GORE CAUTIONS CANADIANS
Vancouver Sun, Thursday, January 26, 2006
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... 101d3543ee
Katherine Monk CanWest News Service
CREDIT: Kevork Djansezian, Associated Press
Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and his wife Tipper arrive to the Entertainment Weekly Party at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday.
PARK CITY, Utah -- Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore urged Canadians to be vigilant over their new leader Stephen Harper in light of the newly elected prime minister's pro-oil agenda.
"The election in Canada was partly about the tar sands projects in Alberta," said Gore. "And the financial interests behind the tar sands project poured a lot of money and support behind an ultra-conservative leader in order to win the election ... and to protect their interests."
More:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... 101d3543ee
=====================================
Tory proposal 'designed to mislead' Canadians, U.S. lobbyist says
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/208447
April 29, 2007 Kevin Donovan STAFF REPORTER
The Conservative government has taken the easy route and produced an environmental plan that is a "complete and total fraud" on the Canadian public, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore told a Toronto audience yesterday.
"(Harper) is under a lot of pressure and he has chosen the easy wrong over the hard right," Gore thundered to applause from the packed crowd.
Critics of the Harper government's plan say that while it talks the talk – the overall theme is reducing greenhouse gas emissions – it is vague and fails to spell out the specific regulations that will be needed to effect change. Gore said the plan was "designed to mislead the Canadian people."
The backdrop for Gore's remarks was the Toronto Green Living Show, the first "green consumer show" hosted by the city. Two hundred exhibitors jammed the Direct Energy Centre at the exhibition grounds, showing everything from solar panels for houses to hybrid fuel vehicles to home roasting of organically grown coffee.
In a convention room nearby, Gore made the latest stop of his global warming road show, presenting a compelling, live version of his now famous slide presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth." This week he's given the talk eight times, including once in Regina and once in Calgary, in the province that contains the oil-rich tar sands, a carbon energy source he says poses an extremely serious threat to the environment.
In Toronto, David Suzuki was in the audience, fresh from a confrontation with Tory Environment minister John Baird, whom he accused Friday of bringing in a disappointing plan.
More: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/208447
Canadian Conservative Capers
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• Page 1 of 1
Canadian Conservative Capers
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:20 am
Last edited by Oscar on Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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By the nose and down the garden path
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:24 am
By the nose and down the garden path
http://ensign.ftlcomm.com/editorials/LT ... enose.html
By Marjaleena Repo March 2, 2006
What a spectacle it was: the public probing of the Harper government nominee to the Supreme Court, televised and broadcast in its entirety for the nation. The session was announced in advance as being “historic,” and immediately afterwards applauded, with editorials and commentators declaring in unison that “the sky didn’t fall,” that the process had been a success, despite an occasional naysayer. We have now reached a new level of “openness”, “transparency” and democracy”, we are assured. The MPs on the ad hoc committee, set up for the show, received accolades for having behaved well, unlike during the question period in the House. Open line callers added their praise by declaring that they liked the new judge who had a sense of humour and sounded like an ordinary person. All in all, it was peaches and cream in the post-event published reactions.
In reality, what we saw was the emperor with his new see-through clothes. The session was a make-believe from beginning to end. The judge was already chosen and the probe, if one can call it that, was after the fact, nothing more than a polite meet-and-greet session without the cocktails. It was a job interview the day after the hiring, done to create an illusion of new openness, accountability, transparency and increased democracy, the trademark promises of the new government which in its first week had acted contrary to each by snatching a newly-elected Liberal, David Emerson, into the cabinet, appointing a non-elected crony, Michael Fortier, not only to the senate but also into the cabinet in charge of a major ministry, and raising a multitude of eyebrows by making Gordon O’Connor, a long-time lobbyist for the defence industry, the minister of defence.
The sham process around the new judge was no doubt meant to gloss over these serious misdeeds and to lull the country into a false sense of security about the looming radical change one among many planned by the Harper government. It had not taken long for the Conservatives to cancel a national and much-needed daycare plan which was supported by the other three parties, to take Canada deeper into the hot war in Afghanistan (where we should not be in the first place), to making approving noises about the Missile Defence Shield which a great majority of Canadians oppose, and also pulling out from an international treaty, Kyoto, all of the above without any participation from parliament. Changing the court appointment method was more of the same: the modeling of Canada after the U.S.
The Supreme Court had been a steady target for the Conservative party and its antecedents, the Canadian Alliance and The Reform Party, who habitually referred to judges as “activists” with “an agenda”, forcing them, on more than one occasion to publicly defend themselves against the accusation. The Conservatives simply didn’t like many of the decisions made by the court, and had a plan to take control of it, making sure that the “right kind” of person was appointed, now and in the future. The innocuous-sounding and -looking process now started is the first step in conditioning the public to accept a process whereby judges will be examined not just after they have been appointed but when first nominated, and where the grilling of all the nominees is bound to be far different from the polite affair that took place in Ottawa, with an end goal to produce a politically correct Supreme Court in tune with the ideology of the government in power. A similar process has gone very far in the U.S., where the confirmation hearings of judges have been both protracted and contentious.
The Supreme Court of Canada is an institution that must remain at arms length from any government or ideology. Until today, the appointments, while done by the prime minister, were vetted by many agencies and organizations, as well as representatives of provincial governments, all with experience with the justice system, knowledge of the potential nominees and an understanding of the court’s requirements. The judges simply didn’t pop out of the head of a prime minister, and the processes to choose them were developed over the years, producing a high caliber of Supreme Court judges, with whom there have been few if any problems. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Yet a very dangerous kind of fixing is now taking place, carefully dressed in a bland garb to avoid alerting Canadians to the Harper government’s true intentions of giving us, if not sooner then later, an American-style Supreme Court, where the candidates have to sell themselves in a high-pitched and public contest. We are, in the true proverbial fashion, being led by the nose down the garden path, while the foundation of one our central institutions is being chipped away in big chunks THE END
http://ensign.ftlcomm.com/editorials/LT ... enose.html
By Marjaleena Repo March 2, 2006
What a spectacle it was: the public probing of the Harper government nominee to the Supreme Court, televised and broadcast in its entirety for the nation. The session was announced in advance as being “historic,” and immediately afterwards applauded, with editorials and commentators declaring in unison that “the sky didn’t fall,” that the process had been a success, despite an occasional naysayer. We have now reached a new level of “openness”, “transparency” and democracy”, we are assured. The MPs on the ad hoc committee, set up for the show, received accolades for having behaved well, unlike during the question period in the House. Open line callers added their praise by declaring that they liked the new judge who had a sense of humour and sounded like an ordinary person. All in all, it was peaches and cream in the post-event published reactions.
In reality, what we saw was the emperor with his new see-through clothes. The session was a make-believe from beginning to end. The judge was already chosen and the probe, if one can call it that, was after the fact, nothing more than a polite meet-and-greet session without the cocktails. It was a job interview the day after the hiring, done to create an illusion of new openness, accountability, transparency and increased democracy, the trademark promises of the new government which in its first week had acted contrary to each by snatching a newly-elected Liberal, David Emerson, into the cabinet, appointing a non-elected crony, Michael Fortier, not only to the senate but also into the cabinet in charge of a major ministry, and raising a multitude of eyebrows by making Gordon O’Connor, a long-time lobbyist for the defence industry, the minister of defence.
The sham process around the new judge was no doubt meant to gloss over these serious misdeeds and to lull the country into a false sense of security about the looming radical change one among many planned by the Harper government. It had not taken long for the Conservatives to cancel a national and much-needed daycare plan which was supported by the other three parties, to take Canada deeper into the hot war in Afghanistan (where we should not be in the first place), to making approving noises about the Missile Defence Shield which a great majority of Canadians oppose, and also pulling out from an international treaty, Kyoto, all of the above without any participation from parliament. Changing the court appointment method was more of the same: the modeling of Canada after the U.S.
The Supreme Court had been a steady target for the Conservative party and its antecedents, the Canadian Alliance and The Reform Party, who habitually referred to judges as “activists” with “an agenda”, forcing them, on more than one occasion to publicly defend themselves against the accusation. The Conservatives simply didn’t like many of the decisions made by the court, and had a plan to take control of it, making sure that the “right kind” of person was appointed, now and in the future. The innocuous-sounding and -looking process now started is the first step in conditioning the public to accept a process whereby judges will be examined not just after they have been appointed but when first nominated, and where the grilling of all the nominees is bound to be far different from the polite affair that took place in Ottawa, with an end goal to produce a politically correct Supreme Court in tune with the ideology of the government in power. A similar process has gone very far in the U.S., where the confirmation hearings of judges have been both protracted and contentious.
The Supreme Court of Canada is an institution that must remain at arms length from any government or ideology. Until today, the appointments, while done by the prime minister, were vetted by many agencies and organizations, as well as representatives of provincial governments, all with experience with the justice system, knowledge of the potential nominees and an understanding of the court’s requirements. The judges simply didn’t pop out of the head of a prime minister, and the processes to choose them were developed over the years, producing a high caliber of Supreme Court judges, with whom there have been few if any problems. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Yet a very dangerous kind of fixing is now taking place, carefully dressed in a bland garb to avoid alerting Canadians to the Harper government’s true intentions of giving us, if not sooner then later, an American-style Supreme Court, where the candidates have to sell themselves in a high-pitched and public contest. We are, in the true proverbial fashion, being led by the nose down the garden path, while the foundation of one our central institutions is being chipped away in big chunks THE END
- Oscar
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- Posts: 9149
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Wolverine PM eager to fight
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:49 am
Wolverine PM eager to fight
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=18342
By Murray Dobbin georgia straight 15-Jun-2006
As I watch Stephen Harper almost daily on the television screen, I am reminded of a nature show I watched years ago about the wolverine. It is easy to attach human characteristics to an animal noted for its ferocity and sheer combativeness. The wolverine is mean, nasty, and eager for a fight even when it makes no practical sense. It's the misanthrope of the animal world.
On that TV show, an adult wolverine attacked a porcupine even though, according to a biologist, it certainly knew the outcome. It killed the porcupine, all right, but at the price, quite likely, of its own life: its mouth full of scores of quills, disabled, and facing almost certain infection.
That's Stephen Harper. Like the wolverine, he just can't help being who he is. It's in his blood; it's his nature to be contemptuous of other humans.
He managed during the election to control that sneering arrogance that had become his trademark persona, but given the power of the prime minister, his true nature rises, inevitably, to the surface in almost everything he does.
A huge range of people has been subjected to Harper's scorn: journalists, senior bureaucrats, his own cabinet ministers, other political leaders, Canadians stupidly attached to their precious social programs, and peace activists. They are all lesser beings who have earned his contempt just by having the gall to disagree with him. Harper is a control freak, but not because he is insecure-it is because he genuinely believes that he is superior to virtually everyone. All around him are fools in need of either his guidance or his disdain. (He left the Reform party because he was contemptuous of Preston Manning, one of the smartest politicians in recent memory.)
It is a mystery why Harper ever wanted to be prime minister of Canada. He detests everything that Canada became in the postwar period, in his own words: "a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status". He is even disdainful of our political system and once ridiculed it before an American audience.
Most people who feel this way just end up as political cranks-like the Calgary School Yankee wannabes. But Harper's overweening personality has convinced him that it's his role to single-handedly correct the mistakes we and our forebears made. Only someone who actually believes he is smarter than everyone else would think himself capable not just of rewriting history but of remaking it.
There is in this project a special irony. Right-wingers like Harper have always rankled at what they described as left-wing "social engineering". Their visceral rejection of activist, egalitarian government render them incapable of accepting that people could genuinely choose, of their own free will, to create institutions such as unemployment insurance, subsidized university education, medicare, "state-run" child-care, and Crown corporations.
Indeed, this is the source of their and Harper's resolve: they really believe that all of these things were the result of a virtual conspiracy of left-wing bureaucrats (the mandarins of old), who, through stealth and
cunning, manipulated a distracted citizenry and "engineered" a political culture alien to human nature. Harper's attitude is revealed in his contempt for the media for their complicity in the liberal project, his
scorn for the judiciary (complicit too), and for the "Liberal" federal bureaucracy. The country as it evolved in the postwar period thus has no >legitimacy. This is a convenient construct that opens the door to Harper's agenda: 50 years of Liberal/NDP manipulation require correction through a heroic social-(re)engineering project.
His agenda's parameters are clear: a massive downsizing of the federal government's role, an American approach to crime, a junior role in America's new manifest destiny, the cancellation of the Kelowna Accord, the child-care agreements, and a score of programs aimed at global climate change, and an approach to government policy that glorifies the individual and denigrates the community.
And then there's Afghanistan. This adventure will become Mr. Harper's porcupine. The Asia Times reported recently that the resistance in Afghanistan is about to become a full-scale jihad, just like the one that drove out the Soviets. The U.S. knows this, and the U.S. also knows that its ally Pakistan is increasingly unstable, with elements of President Gen. Pervez Musharaff's government almost openly supportive of the Taliban. That's why it is about to cut and run, leaving Canada to get stuck in the latest American quagmire.
Stephen Harper knew all of this. He did it anyway. Like the wolverine, it's just his nature. And like his totem animal, he will ultimately pay a very high price.
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=18342
By Murray Dobbin georgia straight 15-Jun-2006
As I watch Stephen Harper almost daily on the television screen, I am reminded of a nature show I watched years ago about the wolverine. It is easy to attach human characteristics to an animal noted for its ferocity and sheer combativeness. The wolverine is mean, nasty, and eager for a fight even when it makes no practical sense. It's the misanthrope of the animal world.
On that TV show, an adult wolverine attacked a porcupine even though, according to a biologist, it certainly knew the outcome. It killed the porcupine, all right, but at the price, quite likely, of its own life: its mouth full of scores of quills, disabled, and facing almost certain infection.
That's Stephen Harper. Like the wolverine, he just can't help being who he is. It's in his blood; it's his nature to be contemptuous of other humans.
He managed during the election to control that sneering arrogance that had become his trademark persona, but given the power of the prime minister, his true nature rises, inevitably, to the surface in almost everything he does.
A huge range of people has been subjected to Harper's scorn: journalists, senior bureaucrats, his own cabinet ministers, other political leaders, Canadians stupidly attached to their precious social programs, and peace activists. They are all lesser beings who have earned his contempt just by having the gall to disagree with him. Harper is a control freak, but not because he is insecure-it is because he genuinely believes that he is superior to virtually everyone. All around him are fools in need of either his guidance or his disdain. (He left the Reform party because he was contemptuous of Preston Manning, one of the smartest politicians in recent memory.)
It is a mystery why Harper ever wanted to be prime minister of Canada. He detests everything that Canada became in the postwar period, in his own words: "a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status". He is even disdainful of our political system and once ridiculed it before an American audience.
Most people who feel this way just end up as political cranks-like the Calgary School Yankee wannabes. But Harper's overweening personality has convinced him that it's his role to single-handedly correct the mistakes we and our forebears made. Only someone who actually believes he is smarter than everyone else would think himself capable not just of rewriting history but of remaking it.
There is in this project a special irony. Right-wingers like Harper have always rankled at what they described as left-wing "social engineering". Their visceral rejection of activist, egalitarian government render them incapable of accepting that people could genuinely choose, of their own free will, to create institutions such as unemployment insurance, subsidized university education, medicare, "state-run" child-care, and Crown corporations.
Indeed, this is the source of their and Harper's resolve: they really believe that all of these things were the result of a virtual conspiracy of left-wing bureaucrats (the mandarins of old), who, through stealth and
cunning, manipulated a distracted citizenry and "engineered" a political culture alien to human nature. Harper's attitude is revealed in his contempt for the media for their complicity in the liberal project, his
scorn for the judiciary (complicit too), and for the "Liberal" federal bureaucracy. The country as it evolved in the postwar period thus has no >legitimacy. This is a convenient construct that opens the door to Harper's agenda: 50 years of Liberal/NDP manipulation require correction through a heroic social-(re)engineering project.
His agenda's parameters are clear: a massive downsizing of the federal government's role, an American approach to crime, a junior role in America's new manifest destiny, the cancellation of the Kelowna Accord, the child-care agreements, and a score of programs aimed at global climate change, and an approach to government policy that glorifies the individual and denigrates the community.
And then there's Afghanistan. This adventure will become Mr. Harper's porcupine. The Asia Times reported recently that the resistance in Afghanistan is about to become a full-scale jihad, just like the one that drove out the Soviets. The U.S. knows this, and the U.S. also knows that its ally Pakistan is increasingly unstable, with elements of President Gen. Pervez Musharaff's government almost openly supportive of the Taliban. That's why it is about to cut and run, leaving Canada to get stuck in the latest American quagmire.
Stephen Harper knew all of this. He did it anyway. Like the wolverine, it's just his nature. And like his totem animal, he will ultimately pay a very high price.
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9149
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
PMO uses RCMP to boot journalists from hotel
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:09 pm
PMO uses RCMP to boot journalists from hotel
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2 ... 85378.html
August 1, 2007 By BRUCE CHEADLE
CHARLOTTETOWN (CP) - RCMP officers, acting on orders from the Prime Minister's Office, evicted journalists from a hotel lobby Wednesday to prevent them from approaching Conservative MPs to discuss the country's governance.
While tour bus groups freely wandered the lobby of Charlottetown's Delta Hotel, plainclothes Mounties rebuffed reporters who had convened for the Conservative party's three-day summer strategy session.
"There's a time and a place for the media," a Mountie told a small knot of print reporters, making it clear the issue was not a matter of security but of communications strategy.
The unnamed officer said he was acting on orders from the PMO.
The reporters were nowhere near the actual caucus meetings, which took place behind a set of closed doors and somewhere down a long hallway in one of the hotel ballrooms.
But it was too close for the Conservatives, who set up a media room in a federal building across the street and promised to bring MPs for interviews "where appropriate."
Sandra Buckler, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's director of communications, said the Conservatives - who campaigned on a platform of government accountability to the public - were merely following their own past practice.
"It's quite normal for there to be private areas and then areas where the media are," she said by e-mail. She suggested reviewing the experiences of reporters at last year's Tory summer caucus in Cornwall, Ont.
"They will tell you there is nothing new here. We provided MPs for commentary, and we are following that same routine this year."
She didn't comment on the appropriateness of using the RCMP to keep reporters away.
MP Rahim Jaffer, the national caucus chairman, was one of two of the party's 125 MPs put forward for media interviews on Wednesday, the opening day of the caucus.
After initially stating the media cordon was to keep reporters away from MPs' families, Jaffer said the decision was made by the RCMP on security grounds.
"It's my understanding the RCMP makes its own security assessments," Jaffer said just prior to an evening speech by the prime minister.
This despite a number of Mounties explicitly stating the order came from the Conservatives.
More:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2 ... 85378.html
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2 ... 85378.html
August 1, 2007 By BRUCE CHEADLE
CHARLOTTETOWN (CP) - RCMP officers, acting on orders from the Prime Minister's Office, evicted journalists from a hotel lobby Wednesday to prevent them from approaching Conservative MPs to discuss the country's governance.
While tour bus groups freely wandered the lobby of Charlottetown's Delta Hotel, plainclothes Mounties rebuffed reporters who had convened for the Conservative party's three-day summer strategy session.
"There's a time and a place for the media," a Mountie told a small knot of print reporters, making it clear the issue was not a matter of security but of communications strategy.
The unnamed officer said he was acting on orders from the PMO.
The reporters were nowhere near the actual caucus meetings, which took place behind a set of closed doors and somewhere down a long hallway in one of the hotel ballrooms.
But it was too close for the Conservatives, who set up a media room in a federal building across the street and promised to bring MPs for interviews "where appropriate."
Sandra Buckler, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's director of communications, said the Conservatives - who campaigned on a platform of government accountability to the public - were merely following their own past practice.
"It's quite normal for there to be private areas and then areas where the media are," she said by e-mail. She suggested reviewing the experiences of reporters at last year's Tory summer caucus in Cornwall, Ont.
"They will tell you there is nothing new here. We provided MPs for commentary, and we are following that same routine this year."
She didn't comment on the appropriateness of using the RCMP to keep reporters away.
MP Rahim Jaffer, the national caucus chairman, was one of two of the party's 125 MPs put forward for media interviews on Wednesday, the opening day of the caucus.
After initially stating the media cordon was to keep reporters away from MPs' families, Jaffer said the decision was made by the RCMP on security grounds.
"It's my understanding the RCMP makes its own security assessments," Jaffer said just prior to an evening speech by the prime minister.
This despite a number of Mounties explicitly stating the order came from the Conservatives.
More:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2 ... 85378.html
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9149
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
UN Arrested 40 Ahead of Harper’s Haiti Visit
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:12 pm
UN Arrested 40 Ahead of Harper’s Haiti Visit
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/pdf/dominion-issue47.pdf
The Dominion, August 2007 — Issue #47 30 demonstrators remain in jail
by Stuart Neatby
Forty Haitian demonstrators were arrested by UN soldiers hours before the arrival of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Haitian slum neighbourhood of Cite Soleil on July 20. Haiti was the last stop for the Prime Minister’s Latin American tour, which also included stops in Colombia, Chile, and Barbados. The protest had been organized by residents of Cite Soleil in response to the visit of the Canadian Prime Minister, according to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, a protest organizer and director of the Haiti-based September 30th Foundation.
“On the morning of the 20th, our comrades went out into the streets with placards, banners, and megaphones,” said Pierre-Antoine in a phone interview with the Dominion.
“At that moment, it was around six in the morning, MINUSTAH soldiers began to make arrests for no reason. Many of our friends were arrested that morning.”
According to Pierre-Antoine, 10 demonstrators were released on the afternoon of July 20, after Harper’s departure from the country. Thirty demonstrators remain imprisoned in the National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince. They have no access to legal counsel due to financial inability to hire a lawyer, and will wait for an indefinite amount of time before seeing a judge. Although Haiti’s constitution requires prisoners to see a judge within 48 hours of their arrest, they will often remain in jail for months before this happens.
When contacted by the Dominion, UN spokesperson Sophie Boutaud de Lacombe would not confirm that UN soldiers had made arrests in Cite Soleil on July 20.
Several sources report that the UN mission for stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has committed numerous documented human rights abuses within the seaside neighbourhood. According to reports by Democracy Now! and the Haiti Information Project, UN forces conducted a raid in Cite Soleil on December 22, ostensibly aimed at rooting out “armed gangs,” which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 civilians, including several children. As survivors of this raid lay bleeding in the streets, UN soldiers prevented Red Cross ambulances from reaching the dead and wounded.
Cite Soleil has been a centre of political support for the Fanmi Lavalas political party of deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The July 20 protest was organized to oppose Canada’s involvement in the February 29, 2004 coup d’etat of elected President Aristide, as well as Canada’s continued interference in Haitian politics.
After Aristide’s removal, Haiti descended into a nightmare of political violence. Community activists were murdered, former Lavalas parliamentarians were jailed, and the Haitian National Police, which has received training by Canadian RCMP officers since 2004, waged a campaign of terror against some of the poorest neighbourhoods in Haiti’s capital. Cite Soleil was the hardest hit of these neighbourhoods. The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK, estimated 8000 murders in Haiti’s capital alone between 2004 and 2006, as well as 35,000 incidents of rape.
“Their plan was clear,”says Pierre-Antoine of the Canadian-backed Latortue regime which ruled until 2006. “Their plan was to eliminate the party of President Aristide, the Fanmi Lavalas party, the majority party. But they did not succeed in their objective.”
Although such political repression has diminished since the election of current President Rene Preval, the Canadian government continues to play an influential role within Haiti. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs has been a strong advocate for aggressive “anti-gang” attacks and raids by MINUSTAH against poor neighbourhoods like Cite Soleil. In a January 15 radio interview, Canadian Ambassador Claude Boucher applauded the deadly December 22 raid, calling upon the UN to “increase their operations as they did last December.” A Parliamentary report penned by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay also applauded the December 22 killings, stating that “more robust operations led by MINUSTAH and the Haitian National Police from December 22, 2006, further improved the security situation.”
In the months following December 2006, the UN staged a number of brutal raids in Cite Soleil. Seven year-old Stephanie Lubin and four year-old Alexandra Lubin, killed as they lay sleeping on the morning of February 2, were two among many other civilians killed during these attacks. In its press statements, the UN has claimed it has subsequently been successful in dislodging gang leaders from Cite Soleil.
“What MINUSTAH is doing is not a mission of stabilization; it is not engaging in peacekeeping,” said Pierre-Antoine. “It is a mission that engages in operations of massacres, of assassinations, [and] of destabilization more so than activities of reconstruction and peacekeeping.”
During a visit to Haiti this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced plans to extend the UN’s mission in Haiti by one year
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/pdf/dominion-issue47.pdf
The Dominion, August 2007 — Issue #47 30 demonstrators remain in jail
by Stuart Neatby
Forty Haitian demonstrators were arrested by UN soldiers hours before the arrival of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Haitian slum neighbourhood of Cite Soleil on July 20. Haiti was the last stop for the Prime Minister’s Latin American tour, which also included stops in Colombia, Chile, and Barbados. The protest had been organized by residents of Cite Soleil in response to the visit of the Canadian Prime Minister, according to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, a protest organizer and director of the Haiti-based September 30th Foundation.
“On the morning of the 20th, our comrades went out into the streets with placards, banners, and megaphones,” said Pierre-Antoine in a phone interview with the Dominion.
“At that moment, it was around six in the morning, MINUSTAH soldiers began to make arrests for no reason. Many of our friends were arrested that morning.”
According to Pierre-Antoine, 10 demonstrators were released on the afternoon of July 20, after Harper’s departure from the country. Thirty demonstrators remain imprisoned in the National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince. They have no access to legal counsel due to financial inability to hire a lawyer, and will wait for an indefinite amount of time before seeing a judge. Although Haiti’s constitution requires prisoners to see a judge within 48 hours of their arrest, they will often remain in jail for months before this happens.
When contacted by the Dominion, UN spokesperson Sophie Boutaud de Lacombe would not confirm that UN soldiers had made arrests in Cite Soleil on July 20.
Several sources report that the UN mission for stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has committed numerous documented human rights abuses within the seaside neighbourhood. According to reports by Democracy Now! and the Haiti Information Project, UN forces conducted a raid in Cite Soleil on December 22, ostensibly aimed at rooting out “armed gangs,” which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 civilians, including several children. As survivors of this raid lay bleeding in the streets, UN soldiers prevented Red Cross ambulances from reaching the dead and wounded.
Cite Soleil has been a centre of political support for the Fanmi Lavalas political party of deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The July 20 protest was organized to oppose Canada’s involvement in the February 29, 2004 coup d’etat of elected President Aristide, as well as Canada’s continued interference in Haitian politics.
After Aristide’s removal, Haiti descended into a nightmare of political violence. Community activists were murdered, former Lavalas parliamentarians were jailed, and the Haitian National Police, which has received training by Canadian RCMP officers since 2004, waged a campaign of terror against some of the poorest neighbourhoods in Haiti’s capital. Cite Soleil was the hardest hit of these neighbourhoods. The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK, estimated 8000 murders in Haiti’s capital alone between 2004 and 2006, as well as 35,000 incidents of rape.
“Their plan was clear,”says Pierre-Antoine of the Canadian-backed Latortue regime which ruled until 2006. “Their plan was to eliminate the party of President Aristide, the Fanmi Lavalas party, the majority party. But they did not succeed in their objective.”
Although such political repression has diminished since the election of current President Rene Preval, the Canadian government continues to play an influential role within Haiti. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs has been a strong advocate for aggressive “anti-gang” attacks and raids by MINUSTAH against poor neighbourhoods like Cite Soleil. In a January 15 radio interview, Canadian Ambassador Claude Boucher applauded the deadly December 22 raid, calling upon the UN to “increase their operations as they did last December.” A Parliamentary report penned by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay also applauded the December 22 killings, stating that “more robust operations led by MINUSTAH and the Haitian National Police from December 22, 2006, further improved the security situation.”
In the months following December 2006, the UN staged a number of brutal raids in Cite Soleil. Seven year-old Stephanie Lubin and four year-old Alexandra Lubin, killed as they lay sleeping on the morning of February 2, were two among many other civilians killed during these attacks. In its press statements, the UN has claimed it has subsequently been successful in dislodging gang leaders from Cite Soleil.
“What MINUSTAH is doing is not a mission of stabilization; it is not engaging in peacekeeping,” said Pierre-Antoine. “It is a mission that engages in operations of massacres, of assassinations, [and] of destabilization more so than activities of reconstruction and peacekeeping.”
During a visit to Haiti this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced plans to extend the UN’s mission in Haiti by one year
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2007 - PM set to reboot Parliament
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:17 pm
2007 - PM set to reboot Parliament
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/
freeheadlines/LAC/20070905/PARLIAMENT05/national/National
Throne Speech next month opens door for a confidence vote - and possibly an election
BRIAN LAGHI AND BILL CURRY The Globe and Mail
September 5, 2007
OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved yesterday to give his government a new parliamentary start and a fresh legislative agenda, setting the stage for a vote on the Conservatives' survival.
MPs will return to Ottawa one month later than scheduled after Mr. Harper asked Governor-General Michaëlle Jean yesterday to end the current session of Parliament and begin a new one Oct. 16. The government will then unveil a new Speech from the Throne to reinvigorate an agenda that critics say has run its course.
The vote on the Throne Speech is considered a confidence vote and could plunge the country into a fall election if all three opposition parties oppose it.
"It's time to launch the next phase of our mandate," Mr. Harper said in a prepared statement.
"We delivered on all the major commitments we made to Canadians during the 2006 election."
Ending the session means that all legislation that has not been passed - except for private members' bills - will die and require reintroduction if the Tories want to push ahead with them. That would include many of the government's key bills: proposals to terminate the long-gun registry, two Senate reform bills, justice bills that would increase penalties for repeat offenders and impose tighter bail conditions and a bill extending the Human Rights Act to native reserves.
Other bills that are irking the government - such as its own Clean Air Act, which was dramatically altered by the opposition - would also die.
Delaying the return of Parliament until Oct. 16 also means MPs and their staff will be available to work on the campaigns for the Newfoundland and Ontario provincial elections on Oct. 9 and 10, respectively.
Federal Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion set a high bar for his party's support, insisting the government must pledge there will be no extension of the military mission in Kandahar, that it allow a vote on the amended clean-air bill and that it bring forward proposals for the ailing manufacturing sector and for addressing poverty. "We cannot stand up in the house and vote for a Throne Speech that we consider detrimental for the Canadian people and against the honour of Canada," Mr. Dion said in an interview.
NDP Leader Jack Layton called the decision to prorogue the session a waste of time. "Students have gone back to class. Working families are back from vacation. Why is Stephen Harper locking MPs out?" he asked in a statement.
----------------------------
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe said he would support the Throne Speech only if it includes an end date of February, 2009, for the Afghan combat mission. He said it will not be enough for the government to simply promise to put any future military mandate in Afghanistan to a vote in the House. "If they are not clear on Afghanistan ... if they say there will be a vote, that is not sufficient. Everything in the Speech from the Throne requires a vote, so it will not be a revelation to say there will be a vote," Mr. Duceppe said in a television interview.
Mr. Harper's decision comes as the Tories and the Liberals fight it out in the election polls. The most recent survey by the Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV News found the two parties deadlocked at 33-per-cent support.
More:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/
freeheadlines/LAC/20070905/PARLIAMENT05/national/National
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/
freeheadlines/LAC/20070905/PARLIAMENT05/national/National
Throne Speech next month opens door for a confidence vote - and possibly an election
BRIAN LAGHI AND BILL CURRY The Globe and Mail
September 5, 2007
OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved yesterday to give his government a new parliamentary start and a fresh legislative agenda, setting the stage for a vote on the Conservatives' survival.
MPs will return to Ottawa one month later than scheduled after Mr. Harper asked Governor-General Michaëlle Jean yesterday to end the current session of Parliament and begin a new one Oct. 16. The government will then unveil a new Speech from the Throne to reinvigorate an agenda that critics say has run its course.
The vote on the Throne Speech is considered a confidence vote and could plunge the country into a fall election if all three opposition parties oppose it.
"It's time to launch the next phase of our mandate," Mr. Harper said in a prepared statement.
"We delivered on all the major commitments we made to Canadians during the 2006 election."
Ending the session means that all legislation that has not been passed - except for private members' bills - will die and require reintroduction if the Tories want to push ahead with them. That would include many of the government's key bills: proposals to terminate the long-gun registry, two Senate reform bills, justice bills that would increase penalties for repeat offenders and impose tighter bail conditions and a bill extending the Human Rights Act to native reserves.
Other bills that are irking the government - such as its own Clean Air Act, which was dramatically altered by the opposition - would also die.
Delaying the return of Parliament until Oct. 16 also means MPs and their staff will be available to work on the campaigns for the Newfoundland and Ontario provincial elections on Oct. 9 and 10, respectively.
Federal Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion set a high bar for his party's support, insisting the government must pledge there will be no extension of the military mission in Kandahar, that it allow a vote on the amended clean-air bill and that it bring forward proposals for the ailing manufacturing sector and for addressing poverty. "We cannot stand up in the house and vote for a Throne Speech that we consider detrimental for the Canadian people and against the honour of Canada," Mr. Dion said in an interview.
NDP Leader Jack Layton called the decision to prorogue the session a waste of time. "Students have gone back to class. Working families are back from vacation. Why is Stephen Harper locking MPs out?" he asked in a statement.
----------------------------
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe said he would support the Throne Speech only if it includes an end date of February, 2009, for the Afghan combat mission. He said it will not be enough for the government to simply promise to put any future military mandate in Afghanistan to a vote in the House. "If they are not clear on Afghanistan ... if they say there will be a vote, that is not sufficient. Everything in the Speech from the Throne requires a vote, so it will not be a revelation to say there will be a vote," Mr. Duceppe said in a television interview.
Mr. Harper's decision comes as the Tories and the Liberals fight it out in the election polls. The most recent survey by the Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV News found the two parties deadlocked at 33-per-cent support.
More:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/
freeheadlines/LAC/20070905/PARLIAMENT05/national/National
Last edited by Oscar on Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9149
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
A Prime Minister at the top of his imperious game
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:22 pm
A Prime Minister at the top of his imperious game
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.co ... ticleNews/
PEstory/LAC/20071022/COMARTIN22/Headlines/headdex/
headdexComment/3/3/6/
By LAWRENCE MARTIN October 22, 2007
Under the strong arm of Jean Chrétien, things could get pretty rough around Ottawa. Like the time when, sporting his Terminator shades, he put the Shawinigan chokehold on a protester in Hull.
The Chrétien stewardship, initially tame, eventually became heavy-handed. Peace, order and good government.
In terms of amassing power and asserting it, however, Mr. Chrétien is no match for Stephen Harper. In just 20 months, he has become master of everything he's touched. To search the annals for another Canadian PM who accumulated so much cold-blooded authority in such a short time is to come up empty.
Mr. Harper is said to borrow heavily from the style of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. But is the Aussie the real role model, or is it the Russian guy who's brilliantly subdued one and all and whose popularity ratings are through the roof?
One of the first moves Mr. Harper made was to eliminate the position of deputy prime minister. From that point, the storyline has been one of imperious control.
More:
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.co ... ticleNews/
PEstory/LAC/20071022/COMARTIN22/Headlines/headdex/
headdexComment/3/3/6/
======================================
The Canadian Nixon
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dimitry_anastakis_
and_jeet_heer/2008/04/the_canadian_nixon.html
Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer April 24, 2008 9:00 PM
Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is in trouble with Elections Canada, the government body that runs the vote in Canada. They've accused him of overspending in the last election and have even gotten the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to raid the Conservative party's headquarters to find incriminating evidence. In response Harper and his followers have lashed out against Elections Canada, accusing it of a partisan witch hunt.
The whole sorry situation shouldn't surprise anyone who has paid attention. Every prime minister has a modus operandi. Harper's is his utter contempt, shown not once but many times, for Canadian institutions. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that Harper simply sees many Canadian institutions - Elections Canada being simply his latest target - as illegitimate, not just in need of reform but worth attacking root-and-branch.
The historian Garry Wills once observed that Richard Nixon wanted to be president not to govern the nation but to undermine the government. The Nixon presidency was one long counterinsurgency campaign against key American institutions like the courts, the FBI, the state department and the CIA. Harper has the same basic approach to politics: attack not just political foes but the very institutions that make governing possible. The state for Nixon and Harper exists not as an instrument of policy making but as an alien force to be subdued.
Canadians have never had a prime minister who has literally made his career attacking and undermining the legitimacy of Canadian institutions.
Until now.
For instance, in his long-running war against the media, Harper has taken every opportunity to de-legitimise their role in holding his government to account. He refuses to take questions. He speaks only to friendly media outlets. He claims that "national outlets" are biased.
Remember, this is a PM who does not let cabinet ministers speak to the media, and even hides the place and times of cabinet meetings in an effort to avoid questions from the fourth estate.
Along with the media, another of Harper's favourite targets is the Canadian court system. Conservatives love to attack what they call "judge-made law", which really means any decisions that conservatives don't like.
Take same-sex marriage, for example. In 2003, Harper condemned the courts for saying that marriage laws were unconstitutional. He even personally attacked Ontario judge Roy McMurtry, and claimed a Liberal conspiracy: "They put the judges in they wanted," to get the result, Harper accused, even though McMurtry was appointed by Conservative Brian Mulroney.
This anti-court animus is rampant within Harper's inner circle. His chief of staff, academic Ian Brodie, wrote that financially strapped and historically underrepresented groups such as women, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and gays, should have their court funding cut.
Presto - one of Harper's first acts in office was to cut funding for those very groups so that they could no longer make their case at the supreme court.
Then there is the Senate. Harper and his allies hate the Senate. A long-held bugaboo of Harper's Reform party roots, our prime minister never misses a chance to attack the Senate. He'd like to see the Senate be equal, making it even more undemocratic than it is now. Should Price Edward Island (population 130,000) have as many Senate votes as Ontario (population 12 million)?
Harper actually made comments in Australia, touring in his official capacity as head of our government, attacking the constitutionally legitimate Senate, to a foreign audience. Is this standing up for Canada?
Now, many Canadians would like to see the Senate reformed. This is a worthwhile goal. But in the meantime, all Canadians understand that the Senate is a part of our Parliament, created by the 1867 British North America Act.
But Harper has attacked the legitimacy of the Commons, even. After the 2005 same-sex-marriage vote passed, Harper claimed, as leader of the Opposition, that the result was not legitimate because it included the votes of the separatist Bloc Quebecois.
Of course, he did not question the legitimacy of those same votes when the Paul Martin government lost the confidence of the Commons. Harper wanted an election. As for the functioning of the Commons itself, the National Post's Don Martin famously uncovered the Conservative's "black book" of procedural dirty tricks, designed to slow parliamentary action to a halt. Another way to de-legitimise another Canadian institution: paralyse committees, have your committee chairs run out and refuse to bring things to a vote - especially when they bring the government into question.
Most disturbing is Harper's continued attacks upon Elections Canada. The recent raid on Conservative party headquarters is more of a reflection of Harper's disdain for Elections Canada than any supposed "vendetta" conspiracy-minded Conservatives might imagine.
Harper's animus toward Elections Canada goes back years, as do his attempts to circumvent electoral law. As head of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition (NCC), Harper fought for years against Elections Canada's laws around "third-party advertising". The NCC, a murky organisation that does not release its membership, brought a court case against Elections Canada, infamously named Harper v Canada. Though Harper lost, during his time at the NCC he took every chance to attack the legitimacy of Elections Canada and the country's electoral law.
As prime minister, Harper's shocking comments about Elections Canada's investigation of the "in and out" scam alleged by the agency are perhaps the most alarming outburst by any sitting prime minister. Desperate to take Canadians' focus off the Conservatives' allegedly illegal overspending during the 2006 campaign, Harper actually publicly criticised the head of Elections Canada for upholding the law over the non-issue of veiled voting (why didn't he attack the 80,000 people who voted via mail?).
This is unprecedented in Canadian political history. Never has a prime minister publicly attacked a non-partisan election official in such a manner, essentially for partisan gain. The same goes for most of his party, which this week accused Elections Canada of a partisan witch-hunt, being in bed with the Liberals and the media and any other number of tin-foil-hat conspiracies. Of course, unsurprisingly, Harper and the Conservatives have blocked every other effort to examine the scheme in Parliament.
But then again, no one should be surprised. If it's not the media, or the courts, or the Senate, or Elections Canada, it's the Wheat Board, the federal government's own spending power, the bureaucracy, the gun registry ....
Canadians should rightly wonder why their head of government has such a problem with so many Canadian institutions.
----------------------
Dimitry Anastakis is a professor of Canadian history at Trent University. Jeet Heer is a cultural critic who writes for many publications including Slate, the Boston Globe and the Literary Review of Canada.
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.co ... ticleNews/
PEstory/LAC/20071022/COMARTIN22/Headlines/headdex/
headdexComment/3/3/6/
By LAWRENCE MARTIN October 22, 2007
Under the strong arm of Jean Chrétien, things could get pretty rough around Ottawa. Like the time when, sporting his Terminator shades, he put the Shawinigan chokehold on a protester in Hull.
The Chrétien stewardship, initially tame, eventually became heavy-handed. Peace, order and good government.
In terms of amassing power and asserting it, however, Mr. Chrétien is no match for Stephen Harper. In just 20 months, he has become master of everything he's touched. To search the annals for another Canadian PM who accumulated so much cold-blooded authority in such a short time is to come up empty.
Mr. Harper is said to borrow heavily from the style of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. But is the Aussie the real role model, or is it the Russian guy who's brilliantly subdued one and all and whose popularity ratings are through the roof?
One of the first moves Mr. Harper made was to eliminate the position of deputy prime minister. From that point, the storyline has been one of imperious control.
More:
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.co ... ticleNews/
PEstory/LAC/20071022/COMARTIN22/Headlines/headdex/
headdexComment/3/3/6/
======================================
The Canadian Nixon
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dimitry_anastakis_
and_jeet_heer/2008/04/the_canadian_nixon.html
Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer April 24, 2008 9:00 PM
Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is in trouble with Elections Canada, the government body that runs the vote in Canada. They've accused him of overspending in the last election and have even gotten the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to raid the Conservative party's headquarters to find incriminating evidence. In response Harper and his followers have lashed out against Elections Canada, accusing it of a partisan witch hunt.
The whole sorry situation shouldn't surprise anyone who has paid attention. Every prime minister has a modus operandi. Harper's is his utter contempt, shown not once but many times, for Canadian institutions. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that Harper simply sees many Canadian institutions - Elections Canada being simply his latest target - as illegitimate, not just in need of reform but worth attacking root-and-branch.
The historian Garry Wills once observed that Richard Nixon wanted to be president not to govern the nation but to undermine the government. The Nixon presidency was one long counterinsurgency campaign against key American institutions like the courts, the FBI, the state department and the CIA. Harper has the same basic approach to politics: attack not just political foes but the very institutions that make governing possible. The state for Nixon and Harper exists not as an instrument of policy making but as an alien force to be subdued.
Canadians have never had a prime minister who has literally made his career attacking and undermining the legitimacy of Canadian institutions.
Until now.
For instance, in his long-running war against the media, Harper has taken every opportunity to de-legitimise their role in holding his government to account. He refuses to take questions. He speaks only to friendly media outlets. He claims that "national outlets" are biased.
Remember, this is a PM who does not let cabinet ministers speak to the media, and even hides the place and times of cabinet meetings in an effort to avoid questions from the fourth estate.
Along with the media, another of Harper's favourite targets is the Canadian court system. Conservatives love to attack what they call "judge-made law", which really means any decisions that conservatives don't like.
Take same-sex marriage, for example. In 2003, Harper condemned the courts for saying that marriage laws were unconstitutional. He even personally attacked Ontario judge Roy McMurtry, and claimed a Liberal conspiracy: "They put the judges in they wanted," to get the result, Harper accused, even though McMurtry was appointed by Conservative Brian Mulroney.
This anti-court animus is rampant within Harper's inner circle. His chief of staff, academic Ian Brodie, wrote that financially strapped and historically underrepresented groups such as women, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and gays, should have their court funding cut.
Presto - one of Harper's first acts in office was to cut funding for those very groups so that they could no longer make their case at the supreme court.
Then there is the Senate. Harper and his allies hate the Senate. A long-held bugaboo of Harper's Reform party roots, our prime minister never misses a chance to attack the Senate. He'd like to see the Senate be equal, making it even more undemocratic than it is now. Should Price Edward Island (population 130,000) have as many Senate votes as Ontario (population 12 million)?
Harper actually made comments in Australia, touring in his official capacity as head of our government, attacking the constitutionally legitimate Senate, to a foreign audience. Is this standing up for Canada?
Now, many Canadians would like to see the Senate reformed. This is a worthwhile goal. But in the meantime, all Canadians understand that the Senate is a part of our Parliament, created by the 1867 British North America Act.
But Harper has attacked the legitimacy of the Commons, even. After the 2005 same-sex-marriage vote passed, Harper claimed, as leader of the Opposition, that the result was not legitimate because it included the votes of the separatist Bloc Quebecois.
Of course, he did not question the legitimacy of those same votes when the Paul Martin government lost the confidence of the Commons. Harper wanted an election. As for the functioning of the Commons itself, the National Post's Don Martin famously uncovered the Conservative's "black book" of procedural dirty tricks, designed to slow parliamentary action to a halt. Another way to de-legitimise another Canadian institution: paralyse committees, have your committee chairs run out and refuse to bring things to a vote - especially when they bring the government into question.
Most disturbing is Harper's continued attacks upon Elections Canada. The recent raid on Conservative party headquarters is more of a reflection of Harper's disdain for Elections Canada than any supposed "vendetta" conspiracy-minded Conservatives might imagine.
Harper's animus toward Elections Canada goes back years, as do his attempts to circumvent electoral law. As head of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition (NCC), Harper fought for years against Elections Canada's laws around "third-party advertising". The NCC, a murky organisation that does not release its membership, brought a court case against Elections Canada, infamously named Harper v Canada. Though Harper lost, during his time at the NCC he took every chance to attack the legitimacy of Elections Canada and the country's electoral law.
As prime minister, Harper's shocking comments about Elections Canada's investigation of the "in and out" scam alleged by the agency are perhaps the most alarming outburst by any sitting prime minister. Desperate to take Canadians' focus off the Conservatives' allegedly illegal overspending during the 2006 campaign, Harper actually publicly criticised the head of Elections Canada for upholding the law over the non-issue of veiled voting (why didn't he attack the 80,000 people who voted via mail?).
This is unprecedented in Canadian political history. Never has a prime minister publicly attacked a non-partisan election official in such a manner, essentially for partisan gain. The same goes for most of his party, which this week accused Elections Canada of a partisan witch-hunt, being in bed with the Liberals and the media and any other number of tin-foil-hat conspiracies. Of course, unsurprisingly, Harper and the Conservatives have blocked every other effort to examine the scheme in Parliament.
But then again, no one should be surprised. If it's not the media, or the courts, or the Senate, or Elections Canada, it's the Wheat Board, the federal government's own spending power, the bureaucracy, the gun registry ....
Canadians should rightly wonder why their head of government has such a problem with so many Canadian institutions.
----------------------
Dimitry Anastakis is a professor of Canadian history at Trent University. Jeet Heer is a cultural critic who writes for many publications including Slate, the Boston Globe and the Literary Review of Canada.
Last edited by Oscar on Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:39 pm, edited 3 times in total.
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9149
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Harper's Seven-Month Cover-Up of Mulroney Affair Proves Inde
by Oscar » Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:24 pm
Harper's Seven-Month Cover-Up of Mulroney Affair Proves Independent Inquiry Needed
Press Release November 10, 2007
http://www.liberal.ca:80/story_13301_e.aspx
OTTAWA - New information that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had access to key details of the Mulroney-Schreiber affair for seven months, but failed to act on them until an affidavit became public through the media underscores the need for a full judicial inquiry, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said today.
"The facts that came to light today make it clear that Karlheinz Schreiber sent Mr. Harper a letter fully seven months ago that laid out everything. That letter explicitly claims that when Mr. Mulroney sought "financial help" in 1993, Mr. Schreiber met with him, while he was still the prime minister, and worked out an agreement to provide him with funds," said Mr. Dion.
"These are tremendously serious allegations that call into question the very integrity of the office of the Prime Minister. Why did Prime Minister Harper not take action seven months ago? Why has he still not done what is necessary and called an independent inquiry?"
Yesterday, Prime Minister Harper again rejected Liberal demands for a public investigation with full judicial powers and instead only agreed to a third-party review to see if an investigation was warranted. He said he was taking this step because "these new allegations touch on the former prime minister's time in office."
“We now know that the allegations filed in an affidavit this week are not new and that they were explicitly laid out in correspondence Mr. Schreiber sent to Mr. Harper's office at least as early as last March. Are we now expected to believe that these shocking allegations were sent to the Prime Minister and neither he nor his staff did anything about them? That would be a gross breach of duty and portray an appalling lack of leadership," said Mr. Dion.
Mr. Dion noted that media reports confirm that on March 29, 2007, Mr. Schreiber sent Prime Minister Harper a copy of his letter to Brian Mulroney which stated: "During the summer of 1993 when you were looking for financial help, I was there again. When we met on June 23, 1993 at Harrington Lake, you told me that you believed Kim Campbell will win the next election. You also told me ... that the Bear Head project [a business proposal] should be moved to the Province of Quebec, where you could be of great help to me. We agreed to work together and I arranged for some funds for you."
Mr. Dion stressed that Mr. Mulroney was still the Prime Minister of Canada on June 23, 1993 and that Harrington Lake is an official residence of the Government of Canada.
"These latest revelations demonstrate that Mr. Harper and his government are too close to Mr. Mulroney to assess this situation objectively. The Harper government's apparent determination to put defending Mr. Mulroney's reputation ahead of uncovering the truth for Canadians proves decisively that an independent inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of this matter. I call on Mr. Harper to make defending the integrity of the office of Prime Minister his top priority and to stop his delays and call a full judicial inquiry now," said Mr. Dion.
================================
A Poem for Mulroney
http://thetyee.ca:80/Views/2007/11/26/O ... email&utm_
campaign=261107
TheTyee.ca
Mr. Mulroney
said (with a groan) he
wasn’t a crook
and the money he took
was a private transaction
(without any tax on)
and certainly wasn’t anyone’s biz
but his.
It might have been to pay off a debt
or settle a bet
but anyway nothing but three hundred grand
which chaps like him regularly pass hand to hand
without clear explanations
or prompt tax declarations
or even (as no one was going to see)
that tedious business of GST
and if there was any explaining to do
it wouldn’t be simply to me and to you.
But to a royal commission
he might give permission
as with enough lawyers confusing the issues
no one could prove (irrefutably) misuse
and even with minimal legal endeavour
it could drag on for ever and ever
and he could be sure to emerge with his name
if not unsullied at least without blame.
James Barber, television chef and writer, lives in Duncan, BC and chronicles life there.
================================
Does Mulroney take us for fools?
http://andrewcoyne.com/2007/12/does-mul ... -fools.php
December 14, 2007
So, after all this time -- four years since it became public knowledge that he took cash payments from Karlheinz Schreiber, fourteen years after the actual event -- Brian Mulroney finally comes forward to explain... and explains nothing. Or rather, digs himself deeper. Those who might have been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt until now will have a harder time of it after the preposterous story he told the ethics committee today....
Let’s get a few things straight off the top. There are three sets of events about which we need answers. The first has to do with the circumstances surrounding the payments in cash Mulroney admits to having taken from Schreiber after he was prime minister, that is from 1993 on: what he did for the money, why he took it in cash, why there are no records of it anywhere, why he went to such elaborate lengths to conceal it, and so on.
The second has to do with a number of contracts for government business for which Schreiber was paid millions of dollars in secret commissions by his German clients in the 1980s -- not only Airbus, but Thyssen and MBB: how those contracts were won, and what Schreiber did with the money, and whether the first had anything to do with the second. In particular, there is the question of Schreiber’s relationship, financial or otherwise, with several members of that group of Tories centred around Mulroney, going back to the days of the 1983 convention.
Each of those is significant, and troubling, in itself. They remain so, quite apart from whether anyone can connect the two -- that is, whether the payments that we know Mulroney received from Schreiber after he was prime minister were in consequence of anything he did for him while he was prime minister. This third scenario is the one that gets everyone excited. It is, to be sure, the most significant question, in the sense that if it were true, it would be the most serious possible outcome of all this.
But it is also the one for which there is the least evidence. None, in fact. No evidence has been produced to suggest Mulroney personally took bribes from Schreiber, either before or after he left office. It has not even been alleged, except in the infamous 1995 letter of request to the Swiss authorities. Moreover, both men have consistently denied there was any such exchange (though, it should be said, this is hardly surprising: if Schreiber had bribed Mulroney, it is unlikely that either party would be anxious to admit it).
But we do not have to leap all the way to prime ministers taking kickbacks to want the first two sets of events explained. And this Mulroney signally failed to do. He did not give convincing explanations for events of which he was a part in the 1980s. And he most certainly did not give a convincing account of his dealings with Schreiber after he was prime minister.
Instead, he spent most of his time attacking Schreiber’s credibility. This would be significant, and useful, if the business truly pitted one man’s word against the other’s. But in fact that is not the case.
Schreiber’s credibility would be the central issue in this case if we did not know that Mulroney took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from him. But we do. His credibility would be the issue if we did not have his bank records, or the agreements he signed with Airbus, Thyssen and MBB -- but we do. We can trust our own eyes. We don’t need to trust him. We know from these records that Schreiber was paid millions, and we know where at least some of it went: to Frank Moores and his partners in Government Consultants International, and to Brian Mulroney.
To be told that Schreiber is a liar and a perjurer does nothing to explain why Mulroney took cash from Schreiber after he left office, or any of the rest of the story. It is, for the most part, beside the point. To be sure, it would be interesting to know whether they agreed to do business together before or after Mulroney stepped down as prime minister. But the relationship between them is troubling either way. It’s troubling even if you accept Mulroney’s version on every issue on which they disagree. All Mulroney needed to do was explain his side of it. And this is the story he told us:
He said he was hired in August of 1993 to promote the famous Bear Head project to build light-armoured vehicles in Cape Breton -- not in Canada, as Schreiber alleges (which would not only have been in contravention of the lobbyist regulations, inasmuch as he was not registered to lobby, but would also have have run afoul of the code of conduct for public office holders) but overseas: that is, to sell the vehicles abroad. There was no factory to build them, you understand, depending as the project was on government financing that had not proved forthcoming. But never mind. What could be more innocent: selling Canadian-made vehicles -- peacekeeping vehicles, no less -- to other countries?
Why, then, have we not heard this story until now? Mulroney has had seven years to tell his side of the story, ever since his dealings with Schreiber were first unearthed by the reporter Phil Mathias, and since Mathias told what he knew to Bill Kaplan, the lawyer and historian who eventually broke the story. Kaplan spent more than two years nailing it down. In that time, he talked to Mulroney probably a couple of dozen times. The former prime minister tried every possible tack to persuade him not to publish the story, sounding at times a pleading note, at other times a threatening one. In all that time, he never once disclosed this wonderfully exculpatory version of events. Nor has he or any of his spokesmen breathed a word of it since. Why? Maybe he was embarrassed about the cash? That would explain why he didn’t tell anyone before these became known. But after? What’s to lose?
I think we should hear more. Who did he talk to on these foreign journeys? According to Mulroney, he talked to Boris Yeltsin, and to Francois Mitterrand. Does he have any other names -- someone living, perhaps? He says he talked to government officials in China and the United States? Are there any records of these meetings?
Then there’s the little matter of the cash. According to Mulroney, it was Schreiber who insisted that he be paid in cash, in payments totalling $225,000, not the $300,000 Schreiber has maintained. Schreiber’s explanation for this extraordinary request, he says, was simple that he was an international businessman, and this was how he did business. O-kay. That does not explain why Mulroney -- former prime minister of Canada, former president of the Iron Ore Co. of Canada, experienced lawyer -- accepted the request. All that we heard, over and over, was: I made a mistake. It was an error. I’m sorry.
This at least has the virtue of being something we have heard before. Last month, Mulroney’s faithful former spokesman, Luc Lavoie, road-tested the international businessman-colossal mistake explanation. But Luc added another element: Mulroney needed money. Desperately. This was a rare point of agreement between Mulroney and Schreiber, who said the same thing in his testimony. Indeed, Mulroney once confided in Kaplan to much the same effect. “I can tell you,” he said in a June 4, 1998 interview, “when I first started out, I needed … money quite badly.”
But this was a hard sell -- not only did he have most of his expenses paid as prime minister, on top of his six-figure salary, on top of his pension, but the party also kicked in $4000 a month to boot -- and in any event, if he was so broke on leaving office, it was hardly likely to be more than a temporary affliction. He was a former prime minister, with business connections the world over; soon, he would be joining the blue-chip Montreal law firm of Ogilvy Renault. Why could he not have hit up a friend, Peter Munk for example, to tide him over until the directorships and legal fees started to flow? Or a bank? Or Ogilvy Renault? Why go to Schreiber? And why in such circumstances? Perhaps that is why Luc is no longer his spokesman.
So: ixnay on the overtypay. Stick with “colossal mistake”. Is this credible? Suppose it is. Stretch your mind around the notion of a man of Mulroney’s stature meekly acceding to Schreiber’s request. Maybe he was startled, temporarily flummoxed at the sight of all that cash, reluctant to give offense. It happens. But three times? Over sixteen months? By that time, you’ve presumably recovered your composure, not to say your common sense. And still you take the cash? Nobody does business this way. Nobody in business does, that is.
Even then, suppose that’s true. That still doesn’t explain why Mulroney himself kept no records of the transaction, or any subsequent disposition of the cash. Maybe Schreiber didn’t want to leave a paper trail. Why did that prevent Mulroney from leaving one? Yet not only is there no invoice, no contract, no receipt, nothing to link the two men in any way, but there is no record of what Mulroney did with the money at any point thereafter. No bank statements: he didn’t deposit the money in any bank account, he says, but rather in a safe, at his home in Montreal, and in a safety deposit box in New York. And no expense records: he can offer no receipts or records to account for how the money was spent, though he says it was used strictly for business expenses incurred in the course of representing Schreiber’s interests abroad, and though he says he paid for these with a credit card (paying off the credit card bill in turn with wads of cash). And this brings us to the tale of the taxes.
Mulroney did not pay tax on the $225,000 he says he received in 1993 and 1994 until 1999, when he made what’s called a “voluntary disclosure.” He filed tax returns for those years, but did not mention the payments he received from Schreiber. He says he only finally decided to pay taxes on the money because Schreiber’s 1999 arrest on charges of fraud, bribery and tax evasion in his native Germany convinced him that Schreiber was not the respectable businessman he had imagined him to be. Why that should have been the determining factor in his decision the committee did not explore.
But Mulroney says he was not obliged to pay tax on the income he received from Schreiber, because it was not really income, as such, but merely a kind of expense account for him to draw down as need be. O-kay. Did he keep any records of his expenses? Oh yes. Where are they, then? Did he submit them to the tax department, when he finally did file? No: He paid taxes on the whole amount, claimed no deduction for the $40,000 in expenses he says he incurred. Again, this had something to do with Schreiber’s arrest, though again the link is unclear. But what is clear is that this relieved him of the need to file any supporting receipts. But then what about those records he says he kept? Oh, he destroyed them once the tax matter was cleared up. Of course.
Does he take us for fools? No cheques, no invoices, no receipts, no contracts, no bank statements, no withdrawal slips, no credit card bills, no expense records, nothing: not a single scrap of paper exists, it appears, anywhere in the world to support Mulroney’s version. Well, there might be: his tax records. In order to make a voluntary disclosure, you have to make a full explanation of everything to do with the income: how you earned it, what you did with it, etc. Is there a letter to the tax department somewhere offering such explanation? Apparently not. What about his income tax returns, then? Can we at least see them? Uh-uh, he said: those are private. I say again: Does he take us for fools?
All of these questions, all of these doubts, as I said before, are raised not by anything Schreiber said, but by Mulroney’s own testimony. But then, nothing Mulroney said today made much sense. He is still insisting that he barely knew Schreiber -- against a mountain of letter, visits, photos, and telegrams going back to the early 1980s -- and that, so far as he knew him, he was merely a hard-driving business man, the head of Thyssen’s Canadian subsidiary, a man of accomplishment, employer of 3,000 souls. It was only with his arrest in 1999, apparently, that the scales fell from his eyes -- though by that time Schreiber had been a fugitive from German justice for four years.
If so, Mulroney was perhaps the last person in Canada to harbour such illlusions. John Crosbie, Peter MacKay, Rhys Eyton, Paul Tellier, Robert Fowler and Peter Lougheed are among the political, bureaucratic and business leaders who have said they had misgivings about Schreiber, or indeed refused to have anything to do with him. Public inquiry? Schreiber has already been the subject of one -- 26 years ago, in 1981, over a notorious purchase of land outside Edmonton, Alberta, one that had uncannily anticipated a provincial land-use decision, which may or may not have had something to do with the several former provincial cabinet ministers Schreiber had taken into his employ. Of all this Mulroney was apparently blissfully unaware.
Likewise, he continues to maintain that his statements under oath prior to his 1996 libel trial -- to the effect that he had never had any dealings with Schreiber -- were the literal truth, if you interpret “never had any dealings” to mean “never had any dealings involving the exchange of Airbus contracts for cash.” No one but he can know for sure what was in his mind at the time, but I defy anyone reading the statement in its original context to discover that interpretation. Understand: the letter of request was seeking access to the Britan account -- the very account from which Mulroney was, in fact, paid (notwithstanding his bizarre attempt to deny this in front of the committee).
Even more dubious is Mulroney’s imputation of the same selective interpretation to Schreiber’s Edmonton lawyer, Bobby Hladun. Asked about the call he is alleged to have made to Hladun in 1999, asking Schreiber to sign a document asserting he had never paid Mulroney any money for any purpose -- a call that Hladun described in a letter to Schreiber’s other lawyer, Eddie Greenspan -- Mulroney insisted that Hladun, too, had meant by this, or had understood Mulroney to mean, that Schreiber had never paid him any money in connection with the Airbus contract.
But if that were true, why would Schreiber refuse to sign? Why would Greenspan, as Schreiber has testified, forbid him to sign (it would be interesting to hear Greenspan on this -- no solicitor-client privilege can exist on a matter that the client has already disclosed). Mulroney was, by his own account, asking him to do nothing more than tell the truth -- a truth that he, Schreiber, had already stated publicly any number of times. So why wouldn’t he?
On and on it goes. At times, Mulroney seemed genuinely confused as to the facts, claiming that Government Consultants International, the notorious lobby firm at the centre of this whole affair, did not yet exist when he appointed Frank Moores, its chairman, to the board of Air Canada (in fact, it had been incorporated two months before) -- this, though Moores was lobbying for Airbus at the time. Mulroney even claimed that Schreiber had disavowed any involvement in financing the airlift of 450 delegates from Quebec to Winnipeg to vote against Joe Clark at the 1983 Conservative leadership review, when Schreiber has in fact affirmed his involvement on numerous occasions, most recently in his appearance before the committee on Tuesday.
Mulroney had no convincing explanation for either event. Nor could he explain why, after Schreiber sent him a letter in May of this year accusing him of all sorts of misdeeds and threatening to expose him if he did not help him on his extradition case -- the “blackmail letter,” Mulroney called it -- he did not immediately turn it over to the police. Or why Elmer MacKay would have drafted Schreiber’s letter to him of the previous year. His testimony is, quite literally, incredible.
And on those rare occasions when he was pinned down, when the illogic of his position was pursued to its logical conclusion, when all the spin and bafflegab had been worn away, leaving only the stark inexplicabilty of Mulroney’s behaviour, he fell back on his handy, all-purpose, non-explanation: it was an error of judgement. I made a mistake.
But that’s not an explanation. It’s at best a description. It tells us nothing about his motives, reasoning, or objectives. It merely categorizes the result. It tells us neither why nor how he did it, but merely that he did it.
That’s not an error. It’s a pattern.
Comments at:
http://andrewcoyne.com/2007/12/does-mul ... -fools.php
Press Release November 10, 2007
http://www.liberal.ca:80/story_13301_e.aspx
OTTAWA - New information that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had access to key details of the Mulroney-Schreiber affair for seven months, but failed to act on them until an affidavit became public through the media underscores the need for a full judicial inquiry, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said today.
"The facts that came to light today make it clear that Karlheinz Schreiber sent Mr. Harper a letter fully seven months ago that laid out everything. That letter explicitly claims that when Mr. Mulroney sought "financial help" in 1993, Mr. Schreiber met with him, while he was still the prime minister, and worked out an agreement to provide him with funds," said Mr. Dion.
"These are tremendously serious allegations that call into question the very integrity of the office of the Prime Minister. Why did Prime Minister Harper not take action seven months ago? Why has he still not done what is necessary and called an independent inquiry?"
Yesterday, Prime Minister Harper again rejected Liberal demands for a public investigation with full judicial powers and instead only agreed to a third-party review to see if an investigation was warranted. He said he was taking this step because "these new allegations touch on the former prime minister's time in office."
“We now know that the allegations filed in an affidavit this week are not new and that they were explicitly laid out in correspondence Mr. Schreiber sent to Mr. Harper's office at least as early as last March. Are we now expected to believe that these shocking allegations were sent to the Prime Minister and neither he nor his staff did anything about them? That would be a gross breach of duty and portray an appalling lack of leadership," said Mr. Dion.
Mr. Dion noted that media reports confirm that on March 29, 2007, Mr. Schreiber sent Prime Minister Harper a copy of his letter to Brian Mulroney which stated: "During the summer of 1993 when you were looking for financial help, I was there again. When we met on June 23, 1993 at Harrington Lake, you told me that you believed Kim Campbell will win the next election. You also told me ... that the Bear Head project [a business proposal] should be moved to the Province of Quebec, where you could be of great help to me. We agreed to work together and I arranged for some funds for you."
Mr. Dion stressed that Mr. Mulroney was still the Prime Minister of Canada on June 23, 1993 and that Harrington Lake is an official residence of the Government of Canada.
"These latest revelations demonstrate that Mr. Harper and his government are too close to Mr. Mulroney to assess this situation objectively. The Harper government's apparent determination to put defending Mr. Mulroney's reputation ahead of uncovering the truth for Canadians proves decisively that an independent inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of this matter. I call on Mr. Harper to make defending the integrity of the office of Prime Minister his top priority and to stop his delays and call a full judicial inquiry now," said Mr. Dion.
================================
A Poem for Mulroney
http://thetyee.ca:80/Views/2007/11/26/O ... email&utm_
campaign=261107
TheTyee.ca
Mr. Mulroney
said (with a groan) he
wasn’t a crook
and the money he took
was a private transaction
(without any tax on)
and certainly wasn’t anyone’s biz
but his.
It might have been to pay off a debt
or settle a bet
but anyway nothing but three hundred grand
which chaps like him regularly pass hand to hand
without clear explanations
or prompt tax declarations
or even (as no one was going to see)
that tedious business of GST
and if there was any explaining to do
it wouldn’t be simply to me and to you.
But to a royal commission
he might give permission
as with enough lawyers confusing the issues
no one could prove (irrefutably) misuse
and even with minimal legal endeavour
it could drag on for ever and ever
and he could be sure to emerge with his name
if not unsullied at least without blame.
James Barber, television chef and writer, lives in Duncan, BC and chronicles life there.
================================
Does Mulroney take us for fools?
http://andrewcoyne.com/2007/12/does-mul ... -fools.php
December 14, 2007
So, after all this time -- four years since it became public knowledge that he took cash payments from Karlheinz Schreiber, fourteen years after the actual event -- Brian Mulroney finally comes forward to explain... and explains nothing. Or rather, digs himself deeper. Those who might have been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt until now will have a harder time of it after the preposterous story he told the ethics committee today....
Let’s get a few things straight off the top. There are three sets of events about which we need answers. The first has to do with the circumstances surrounding the payments in cash Mulroney admits to having taken from Schreiber after he was prime minister, that is from 1993 on: what he did for the money, why he took it in cash, why there are no records of it anywhere, why he went to such elaborate lengths to conceal it, and so on.
The second has to do with a number of contracts for government business for which Schreiber was paid millions of dollars in secret commissions by his German clients in the 1980s -- not only Airbus, but Thyssen and MBB: how those contracts were won, and what Schreiber did with the money, and whether the first had anything to do with the second. In particular, there is the question of Schreiber’s relationship, financial or otherwise, with several members of that group of Tories centred around Mulroney, going back to the days of the 1983 convention.
Each of those is significant, and troubling, in itself. They remain so, quite apart from whether anyone can connect the two -- that is, whether the payments that we know Mulroney received from Schreiber after he was prime minister were in consequence of anything he did for him while he was prime minister. This third scenario is the one that gets everyone excited. It is, to be sure, the most significant question, in the sense that if it were true, it would be the most serious possible outcome of all this.
But it is also the one for which there is the least evidence. None, in fact. No evidence has been produced to suggest Mulroney personally took bribes from Schreiber, either before or after he left office. It has not even been alleged, except in the infamous 1995 letter of request to the Swiss authorities. Moreover, both men have consistently denied there was any such exchange (though, it should be said, this is hardly surprising: if Schreiber had bribed Mulroney, it is unlikely that either party would be anxious to admit it).
But we do not have to leap all the way to prime ministers taking kickbacks to want the first two sets of events explained. And this Mulroney signally failed to do. He did not give convincing explanations for events of which he was a part in the 1980s. And he most certainly did not give a convincing account of his dealings with Schreiber after he was prime minister.
Instead, he spent most of his time attacking Schreiber’s credibility. This would be significant, and useful, if the business truly pitted one man’s word against the other’s. But in fact that is not the case.
Schreiber’s credibility would be the central issue in this case if we did not know that Mulroney took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from him. But we do. His credibility would be the issue if we did not have his bank records, or the agreements he signed with Airbus, Thyssen and MBB -- but we do. We can trust our own eyes. We don’t need to trust him. We know from these records that Schreiber was paid millions, and we know where at least some of it went: to Frank Moores and his partners in Government Consultants International, and to Brian Mulroney.
To be told that Schreiber is a liar and a perjurer does nothing to explain why Mulroney took cash from Schreiber after he left office, or any of the rest of the story. It is, for the most part, beside the point. To be sure, it would be interesting to know whether they agreed to do business together before or after Mulroney stepped down as prime minister. But the relationship between them is troubling either way. It’s troubling even if you accept Mulroney’s version on every issue on which they disagree. All Mulroney needed to do was explain his side of it. And this is the story he told us:
He said he was hired in August of 1993 to promote the famous Bear Head project to build light-armoured vehicles in Cape Breton -- not in Canada, as Schreiber alleges (which would not only have been in contravention of the lobbyist regulations, inasmuch as he was not registered to lobby, but would also have have run afoul of the code of conduct for public office holders) but overseas: that is, to sell the vehicles abroad. There was no factory to build them, you understand, depending as the project was on government financing that had not proved forthcoming. But never mind. What could be more innocent: selling Canadian-made vehicles -- peacekeeping vehicles, no less -- to other countries?
Why, then, have we not heard this story until now? Mulroney has had seven years to tell his side of the story, ever since his dealings with Schreiber were first unearthed by the reporter Phil Mathias, and since Mathias told what he knew to Bill Kaplan, the lawyer and historian who eventually broke the story. Kaplan spent more than two years nailing it down. In that time, he talked to Mulroney probably a couple of dozen times. The former prime minister tried every possible tack to persuade him not to publish the story, sounding at times a pleading note, at other times a threatening one. In all that time, he never once disclosed this wonderfully exculpatory version of events. Nor has he or any of his spokesmen breathed a word of it since. Why? Maybe he was embarrassed about the cash? That would explain why he didn’t tell anyone before these became known. But after? What’s to lose?
I think we should hear more. Who did he talk to on these foreign journeys? According to Mulroney, he talked to Boris Yeltsin, and to Francois Mitterrand. Does he have any other names -- someone living, perhaps? He says he talked to government officials in China and the United States? Are there any records of these meetings?
Then there’s the little matter of the cash. According to Mulroney, it was Schreiber who insisted that he be paid in cash, in payments totalling $225,000, not the $300,000 Schreiber has maintained. Schreiber’s explanation for this extraordinary request, he says, was simple that he was an international businessman, and this was how he did business. O-kay. That does not explain why Mulroney -- former prime minister of Canada, former president of the Iron Ore Co. of Canada, experienced lawyer -- accepted the request. All that we heard, over and over, was: I made a mistake. It was an error. I’m sorry.
This at least has the virtue of being something we have heard before. Last month, Mulroney’s faithful former spokesman, Luc Lavoie, road-tested the international businessman-colossal mistake explanation. But Luc added another element: Mulroney needed money. Desperately. This was a rare point of agreement between Mulroney and Schreiber, who said the same thing in his testimony. Indeed, Mulroney once confided in Kaplan to much the same effect. “I can tell you,” he said in a June 4, 1998 interview, “when I first started out, I needed … money quite badly.”
But this was a hard sell -- not only did he have most of his expenses paid as prime minister, on top of his six-figure salary, on top of his pension, but the party also kicked in $4000 a month to boot -- and in any event, if he was so broke on leaving office, it was hardly likely to be more than a temporary affliction. He was a former prime minister, with business connections the world over; soon, he would be joining the blue-chip Montreal law firm of Ogilvy Renault. Why could he not have hit up a friend, Peter Munk for example, to tide him over until the directorships and legal fees started to flow? Or a bank? Or Ogilvy Renault? Why go to Schreiber? And why in such circumstances? Perhaps that is why Luc is no longer his spokesman.
So: ixnay on the overtypay. Stick with “colossal mistake”. Is this credible? Suppose it is. Stretch your mind around the notion of a man of Mulroney’s stature meekly acceding to Schreiber’s request. Maybe he was startled, temporarily flummoxed at the sight of all that cash, reluctant to give offense. It happens. But three times? Over sixteen months? By that time, you’ve presumably recovered your composure, not to say your common sense. And still you take the cash? Nobody does business this way. Nobody in business does, that is.
Even then, suppose that’s true. That still doesn’t explain why Mulroney himself kept no records of the transaction, or any subsequent disposition of the cash. Maybe Schreiber didn’t want to leave a paper trail. Why did that prevent Mulroney from leaving one? Yet not only is there no invoice, no contract, no receipt, nothing to link the two men in any way, but there is no record of what Mulroney did with the money at any point thereafter. No bank statements: he didn’t deposit the money in any bank account, he says, but rather in a safe, at his home in Montreal, and in a safety deposit box in New York. And no expense records: he can offer no receipts or records to account for how the money was spent, though he says it was used strictly for business expenses incurred in the course of representing Schreiber’s interests abroad, and though he says he paid for these with a credit card (paying off the credit card bill in turn with wads of cash). And this brings us to the tale of the taxes.
Mulroney did not pay tax on the $225,000 he says he received in 1993 and 1994 until 1999, when he made what’s called a “voluntary disclosure.” He filed tax returns for those years, but did not mention the payments he received from Schreiber. He says he only finally decided to pay taxes on the money because Schreiber’s 1999 arrest on charges of fraud, bribery and tax evasion in his native Germany convinced him that Schreiber was not the respectable businessman he had imagined him to be. Why that should have been the determining factor in his decision the committee did not explore.
But Mulroney says he was not obliged to pay tax on the income he received from Schreiber, because it was not really income, as such, but merely a kind of expense account for him to draw down as need be. O-kay. Did he keep any records of his expenses? Oh yes. Where are they, then? Did he submit them to the tax department, when he finally did file? No: He paid taxes on the whole amount, claimed no deduction for the $40,000 in expenses he says he incurred. Again, this had something to do with Schreiber’s arrest, though again the link is unclear. But what is clear is that this relieved him of the need to file any supporting receipts. But then what about those records he says he kept? Oh, he destroyed them once the tax matter was cleared up. Of course.
Does he take us for fools? No cheques, no invoices, no receipts, no contracts, no bank statements, no withdrawal slips, no credit card bills, no expense records, nothing: not a single scrap of paper exists, it appears, anywhere in the world to support Mulroney’s version. Well, there might be: his tax records. In order to make a voluntary disclosure, you have to make a full explanation of everything to do with the income: how you earned it, what you did with it, etc. Is there a letter to the tax department somewhere offering such explanation? Apparently not. What about his income tax returns, then? Can we at least see them? Uh-uh, he said: those are private. I say again: Does he take us for fools?
All of these questions, all of these doubts, as I said before, are raised not by anything Schreiber said, but by Mulroney’s own testimony. But then, nothing Mulroney said today made much sense. He is still insisting that he barely knew Schreiber -- against a mountain of letter, visits, photos, and telegrams going back to the early 1980s -- and that, so far as he knew him, he was merely a hard-driving business man, the head of Thyssen’s Canadian subsidiary, a man of accomplishment, employer of 3,000 souls. It was only with his arrest in 1999, apparently, that the scales fell from his eyes -- though by that time Schreiber had been a fugitive from German justice for four years.
If so, Mulroney was perhaps the last person in Canada to harbour such illlusions. John Crosbie, Peter MacKay, Rhys Eyton, Paul Tellier, Robert Fowler and Peter Lougheed are among the political, bureaucratic and business leaders who have said they had misgivings about Schreiber, or indeed refused to have anything to do with him. Public inquiry? Schreiber has already been the subject of one -- 26 years ago, in 1981, over a notorious purchase of land outside Edmonton, Alberta, one that had uncannily anticipated a provincial land-use decision, which may or may not have had something to do with the several former provincial cabinet ministers Schreiber had taken into his employ. Of all this Mulroney was apparently blissfully unaware.
Likewise, he continues to maintain that his statements under oath prior to his 1996 libel trial -- to the effect that he had never had any dealings with Schreiber -- were the literal truth, if you interpret “never had any dealings” to mean “never had any dealings involving the exchange of Airbus contracts for cash.” No one but he can know for sure what was in his mind at the time, but I defy anyone reading the statement in its original context to discover that interpretation. Understand: the letter of request was seeking access to the Britan account -- the very account from which Mulroney was, in fact, paid (notwithstanding his bizarre attempt to deny this in front of the committee).
Even more dubious is Mulroney’s imputation of the same selective interpretation to Schreiber’s Edmonton lawyer, Bobby Hladun. Asked about the call he is alleged to have made to Hladun in 1999, asking Schreiber to sign a document asserting he had never paid Mulroney any money for any purpose -- a call that Hladun described in a letter to Schreiber’s other lawyer, Eddie Greenspan -- Mulroney insisted that Hladun, too, had meant by this, or had understood Mulroney to mean, that Schreiber had never paid him any money in connection with the Airbus contract.
But if that were true, why would Schreiber refuse to sign? Why would Greenspan, as Schreiber has testified, forbid him to sign (it would be interesting to hear Greenspan on this -- no solicitor-client privilege can exist on a matter that the client has already disclosed). Mulroney was, by his own account, asking him to do nothing more than tell the truth -- a truth that he, Schreiber, had already stated publicly any number of times. So why wouldn’t he?
On and on it goes. At times, Mulroney seemed genuinely confused as to the facts, claiming that Government Consultants International, the notorious lobby firm at the centre of this whole affair, did not yet exist when he appointed Frank Moores, its chairman, to the board of Air Canada (in fact, it had been incorporated two months before) -- this, though Moores was lobbying for Airbus at the time. Mulroney even claimed that Schreiber had disavowed any involvement in financing the airlift of 450 delegates from Quebec to Winnipeg to vote against Joe Clark at the 1983 Conservative leadership review, when Schreiber has in fact affirmed his involvement on numerous occasions, most recently in his appearance before the committee on Tuesday.
Mulroney had no convincing explanation for either event. Nor could he explain why, after Schreiber sent him a letter in May of this year accusing him of all sorts of misdeeds and threatening to expose him if he did not help him on his extradition case -- the “blackmail letter,” Mulroney called it -- he did not immediately turn it over to the police. Or why Elmer MacKay would have drafted Schreiber’s letter to him of the previous year. His testimony is, quite literally, incredible.
And on those rare occasions when he was pinned down, when the illogic of his position was pursued to its logical conclusion, when all the spin and bafflegab had been worn away, leaving only the stark inexplicabilty of Mulroney’s behaviour, he fell back on his handy, all-purpose, non-explanation: it was an error of judgement. I made a mistake.
But that’s not an explanation. It’s at best a description. It tells us nothing about his motives, reasoning, or objectives. It merely categorizes the result. It tells us neither why nor how he did it, but merely that he did it.
That’s not an error. It’s a pattern.
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http://andrewcoyne.com/2007/12/does-mul ... -fools.php
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