionally to Ottawa as needed. ... A source close to Muttart said the photo was found online by a U.S.-based political party researcher ."

"He has no further role in our campaign," Conservative spokesman Alykhan Velshi said from the party’s Ottawa war room. Muttart recently returned to work on the Conservative campaign as a consultant “offering advice on messaging and strategy,” according to Velshi.

According to Mr. Velshi, the Tory campaign "provided Sun Media with information that had been acquired during Internet research, namely a photograph described as that of Mr. Ignatieff. The campaign made clear to Sun Media that the identity in the photograph could not be verified and that our own efforts to verify the photograph had been exhausted."

So. Patrick Muttart, former Harper staffer, helps Kory Teneycke, another former Harper staffer, set up the brand for Sun News and then sends him incriminating but fake material in what looks to be an attempt to swiftboat Michael Ignatieff - and he did this while giving "advice on messaging and strategy" to Harper's re-election war room? Unbelievable!

So who is this US company Mercury Public Affairs that Muttart now works for - presumably the source of the photo found by "a US-based political party researcher" ?

Mercury - A firm specializing in "high-value public affairs," including image management, polling, and "grassroots coalition building".
Company slogan : "We know what it takes to win in difficult situations."

May 20, 2009 :

Mercury Public Affairs named Patrick Muttart as an MD [Managing Director] and leader of the firm's new Canada/US practice, starting May 4. Muttard is the former deputy chief of staff for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former chief marketing strategist for the Conservative Party of Canada. At Mercury Public Affairs, he will also work with the international public affairs team, which is led by partner Terry Nelson.

Muttart's new boss Terry Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush Cheney campaign and former McCain-Palin campaign manager, is now also a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, which might go some distance towards explaining why Harper's recent campaign ad bore such a strong resemblance to Pawlenty's.  [My parody of Harper's ad here.]

Here's Rachel Maddow on Terry Nelson : the race-baiting, the phonejamming dirty tricks, and, before his firm Crosslink Strategy Group became an operating unit of Mercury Public Affairs, the staffer in his employ who was previously the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads , which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry's war record.



Which pretty much brings us full circle on the apparent attempt to swiftboat Michael Ignatieff by a former Harper staffer on loan from a Republican PR company during our election.

Update : Sixth Estate has a few questions.

Thursday Upperdate : Cons : No, no, no, he wasn't in our war room while simultaneously advising Sun Media.
Muttart : Yes, I was.

PostMedia : "Contrary to what some have reported, Patrick hasn't been working in the (Conservative) war room or been in Ottawa," wrote Conservative spokesman Chisholm Pothier in an email."

CP : Tory strategist says he advised Sun Media, and worked for political war room

"Patrick Muttart, the former deputy chief of staff for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told The Canadian Press on Thursday he gave periodic unpaid advice to Sun Media in recent weeks to help it launch its new television news channel. Until this week, he was also on the Tory payroll as a consultant to the party's election war room."

We still don't know, however, what he was doing sending false and incriminating stuff on Iggy to The Sun in the middle of an election. And did he send it from the Con war room and on whose instructions?
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Inside the new recalibrated Foreign Affairs committee

... the first new recalibrated government filibuster got underway.

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The Foreign Affairs committee had one hour before Question Period to schedule a witness list for their investigation into the Rights and Democracy debacle.

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Motion from Bernard Patry, Lib : To allow the widow of former Rights and Democracy President Rémy Beauregard to appear before the committee on the 25th to speak on behalf of her dead husband and to schedule the fired R&D staff for the 30th.

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Con Deepak Obhrai interjected "We must have a debate first", whereupon Con Chair Dean Allison gave the floor to Con Jim Abbott - yes, him again.

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Abbott began with his opinion that the committee "does not have the right to micromanage the Foreign Affairs Dept." The inclusion of Beauregard's widow would be "outside the bounds of this committee" and further "there would be an emotional reaction to a situation over which this committee has absolutely no control."

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What if we also allowed corporations like the CBC to appear, he asked, or perhaps the EDC, before veering off into a rant about Bill C-300 and the possible restrictions it might cause Canadian mining abroad.

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After half an hour, Patry asked if Abbott was going to respond to his motion about the witness list.

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"I'm 30 seconds away from making my point", said Abbott, continuing on about unions and the G8 conference and women in Sudan and arctic sovereignty and the great headlines the Cons get in the G&M and banks and the CMHC until the end of the hour.

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Somewhere in there he mentioned that he had no objection to the new R&D president and chair and new board members appearing before the committee because they had been appointed by the government of Canada and "could explain to us what direction the government wants to go."

Well, so much for the new pres and board members being arms length.

As to the fired R&D board members, he said :

"they can send out flyers or go on tv."

When the Chair "adjourned the debate", advising that "as this is going nowhere, opposition and government should get together to agree on a witness list before the next meeting", Abbott had one last point he wished to make :

"Just a quick point of order here - as we know, when a member has the floor, he or she has the floor, so I'm presuming that I will continue to have the floor when we get back together again."

The chair assured him that he would indeed have it and adjourned the meeting.

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So. Are we to expect the other committees to go the same way?

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Update : Cliff suggests that Abbott needs to hear from us about his shameful behavior here.

Jim Abbott : Telephone:(613) 995-7246 Fax: (613) 996-9923
EMail: AbbotJ@parl.gc.ca

cc to Chair Dean Allison: Telephone: (613) 995-2772 Fax:(613) 992-2727
EMail:AllisD@parl.gc.ca

and co-committee members Bob Rae : RaeB@parl.gc.ca , Paul Dewar : DewarP@parl.gc.ca , and Bernard Patry : PatryB@parl.gc.ca whose motion it was to allow Trepanier to appear.

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Write nice. Remember these sometimes get read out in the House.

If you need talking points, Cliff's got 'em.

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Con MPs boycott Afghan Committee today

Con Committee chair Rick Casson confirmed today's meeting with the opposition MPs but did not bother to tell them that neither he nor any of the other Con MPs would be showing up.
As the committee requires a quorum of seven to convene and only the six MPs from the opposition parties showed up, the committee could not go ahead as planned.

That the Cons are dipping into their dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt committees again does not surprise, but the Cons primary argument against having the public inquiry into the whole detainees mess - passed as a motion in the House and then ignored -has been that it is already being dealt with in this committee.

The Cowardly Cons on the Afghan Special Committee :
Rick Casson , Chair : CassoR@parl.gc.ca ,
Jim Abbott : AbbotJ@parl.gc.ca ,
Goldie Hawn : HawnL@parl.gc.ca ,
Greg Kerr : Kerr.G@parl.gc.ca ,
Deepak Obhrai : ObhraD@parl.gc.ca ,
Dave MacKenzie : MackeD@parl.gc.ca .

Send them a feather.

Possibly none of them wanted to deal with reports from today that British Colonel Dudley Giles, a senior military police officer with NATO's International Security Assistance Force, complained to the Canadian embassy in Kabul in August 2006 that

"Canada was stonewalling on providing basic information on the Afghans it was capturing."

or that

"a memo from Canadian NATO staffer Anne Burgess alerted the government on Sept. 11 2006 to the fact that the ICRC had singled out Canada's practice of handing over prisoners to the Afghans on the battlefield."

And if there's anyone left, aside from the Cowardly Cons, who still doesn't think it much matters what is done in our name a long way from home, either Dave or Boris will explain it to you.
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RCMP, pipeline bombings, and "domestic terrorism"

RCMP ask for public's patience after sixth B.C. pipeline bombing
"It's been nine months since the first explosion targeting EnCana's (TSX:ECA) natural gas operations in northeastern B.C. - the start of six attacks the RCMP are now labelling "domestic terrorism."
But with the bomber still at large and months since investigators have announced any new leads in the case, the RCMP are asking for patience as they investigate the two latest explosions in the Dawson Creek area. A blast on Canada Day at a wellhead near the village of Pouce Coupe marked the first attack since January"

CBC : More details of RCMP 'dirty tricks' revealed
"There are new details of the RCMP's covert operation to set off a bomb in northwestern Alberta's oilpatch.
Dubbed "Operation Kabriole", the RCMP's intention was to help an informant get closer to the two men police suspected were behind vandalism against the oil and gas industry.
Wiebo Ludwig and Richard Boonstra were arrested and charged earlier this month.

"Operation Kabriole" was planned and executed with the direct involvement of a Calgary based oil and gas business. Alberta Energy Company has a big operation in the Peace River country.

The RCMP's original plan was to blow up one of AEC's trucks. The company convinced the police to change the operation even though AEC had already given its approval, offered up a truck to be bombed and said it would pay for any major damages. Company officials were having second thoughts.

According to the RCMP's own files, the head of AEC's northern operations met with the police to say his bosses were concerned that bombing a vehicle would cause 'undue stress and fear' for employees driving company trucks.
So the company offered an alternative, a shed covering one of its "out of service" well sites not far from the suspects' property.

The bomb was set off Oct. 14, one week before AEC hosted two tense and emotional town hall meetings. Worried residents who turned out, were told by an expert, who was flown in by AEC, that they were the victims of 'eco-terrorists'.
Nov. 10, 2000."

Related : media terrorism experts.
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Go for it, Steve, you arrogant ass.

After three days of flop sweats and hiding in their rooms from summonses, the Cons have finally settled on a strategy of staging public tantrums to avoid the ethics committee.
Obviously shitting bricks at the prospect of any more of Team Clown Con appearing in public, Steve comes up with a desperate plan.

CBC :

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper hinted strongly Thursday that he may do something to trigger an election because Parliament is not functioning anymore.

Harper added that the committee system is "increasingly in chaos," an apparent reference to bickering taking place at an ethics committee probe into Tory election ad spending."

That's rich. This from the leader of the party that had dirty tricks manuals printed on how to scuttle committees.

The only "increasingly in chaos" committee Steve cares about at the moment is the Ethics Committee which is holding hearings on how the Cons exceeded their 2006 election spending limit by $1.1 mil­lion : they transferred money into the campaign bank ac­counts of 67 selected candidates and then quickly transferred the money back out. Many Cons say they had no idea they were being used this way, and the ad agency in question expressed concerns to the Cons about the legality of the In and Out scheme.

Now about Steve's "increasingly in chaos" ethics committee...

G&M :

"A panel of 11 senior Conservatives skipped yesterday's hearing of the Commons ethics committee looking into a controversial election-finance scheme, with two failing to respond to a summons, and some others eluding bailiffs' efforts to serve them.

On Tuesday, Douglas Lowry, an official agent for a Toronto Conservative in the last election, testified that the party's Toronto organizer, Karma McGregor, had told witnesses not to attend.
Yesterday afternoon, the witness table was unoccupied when every member of a high-level list of Conservative witnesses failed to appear.

"I don't know the reasons. ... What if somebody's on vacation? What if somebody had a heart attack? What if somebody needs a kidney replacement? Or dialysis?" said Tory MP Gary Goodyear."

in an obvious bid to make clear his contempt for making committees work.

Yesterday a witness showed up a couple of days early demanding to be heard right then, and had to be escorted from the committee room by security when he refused to leave. Today another showed up a couple of days late, also demanding to be heard right then, and even though he was told he could appear after the scheduled witnesses, he nonetheless left the room, according to Kady, actually screaming.

Kady live-blogs the whole appalling scene.

Meanwhile the Cons and the Libs are neck-and-neck in the polls and the Libs are broke and our first-past-the-post electoral system has landed us with a government who garnered less than 30% support in the polls and who may be fond of power but who definitely hate government. Small wonder they act so nuts : after two years in government they still think they're the opposition. They're right.

Harper's war on the Canadian Wheat Board

Aug 2, 2007 : (italics mine)
"One ongoing concern remains Harper's determination to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly on the marketing of western barley crops. A recent federal court ruling upheld the wheat board's right to serve as a single marketing desk for Canadian barley.
Harper said the monopoly would have to end, no matter what the court has said.
"We're obviously disappointed with the court decision," he said, "but that does not change the determination of the government of Canada to see a dual market for Canadian farmers.
"I hope the wheat board will start working with the government to make sure this is gonna happen, 'cause it's gonna happen one way or another, whether it takes a little bit of time or a lot of time, it's gonna happen."

Aug 2, 2008 : (Italics mine)
"The Harper government is tinkering with the rules governing the election of Canadian Wheat Board directors in an attempt to influence this fall's scheduled vote, critics charge.
Late Friday, Ottawa announced it would remove advertising spending limits for third-party interveners in wheat board elections.
"It's just another attack on the Canadian Wheat Board," said National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells. "They think they can marshal lots of corporate money and lots of big-spender money and try to destroy the board by advertising against it."

The spending limits for wheat board candidates, 8 out of 10 of whom support the wheat board's monopoly on wheat and barley sales, are capped at $15,000.

Monsanto, on the other hand, once blocked by the CWB from Canadian registration of RoundUp Ready Wheat, will now be allowed to run as many ads advocating "choice" for wheat farmers as they like.

A timeline of the Con's attacks on the wheat board includes firing the CWB president and two directors, striking 16,269 farmers - or 36% - from the voters' list, and issuing a gag order preventing the CWB from taking its case to the public.

h/t Peterborough Politics for the Aug 2, 2008 newslink