Double Standards On The Hill

I can appreciate that any employer wants to protect its confidentiality, however what the Harper Government is imposing on employees of MPs is another thing altogether.

Most people sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement with their employers.  These are not usually any big deal.  They usually contain some kind of statement that more or less says "thou shalt not give away company secrets". 

What they don't do is attempt to impose life-long bans.  In fact, doing so would be considered illegal under both our constitution and labour laws.  

So ... what makes it "reasonable" for the Harper Government to slide a clause like this into a confidentiality agreement:

Yes, Government Employees are often subject to the Official Secrets Act, especially if they have access to government secrets such as military intelligence documents.  Someone working in the employ of an MP may well have access to sensitive information.  However, imposing a lifetime gag order on them seems unnecessary.  Especially when MPs are not subject to similar restrictions.

But, then again, the Harper Government is no ordinary government in Canadian experience.  The Harper Government has gone to lengths to invade the private lives of Canadian citizens that are unprecedented, and at the same time a cloak of secrecy has descended over Ottawa since 2006. 

Only a government with a serious authoritarian streak would view this as an appropriate act.

The Assault On Knowledge Continues

The Harperites are continuing their assault on any source of data which might get between them and their dogmatic policies.

The most recent chapter in the saga is the dismantling of the DFO's system of reference libraries.

If they were consolidating them, that would be one thing.  For the Harperites, nothing less than destruction is good enough:

"I was sickened," said one prominent research scientist who had worked for the federal government for 30 years, and who did not want to be identified. "All that intellectual capital is now gone. It's like a book burning. It's the destruction of our cultural heritage. It just makes us poorer as a nation.""There are so many willing accomplices to what's going on," the scientist added. "All of our federal libraries and archives are being diminished. It's an ideological thing coming from a right-wing libertarian government." 

Since 2012, the government has closed or consolidated more than a dozen federal libraries at Parks Canada, Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Foreign Affairs, Citizenship and Immigration and Canadian Heritage.

These various libraries represent decades or more of data and knowledge.  It is easy to look at them and declare that this or that document is "obsolete", but that doesn't render it "valueless".  Older documents can give us insight into how the situation has changed since that document was written.  Newer data is more relevant in the immediate sense, but often only really has meaning when analyzed against older datasets for comparison.

Like Harper's kneecapping of Statistics Canada - a move which makes it almost impossible for government to make policy decisions based on meaningful population data (which, of course, allows more claims like "Unreported Crime Rates" to be made by the Harperites to justify their more psychotic policies.

Dismantling the DFO libraries enables the Harperites to ignore the problems that their "sell everything" approach to policy is all but guaranteed to create.

If Nigel Wright is a "Hero" ...

According to Christie Blatchford, Canadians apparently should revere Nigel Wright and his actions in the Senate Expenses mess.

I don't believe that Mr. Wright was acting in a knowingly criminal manner - I have always thought that he believed firmly that he was acting within the bounds of his job and responsibilities.

However, having said that, Ms. Blatchford's analysis misses a few things.

First, Mr. Wright was smack in the midst of a conspiracy to cover things up when there was a looming audit that was almost guaranteed to generate a lot of bad press.

Second, based on the evidence available to this point, the issue of repaying Duffy's expenses appears to have devolved to Wright after the Conservative Fund (headed up by Senator Gerstein) decided to balk at the amount to be repaid.  Whether or not Wright's action in giving Duffy a cheque for $90,000 were strictly legal, they certainly have the whiff of political cover-up at the very least and poor moral judgment on Wright's part.

The real question that should be asked is why bother with trying to hide the expenses of a single, errant senator?  What about Mike Duffy was so important to the party that they felt it necessary to go to these lengths to protect him from scrutiny?  Would it not have been far simpler to direct Mr. Duffy to his bankers to extend his loans to cover the amount in question?  Last, but far from least, the degree of Mr. Harper's involvement and awareness in this whole mess deserves scrutiny as well.

Mr. Wright is far from the "villain" in all of this.  He no doubt had been told by his boss to "make the problem go away".  He tried ... and failed.  Unfortunately for Mr. Wright, his choice of actions are at best a sign of poor judgment.  He may have acted as the lesser player in the entire mess, but that does not make him any kind of "hero".

Trickle Down Budget Cuts

Conservative governments love budget cuts.  Look around you, and every time there is a "financial crisis", the first thing that comes out of the conservatives is that they must cut program spending left, right and centre "because the government doesn't have the income to support it".

Superficially, the public would expect that those budget cuts would be implemented so that the impact on the programs themselves is minimized.  Or at least that is what reasonable people would expect.  Right?

The unfortunate reality is that the people who are in the position to absorb a sizeable chunk of the burden of the cuts, those at the top, simply step aside and let the brunt of the cuts work their way down to people lower on the "food chain".

Consider the situation in Alberta.  In this spring's budget, the government announced major cuts to the post-secondary education.  Naturally, this placed the University of Calgary in a budget shortfall position immediately.  So, where do the cuts take place?  At the top?  Not even close.  In fact, the cuts are allowed to flow down to the students and faculty.   Sure, the executives took a "pay freeze" (considering that executive pay at the U of C is much higher than at other universities, this is a minor gesture at most), but at the same time, they have allowed a massive renovation of the executive offices to go ahead.  

Budget cuts are kind of like trickle-down economics in reverse.  Instead of the people at the top taking a larger percentage of the burden, they quietly step aside and allow the bulk of the burden of the cuts to flow down to lower levels - ultimately to students and faculty.

Just as the "consolidation" of regional health authorities to create AHS ended up keeping a ridiculous number of executives in place (necessitating restrictions on the number of beds in hospitals, overloaded nurses and so on), the cuts to Post Secondary Education in Alberta will result in cuts to programs that are not deemed "workplace friendly" programs, while the executives at the top of the heap continue pulling down enormous salaries.  

Ultimately, the burden of these cuts flow down to the people who rely on the programs - be they students or patients.  Just as Trickle-Down Economics ultimately concentrates wealth at the top, budget cuts, as implemented by conservative governments, inevitably follow a similar principle and ultimately starve the people who depend on these programs.

Why does this happen?   Because people are not "selfless agents".  The people in positions of power and authority will go to great lengths to preserve their position.

What Ford and Harper Have In Common

They both have problems with telling the truth.

Yesterday, news broke that Rob Ford had been attempting to purchase the video of him smoking crack cocaine - before Gawker and the Toronto Star made the existence of the video public.  In this morning's news, we find Ford denying that he was doing that at all.

So far, in the course of this saga, every time Ford has denied something, evidence has come along to disprove his denials.  At first, he denied ever having smoked crack cocaine, and then at the end of October, the video mysteriously turns up in the hands of police.  Given the pattern to date, I'd say the odds of Ford's utterances (which appear to contradict the ITO documents) being true are fairly low.

As we've seen with the Senate Expenses Scandal, Harper has a similar approach - lie, deflect, deny until the evidence corners you.  At first, Harper was saying the everything was just fine with his errant senators, then when it became impossible to avoid, they were being "disciplined" by the Senate; and eventually the whole mess got handed to the RCMP in a clumsy attempt to bury it in a criminal investigation.  All the way along, Harper has denied all knowledge.  Meanwhile, Duffy's speeches have made it abundantly clear that the PM clearly knew what was going on in considerable detail.

In parliamentary terms, both have chosen to "deliberately mislead the house".

Do the math.

Thought's On Chong's Reform Bill

Michael Chong's Bill C-559 is a relatively short piece of work, but it has taken me a bit of time to go through it and start to understand the implications of the changes being proposed, mostly because it contains a series of small changes to much larger acts - in particular the Canada Elections Act, but also the Parliament of Canada Act.

As I read through the proposed changes (which required a lot of flipping back and forth to the current Acts to fully understand), I started to come to the conclusion that in some respects this bill is a resurrection of a piece of the original Reform party wish list.

At its core, it creates an environment which removes from the party executives direct control over the nomination of candidates.  In doing so, it removes from party leaders one of the bigger levers used to maintain control over their respective caucuses - namely the threat of the leader refusing to sign their nomination papers for the next election.

Consider the following changes:

Current Canada Elections Act S.67(4)(c):

• (c) if applicable, an instrument in writing, signed by the leader of the political party or by a person referred to in subsection 383(2), that states that the prospective candidate is endorsed by the party in accordance with section 68.

Proposed Amendment in Bill C-559:

(c) if applicable, an instrument in writing, signed by the nomination officer of the political party’s electoral district association for the electoral district that states that the prospective candidate is endorsed by the party.

You do have to read this a couple of times before it becomes clear what Chong's legislation does.  It completely removes the party executive from the nominations decision making process.  It creates a position at the riding association level called a 'Nomination Officer' who essentially has the final say over who the party nominee is going to be.

Superficially, this is not entirely a bad thing.  It hands a level of control to the riding association level in each party that has been constrained historically by the need for the party executive to "sign off" on candidates.

Is it a good thing?  That's a little more subtle and difficult to ascertain.  The Reform Party was big on "direct democracy" back in the day.  Then they started to discover that having things concentrated at the riding level meant that they got a fair number of candidates that were unelectable.  The PCs in Alberta ran smack into this a few years ago when one Craig Chandler engineered a takeover of a local riding association by his supporters and got himself nominated.  Even Ed Stelmach could see that was a good way to lose a seat, and killed Chandler's nomination.

This does create a problem to consider for party apparatus people to consider.  Can you deal with the inevitable selection of candidates at the riding level that are for one reason or another "bad news"?  If one looks at the candidates as part of the party's "marketing image", this could be seen as a significant problem.

The second part of Chong's bill is more interesting - it basically creates a mechanism through which MPs could trigger a leadership review process within a party.

(k) the extract of the party by-laws that provides that 

(i) a leadership review may be initiated by the submission of a written notice to the caucus chair signed by at least 15% of the members of the party’s caucus, 

(ii) a leadership review is to be conducted by secret ballot, with the result to be determined by a majority vote of the caucus members present at a meeting of the caucus, and 

(iii) if a majority of caucus members present at the meeting referred to in subparagraph (ii) vote to replace the leader of the party, a second vote of the caucus shall be conducted immediately by secret ballot to appoint a person to serve as the interim leader of the party until a new leader has been duly elected by the party.

MPs (or MLAs, come to that) are the people who have to work with the party executive on a day to day basis outside of elections.  The idea of MPs being able to trigger a leadership review based on the  actual work of the leadership team is not entirely bad.

However, I do think that Chong's legislation has some very fundamental problems here.

First, its threshold value is far too low.  15% of a party caucus could probably be found at any time - even when things are going well for the party.  This will create an environment where the focus is constantly on "finding enough supporters" to advance one's favoured leadership candidate, rather than handing MPs a set of tools which can be brought to bear when serious issues are found with party leadership.

The second problem I see is that there is no time fuse on when the leadership review has to take place.  The lack of a time fuse on the matter is problematic, as the leadership can then delay things as long as they choose.

The last problem, and perhaps the one that is most fatal to this proposal is that it effectively hands control over the party leadership to the MPs.  While triggering a leadership review seems like an effective tool for MPs to have access to, I do not think they should have the right to depose a leader without the consent of the party membership at large.

While I can appreciate Chong's frustration with the leadership of the CPC these days, and the overbearing control that the party discipline mechanisms are exerting on MPs, I am less than convinced that this legislation will actually have the effect that he is seeking.

How Shocking ...

So, apparently the PMO has "found" a bunch of e-mails that they previous claimed had been deleted.

The emails of Stephen Harper's former legal advisor were not deleted when he left the Prime Minister's Office, according to a letter sent from the Privy Council Office (PCO) to the RCMP. 

Benjamin Perrin, who was named in RCMP documents last week as a player in the deal between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy, left the PMO in late March. 

The letter released Sunday night states when Perrin left in March, the PCO said they deleted his emails records as part of standard protocol. Last week, the RCMP sent another request to the PMO for Perrin's records to see if there were any backups. 

But it turns out the Perrin's emails were held as part of "unrelated litigation", a discovery the PCO made the next day after PMO asked them to check again.

If this sounds just a little Nixonian to you, it should.   First the records don't exist, then they do.  I'll put even money that the PMO has been busily hacking up the e-mail trail to remove the most damning evidence, and to end up making it look like Perrin never told Harper what was going on.  Which will, incidentally throw Mr. Perrin under the same bus as Mr. Duffy, Mr. Wright and a few others.  In this case, because Mr. Perrin will suddenly find himself under suspicion of failing to carry out the ethical duty of notifying "up the chain of command" when the organization is about to act wrongly).

As far as I am concerned, at this point, the RCMP should walk into the Langevin block armed with warrants for the seizure of all backups of the PMO's e-mail servers, if not the servers themselves.  We already have evidence of the PMO attempting to cover up its activities and involvement in this whole mess.  It is time to lock down every piece of communication related to this.  The RCMP should also ascertain any external e-mail accounts that may have been involved, and issue requests for copies of all data in those accounts for the last couple of years.

Does this sound like a fishing expedition?  To some extent it is.  However, when there is reason to suspect that evidence has been tampered with, a wider net is needed to ensure that we capture the full picture.

However, even if we establish beyond all doubt that Harper really did not know the particulars of the arrangement that resulted in Nigel Wright paying Mike Duffy some $90,000 it does not matter.  At the end of the day, the PMO is Harper's office.  He is not some low level functionary who can be excused for not being fully aware of the consequences of someone's actions.  He is the man at the helm.  The guy in charge.  The man who ultimately has to bear responsibility whether he likes it or not.  Harper has tried desperately not to take responsibility for the actions of his staff.

This is unacceptable.