Excited delirium 'R Us.ca

Ken Boessenkool, original signatory to the 2001 'Alberta Firewall' letter and former Alliance campaign advisor to both Harper and Stockwell Day, has added TASER™ International to his lobbying portfolio.

According to the Gov. of Canada Lobbyist Registration System, his job for TASER™ will be to lobby the Prime Minister's Office, the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada (PSEPC), and the RCMP with an "Awareness campaign to educate decision-makers on the facts of TASER International's products" for "Government reviews of taser use by law enforcement".

One of the "Techniques of communication that you have used or expect to use in the course of the undertaking" listed on Ken's TASER™ page at the same government lobbyist website is "Grass-roots Communications"

LOL, as the kids say.

Previous "grass-roots communications" by Ken Boessenkool's firm, Hill and Knowlton Canada, have been "getitrightalberta.ca", a grass-roots effort to convince Albertans they really don't want to benefit personally from $2B+ in tarsands revenue after all, and the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, another grassroots org famous for shilling for ethanol for agri-biz firms.

Based on past performance, we now eagerly await new TASER™ grassroots websites like tasersaveslives.ca, exciteddelirium'r us.ca and onemilliontasered.ca.

Possibly, onemillionserved.ca would be pushing it.

Former advisor to Harper and Day lobbies for Taser Int - a very good article from Sue Bailey at Canadian Press re the revolving door of gov/industry lobbying and Boessenkool's work for Merck Frosst, which benefited from a surprise $300-million fund in the last federal budget to vaccinate girls against cervical cancer.

Christy Clark and the Manning Centre for Building Conservatives

In March 2012, Christy Clark gave the opening remarks to the Ottawa Manning Centre Networking Conference, the yearly "conservative family reunion".

She was introduced by her then chief of staff, former senior Harper advisor, Enbridge lobbyist, and Alberta 'firewall manifesto' signatory Ken Boessenkool, who was her very first campaign manager back in 2010. 

"We have a duty to Canada" to easy the flow of products to Asia, she told her audience at the Manning Centre [a year ago]. "We support pipelines in British Columbia."

BC Conservative leader John Cummins was not invited.

Manning has in the past said he doesn’t support the political ambitions of Cummins, who was elected as a Reformer with Manning in the 1993 election, because vote-splitting on the centre-right always makes it easier for the NDP to assume power.

One-time Harper government cabinet minister, Jay Hill, also said Friday he’s backing Clark’s leadership. “I’ll do whatever I can to support her and support the B.C. Liberals."

Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and President of the Manning Centre, is also a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.

Jay Hill was in charge of the Cons 200 page dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt and stonewall parliamentary committees back in 2007.

Also helping Christy's campaign was Chuck Strahl, former BC Reform and Con MP, now chair of the Manning Centre and chair of CSIS watchdog the Security Intelligence Review Committee since last June, at which time he had to give up working for Christy.

The only pollster to accurately predict Tuesday's election result was Christy's principal secretary and ADM in charge of "Intergovernmental Relations" till a year ago and now on contract to Christy, former Reform and Republican policy advisor Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Premier’s Office targeted crucial election ridings for the B.C. Liberals — all on government time and your dime

"Premier Christy Clark’s former principal secretary, Dimitri Pantazopolous, and former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad were among those involved in a comprehensive strategy that used government staff and resources to try to win swing ridings for the BC Liberals ...  serious misconduct by government employees and misuse of government funds.   

“Dimitri was the driving force behind the swing teams, from its inception through to the operational phase."

Pantazoploulos also runs the Manning Centre Municipal Governance Project and is mentioned by Calgary developer Cal Wenzel in the now infamous cel vid about buying the campaigns of developer-friendly municipal candidates in order to defeat Calgary Mayor Nenshi.

On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - Christy's former chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign win.  
The third partner in the firm is BC NDP campaign director Brian Topp.

and a quick tweet from Rob Ford's chief of staff Mark Towhey:

You do remember Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research,  don't you ? 

In addition to being Rob Ford's election architect, Kouvalis is a regular speaker at ... wait for it ... the Manning Centre yearly bunfest.

Fun fact :  Founding directors of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy :

• Nigel Wright, Harper's chief of staff, currently in the news for cutting Con senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to cover money the Duffster owed to the Senate for inappropriately claimed living expenses for the past four years while Duffy was being investigated for it,  and 
• Gwyn Morgan, Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin til May 2 this year, the company being investigated for fraud in four countries on three continents, was Steve's choice for heading up his brand new Accountability commission in 2006.

Manning Centre : "Congratulations to Christy Clark on a spectacular victory. The election of a non-socialist government in BC is in the best interests of BC and Canada."
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Tracking the BC ConservaLiberals

Dave and RossK are tracking the incestuous links between the federal Cons and the BC provincial Libs.

Dave traces the Vancouver web development company Backbone Technology setting up websites for the federal Cons in 2004, the Olympics, the BC Libs and the BC government, and scoring a secret bid on the BC HST info site. Handy, that.
RossK is looking at the possibility the BC Libs are a mere subsidiary of the FedCons and asks "Who was the first FedCon operative hired by Christy Clark?", noting a DComm left Steve to reappear in Christy's government 3 months later in July 2011.


So who was the first BC FedConLib? Here's one from April 2011.
Dimitri Pantazopoulos became Christie Clark's principal secretary on April 4, 2011, in charge of "Long-term policy and priorities and Intergovernmental Relations" after doing polling and voter tracking for her BC Liberal leadership race.
A former Reform Party policy advisor, he was introduced to Clark four months earlier by another Reform Party policy advisor and Harper strategist Ken Boessenkool, who quit as Clark's campaign manager after Steve asked senior members from the national Con campaign team to "refrain from taking formal positions in the B.C. leadership race".
Boessenkool, a former Enbridge lobbyist, eventually joined Clark's team as her chief of staff last month.

 Clark explains :

"The role of the principal secretary is a policy adviser, helping us navigate some of the policy waters that sometimes can get difficult -thinking about the long-term vision for government, helping set some of that agenda," she said.

Prior to becoming Clark's principal secretary, Pantazopoulos was founder and president of Praxicus Public Strategies for 11 years, where he led public opinion research as Steve's official "Pollster of Record", and more recently polled for TO Mayor Rob Ford. And previous to that :

Mr. Pantazopoulos served as a Washington, (D.C.) Partner with Market Strategies, Inc., an influential Republican public opinion research and consulting firm based in Livonia, Michigan. 

Surprising how often, no matter where you start with these guys, it leads back to Republican flacksters.


Christy Clark's latest Harper acquisition is recent PMO press secretary Sara MacIntyre, who introduced Steve's inimitable media-repression tactics to BC this month with her appointment as Clark's media handler less than one month after leaving Steve's employ.

“She's taken the Harper media plan and brought it to B.C.” said CTV's Robert Fife.

Go, Reform.
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Election 2011 - Vote splitting

Who really benefited from vote splitting this election?

Ken Boessenkool and Brian Topp, a Con and an NDP strategist respectively, crunch up the numbers and conclude :

the Liberals did.

"The Conservatives and the NDP won their seats with, on average, large pluralities and considerable margins over the party that finished second – which was usually not the Liberals."

Hence little evidence of vote splitting.

Even in Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area where the Libs claim they were hurt by vote splitting? Yup. Even there.

To be honest I've no idea whether Topp and Boessenkool's method for determining vote splitting - explained at the link above - is sound and I'm hoping Alice will find time to evaluate it, but I rather liked the dramatic graph accompanying it, showing how the party tallies shifted in each province compared to the 2008 election.

Alice has her own graphs here.


Paul Wells on vote splitting :
 On the impertinence of the NDP

"Here’s an article in a Toronto newspaper: How vote-splitting gave the Tories Ontario — and a majority. Apparently the Globe is using its Random Headline Generator again, because the story is about how vote-splitting didn’t give the Tories Ontario or a majority.

The Conservatives won 12 seats in the province in large part due to vote-splitting on the centre-left. Had the NDP surge fizzled on ballot day – and the votes cleaved to the Liberal camp – Stephen Harper’s majority would have been a bare-minimum 155.

         Fun fact: 155 is a majority."

Yes I know we're all bored with election post mortems by now.  But in 4½ years the Liberal strategic voting sites will once again be handing out bucket advice to 'vote Lib so the Cons won't get in' and I figure we're going to need this as a reminder.
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Update : Thank you, Alice!
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Christy Clark's Big Fat Tarsands Fundraisers

Our national media seems pretty exercised about Alberta tarsands bigwigs and political insiders throwing a fundraiser in Calgary for our unelected Premier Christy Clark's Liberals to slag off on the NDP :

CBC : Albertans hold fundraiser for BC Liberals
G&M : Clark defends out-of-province fundraising for B.C. Liberal candidate
FPost : Alberta powerbrokers throw lifeline to B.C. premier as threat of tougher pipeline fight from NDP looms
Sun : B.C. Liberals tap Calgary crowd for election funds
Edmonton Journal : Alberta Tories helping to raise cash for beleaguered B.C. Liberals

They do know that last October, Chrusty went straight from her "frosty" meeting with Alberta's Alison Redford in which she loudly promised to protect BC's environment from Alberta pipelines, directly to a fundraiser at the Calgary Petroleum Club, also hosted by the same Murray Edwards, chairman of Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and exactly these same Alberta dudes, don't they? And that the year before on October 20, 2011, a $500-a-plate fundraiser was held for her, again at the Calgary Petroleum Club. 

They do realize that Chrusty's 2011 October Alberta fundraiser was set up by her then chief of staff Ken Boessenkool, formerly Tarsands Harper's chief of staff, right?

They have noticed that it was Encana's Gwyn Morgan who smoothed over the transition from the unre-electable Gordo to the unelected Premier Chrusty - the same Encana who have donated over a half a million dollars to Chrusty's Liberals in the last 3 years. Right?

Oh well, if Calgary could hold a $1000-a-plate fundraiser to elect John McCain for president in 2008, I guess Chrusty might be worth $125-a-plate to them in 2013.

h/t MoS and BCLib

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Update : RossK brings the "foreign special interests and their deep pocket puppets" angle to Encana's financial support for Christy. But come on, Ross, PetroChina buying 49.9% of an Encana project with an additional $1B to come over the next four years falls a whole .1% within Steve's new foreign ownership guidelines. So we're good here and no review required says Industry Canada.
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Welcome back, Mr. Togneri

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

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

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

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

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

Togneri, you will recall :

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

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

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

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

Welcome back to the fold, Mr. Togneri
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"What on Earth!" Are We Thinking?

There's something quite obscene about feeding corn to cars, isn't there?

Ditto wheat, barley, sugar cane or palm trees.

Forty years ago the NFB aired a little cartoon "What on Earth!" in which Martians come to Earth and determine that cars are running the whole show.

Things have got much cornier since.

Today we have agri-biz enthusiastically promoting ethanol and biofuels though the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, with their oddly familiar-sounding slogan : "A Climate Change Solution Made In Canada".

CRFA head Kory Teneycke is a former Reform activist and was a Con strategist during the last election.

Ken Boessenkool, one of Harper's closest advisers, is registered to lobby for them. (Thank you, Holly Stick)

Unsurprisingly, last week's budget from the Cons contained $2 billion in incentives for ethanol.

CRFA members include Agricore, Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Cargill, General Motors, Monsanto, Pioneer Dupont, Suncor Energy Products, Shell Canada, and Sylvite (fertilizer).

Well, you say, what could possibly go wrong?

Just this - Ethanol is a product of food and fossil fuels.

Despite arguably burning 12% cleaner, it consumes more energy in its production than it contains, making it a negative energy source.

George Monbiot : “It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.”

Celsias : "Big industry, desperate to retain consumer dollars, is influencing government - who are in turn pandering to very destructive whims."

Celsias , a great source of resource material on biofuels, has a shocking video of horizon-to-horizon forest clearing in Sumatra to grow bio-fuels.

Link to Celsius found at DeSmogBlog, following an article on how running out of oil could worsen climate change.

I know this all sounds terribly depressing. The good news is how much more we know about how all this works now, compared to the people who first watched "What on Earth!" forty years ago.

UPDATE : Front page of YahooNews : Scientists weigh downside of palm oil.

Draining swamps and burning forests in Malaysia and Indonesia to plant palm oil crops now accounts for 8% of the world's fossil fuel emissions.

getitrightorelsealberta.ca

That's : GetItRightOrElseAlberta.ca

From Daveberta :
"Over the past week, a new website has popped up - getitrightalberta.ca - calling for Alberta's Tory Government to keep the resource royalty structure the way it is - even after the damning Alberta Royalty Review Report and Auditor General's Report slammed Ed Stelmach's Tory Government for failing to collect BILLIONS of dollars in resource revenues owed to Albertans over the past 15 years."

Daveberta looked into who is behind getitrightalberta.ca and came up with Hill and Knowlton.
The H&K Calgary office, Dave informs us, is "led by none-other than Mr. Ken Boessenkool, a member of the infamous firewall six and former adviser to Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper."
Pretty slick site for a grass roots effort -
Get It Right Alberta! About this site :

"Concerned Albertans, including private citizens, small oil and gas companies and members of the investment community, have come together to launch this website."

You're shitting me! No big oil and gas companies? No uncollected royalty money going towards this endeavor?
You mean this little grass roots effort can afford Hill and Knowlton all on its own?

Among the petitions and letters you can send to the editor or your MLA begging them to hold off on collecting those BILLIONS in resource revenues that are owned by the people of Alberta and not the oil companies, is a vid clip of Jim McCormick being interviewed on a TV breakfast program. McCormick is able to evade the interviewer's questions as to who is actually backing Get It Right Alberta but does offer this valuable insight :

"I don't believe that any society has ever taxed itself into prosperity."

Really? What exactly is your model for no-tax prosperity here, Jim? Chad? Nigeria?

The website manages to maintain a fairly neutral tone in its quest to convince Albertans they really don't want the money that they should have already received.
The endorsement from the Alberta Alliance party? Not so much :

"..catastrophic consequences for all Albertans
To suggest that costs can be controlled by good management in a booming economy is an absolute lack of understanding of the current state of the oil and gas industry.
To scare away additional capital could result in layoffs tenfold higher than currently being experienced.
The Alliance Party suggests that we should be what Albertans want us to be and that is deal-keepers.
Albertans want Alberta to be known as trustworthy.

The key is to not kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs for Albertans."

I would respectfully suggest that "the key" here is to avoid having your head so far up the goose's ass that you are mistaken for paté foie gras.

As unlikely as it sounds, if their past track record is anything to go on, H&K could very well prove successful in their bid to convince Albertans that they don't want their own money.

Previously Hill and Knowlton sold the American people on the first Gulf War using imaginary babies being thrown out of imaginary incubators.
Remember Nayirah, the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family who was coached by Hill and Knowlton to pose for the cameras as the poor traumatized hospital volunteer who witnessed the baby-throwing and whose life was now consequently in danger?

Grass roots "advocacy" at its finest. Only the oil was real. The oil is always what is real.

H/T Holly Stick for the links.
Previous post on recent Alberta fiascos here.

Con leakage

Impolitical mops up the latest embarrassing Con leakage -Con MP Kelly Block's staffer Russell Ullyatt who was fired for leaking drafts of confidential Finance Committee reports to at least four Con-connected industry lobbyists.
"I heart you," one of them wrote back to Ullyatt on receipt of his "Thought you'd like to see this in its infancy" covering note.

So whenever CBC's Power and Politics is done wrapping up its important coverage of the opinions of the Bonhomme mascot, here are a few other connections the CBC might consider following. After all, Ullyatt may well have only taken up leaking confidential docs to industry lobbyists for the very first time this week but given he's been swimming in the Con pool for some years now, it wouldn't hurt to ask, would it?

Prior to being hired by Brock, leaker Russell Ullyatt was employed as Senior Special Assistant to Secretary of State Helena Guergis (Foreign Affairs and International Trade).
In 2008 Ullyatt was campaign manager for Con MP Rob Clarke, the former RCMP sergeant who made the news when a "uniformed RCMP officer was spotted delivering campaign signs out of an RCMP truck".

The leaked docs recipients

Lynne Hamilton, former Mike Harris alumnus now a VP at GCI Group, and author of the "I heart you" note.
The GCI Group Leadership Team page lists Ken Boessenkool, former Senior Policy Advisor to Stephen Harper, as Senior Counsel. Hamilton's bio :

7 years at Hill & Knowlton plus previous government posts :
Chief of Staff to the Ontario Associate Minister of Health and Long-Term Care
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development
Environment Ministry media coordinator in 2000 for the Walkerton water tragedy
Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Tourism -"handled the corporate
restructuring of over 40 companies for the Government"
Ontario Premier’s office co-ordinating the daily issue binder for question period.

Tim Egan, CEO at the Canadian Gas Association.

Founding director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project aka Not Really Science People - the Tim Ball and Tom Harris climate change skeptics group. Former President of the High Park Group, a Toronto-based lobby organization of which Tom Harris is the former head of its Ottawa office.

Clarke Cross, senior consultant with Tactix Group and former Legislative Assistant to Con/Alliance MPs James Lunney and Leon Benoit

Andy Gibbons of Hill and Knowlton , also formerly a legislative assistant to Con MP Leon Benoit.

Con cabinet ministers and the former political insiders who are now paid to lobby them - you can see how Russell Ullyatt might easily have got the two email lists confused. If only there was some sort of rule to keep the two separate.
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