Minister of Asbestos aide resigns

An aide to Christian Paradis, Minister of Asbestos, resigned last night over his own meddling in at least four access-to-information requests, one of which involved :

"the backgrounds of members of a government panel examining asbestos."

Would that by any chance be the backgrounds of the members of this government panel? March 2010 :

The one remaining asbestos mine in Canada, second largest exporter of asbestos in the world, is in the riding of Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis.

At the last meeting of the Committee on Natural Resources, NDP Pat Martin moved to cut the $250,000 funding the department allocates to the [asbestos lobby group] Chrysotile Institute. No one supported the motion, and the other committee
members - I'm looking at you, Libs - slunk away so there was no longer the quorum necessary for the vote.

At the time I wondered why, as per the Sierra Club's allegations, the Natural Resources Ministry was paying the Chrysotile asbestos lobby group to lobby its own minister.

On March 23, 2010, the motion to remove the government subsidy to Chrysotile Asbestos Institute was defeated in committee nine to one :
Geoff Regan, Liberal - NO ............ Nathan Cullen, NDP - YES
Navdeep Bains, Liberal - NO ........ Cheryl Gallant, Con - NO
Alan Tonks, Liberal - NO ............. Richard Harris, Con - NO
Paule Brunelle, Bloc - NO ............ David Anderson, Con - NO
Mauril Bélanger, Liberal - NO ...... Bernard Genereux, Con - NO

and that made me wonder why they all caved on what appears to be an obvious conflict of interest at the very least.

In May, the minister's aide Sebastien Togneri was questioned by the Ethics Committee over his blocking of information. Shortly thereafter the Cons decided not to allow political staffers or their work/incriminating emails to appear before the committee any more and Paradis showed up in his aide's place.

As Pogge would say here - things that make you go hmmm ...
h/t Antonia Z.

"No one takes Ethics Committee summons seriously"

"At the end of the day, [Ethics Committee Chair]Paul Szabo and this kangaroo court have no credibility and no one takes their summons seriously."

So said Con MP Pierre Poilievre in August two years ago when he was only an associate member of the Ethics Committee.
Since becoming fully-fledged, and also Parliamentary Secretary to Steve, his job there is apparently to pipe up "Point of order" every few minutes like some demented Energizer bunny until the Chair finally cuts his mike.

Lib Wayne Easter's spirited response to John Baird's surprise appearance before the Ethics Committee on Tuesday in place of Dimitri Soudas has already been well covered. Soudas cancelled only minutes before the committee convened, in keeping with Steve's new rules forbidding ministerial staffers from appearing before committees.

Chair Paul Szabo at first let Baird speak, setting off an hour of angry opposition motions to dismiss the usurper, interspersed with Poilievre's points! of! order! By contrast, the Con committee members dutifully bent over their brand new talking points on "ministerial responsibility for their staffers", carefully read aloud with heads bowed down when it was their turn to speak.
Eventually Szabo broke a tie vote over whether or not to let Baird stay and booted him out.

Well sure. After all, as Minister of Transport, Baird is not Soudas' boss and would not be able to answer any of the questions the committee was intending to ask Soudas, despite Baird's sinister hand waving about something he called "collective responsibility".

And as Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac of the Bloc pointed out, the last time a minister appeared before the committee on behalf of one of their staffers - that would be Christian Paradis, Minister of Asbestos - his idea of "ministerial responsibility" was to just blame the staffer.

Carole Freeman of the Bloc brought up committees' right to subpoena witnesses :

"[Soudas] is an ordinary citizen and should be treated as such. A house leader does not have the power to change existing rules simply by standing up in the House and making a statement."

But then there was another tie vote that I haven't seen discussed.

What to do about the many named bureaucrats already scheduled to appear in the few weeks remaining before the committee last meets on June 22? And what to do if their ministers wanted to show up in their staffers' place?

Chair Szabo asked for a motion to give him authority to summon the witnesses already scheduled to appear ... if necessary ... even if it meant allowing those witnesses' ministers to come as substitutes in their stead.

A pretty weak motion but as he explained, they were waiting on an expected future ruling by the Speaker on such witness substitutions. And he was only asking for either the scheduled witness or his/her minister to appear if that's what was offered.

OK so it was an astoundingly weak motion to exercise parliamentary committees' right to summon witnesses, but you know what? That vote was tied up 5 to 5 - the Cons vs everyone else - and only passed because the Chair broke it by voting in favour.

Pierre Poilievre suggested what he called "a friendly amendment" to solve the impasse over the next scheduled witness :

"just replace the name of the political staffer in question with the name of the Minister."

Your moment of hideous irony : The work currently before the committee is looking into "allegations of systematic political interference by ministers' offices to block, delay, or obstruct the release of information to the public regarding the operation of government departments".

Man of Steel, Government of Wobbly Bits

On Friday the government adjourned for three months because they have to get started on their barbie bunfests for next fall's election and hell, there's not much going on in Canada right now anyway, right?
Today we learn :

"In a significant policy shift, the Canadian government now believes that telling the country's taxpayers the future cost of the war in Afghanistan would be a threat to national security.... Julie Jansen, the director of the military's access branch, cited "the defence of Canada or any state allied" with it, in justifying the withholding of the figures for the three next fiscal years."

Three years? WTF?

"The military's new secrecy comes after the financial cost of the mission became a major issue for several days during last fall's federal election campaign."

Right. That would the report from our fearless first-ever Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, aka Jennifer's Man o' Steel, the guy who ... well, let's let Jennifer explain :

"Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released his accounting of the true costs of the Afghanistan War , which to nobody's surprise turned out to be somewhat higher than Stephen Harper's guestimate."

Page's first report, released during last fall's election, calculated that the cost of the Afghanistan mission not including military equipment will be about $18.1 billion by 2011.
The second, published shortly before Diamond Jim Flaherty vowed there was absolutely no chance of a deficit in 2009, projected a serious deficit for 2009.

Parliamentary Librarian William Young and House and Senate Speakers Peter Milliken and Noel Kinsella referred to these corrections of the government's mistakes as evidence that Page was "exceeding his mandate".
.
....Wait for it ... don't rush it ...

Parliament wants to gut first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office's independence

"The Joint Library of Parliament Committee's report will gut Canada's first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office of its transparency and independence and is a simple power play to keep Kevin Page in line because he embarrassed the federal Department of Finance, says Parliamentary observers and some MPs.

"What they've done is put Kevin Page in a box, haven't they?" Concordia University professor Jim McLean told The Hill Times last week."The whole idea of the Parliamentary budget officer was to have an arm's length assessment, to have a person and a group backing up that person of highly-qualified people who could make independent assessments and do it in a transparent fashion. Independence and transparency has been stripped out of this, all together."

McLean : "Twelve people in an office embarrassed the thousand thinkers in the Department of Finance and that's where the politics of the whole thing started to work against Kevin Page."

The muzzling of Kevin Page is a bipartisan effort with both Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Peter Milliken wanting him reined in :

"The parliamentary library operates on a solicitor-client basis. This means any research the library collects for MPs and senators is "privileged" and can be withheld at their request. As an adjunct of the library, Mr. Page's reports would be done for MPs and committees who then can could use the information as they want."

Privileged. Withheld at their request. As they want.

Well it will make a nice change from all that transparency and accountability we've been dealing with lately.
McLean : "the office is going to be buried, very, very deep."
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Time for Jennifer to fire up her forces again.
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Cross-posted at Creekside

The Banana Republic of Canada

In the wake of the O'Connor and Iacobucci public inquiries into the role CSIS played in the torture of Canadians overseas, a new government rulebook of guidelines was issued to CSIS and various blandishments were offered by the ministers in charge.

What's in the new rulebook?
Pogge blogged a couple of days ago about a copy obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act that is so heavily censored it is impossible to tell whether the new guidelines adequately address the recommendations laid out by O'Connor and Iacobucci to prevent future torture such as that visited upon Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin. As Pogge wrote :

"When representatives of government and its agencies assure us that they're playing by the rules, it's a little difficult to judge the accuracy of their claims when we're not allowed to know what those rules are."

This was also the position our elected representatives on the Committee on Public Safety and National Security found themselves in back in March during its Review of the Findings and Recommendations of the Iacobucci and O'Connor Reports. Despite persistent straightforward questions from the Liberals and Bloc members - Do we condone torture? Do we still use information derived from torture? - the dodging and weaving from CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O'Brian left these questions largely unanswered.
A brief media flurry resulted from his opening statement that there is no absolute ban on the use of information derived from torture when "lives are at stake", but this was immediately laid to rest the next day when the word "knowingly" was added by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan", as in "we don't knowingly use info extracted by torture". It's the new Don't ask, Don't tell Intel.

As O'Brian explained to the committee : "Three individuals are suing the government for several hundred million dollars, therefore we cannot discuss anything that would indicate that the government is in agreement with Iacobucci's findings."

He is aided in this avoidance of accountability by the six Con members on the committee running interference on tough questions from the Libs and the Bloc. From my notes of that session -not exact quotes :
Maria Mourani, Bloc : I'd like to ask about our questioning of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo ...
Dave MacKenzie, Con : Point of order : what's the relevance?
Mourani : Khadr was tortured and Canadians paid CSIS to contribute.
Chair Garry Breitkreuz, Con : I don't understand the relevance.
Mourani : I want to know did CSIS use information from Khadr obtained under torture?MacKenzie : Point of order - Mourani is on a fishing trip.

I'll just give you a moment to let that one sink in.

Mourani : I'll rephrase the question : Is information obtained under torture?
Chair, Breitkreuz : Witnesses cannot comment on individual cases.
Mark Holland, Lib : But the questiuon is central to this inquiry.
Rathgeber, Con : Point of order. Not relevant. Stick to Iacobucci and O'Connor reports.

Which, you will recall, O'Brian has already said cannot be commented on due to ongoing litigation.

Menard, Bloc : Mourani is right. This is central to the O'Connor and Iacobucci reports. What we want to know is: Is torture still endorsed?
Mourani : Answer my question.
O'Brian, eventually : "I reject the premise of the question"

And thus CSIS informs elected members of parliament - the peoples' representatives - sitting on a committee whose mandate is to provide public oversight on intelligence agencies - to stuff it.


A couple of years ago I was sitting in a bar in the States discussing politics with some university students. "How are things up there after the coup?" one of them asked.
Me : *blink* *blink*
"Perhaps you don't call it a coup," said another helpfully.
We not only don't call it a coup, we don't even ever refer to it.
In 2006 as Liberal PM Paul Martin seemed almost certain to be re-elected, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli went very public with a criminal investigation into rumoured Liberal government political malfeasance around Income Tax leaks and that was the end of the Libs. Nothing came of the investigation save one lone Finance civil servant pocketing some loot. No inquiry was ever launched into why the head of the national police force, himself later disgraced over Arar, in effect threw the outcome of a national election.

Can individual rogue members of that national police force be brought to justice? Apparently not.
And exactly which intelligence agencies are responsible for the continued incarceration of Omar Khadr and the ongoing banishment of Abousfian Abdelrazik? Well we don't really know.

What we do know is that we have lost public oversight over our police and intelligence agencies. Isn't this the kind of thing we used to sneer at "banana republics" for?

Cross-posted at Creekside

Man of Steel vs. the Incredible Shrinking Mandate

One of the crowning glories of Steve's original Five Priorities Four Pillars Three Little Pigs Accountability Act was his paean to Canada's Gnu Government transparency - the creation of a Parliamentary Budget Office to provide independent analysis of the national economy and the government's fiscal position.

First budget officer Kevin Page, or "Man of Steel" as Jennifer calls him, has produced two reports since March, both critical of the government.
The first, released during the election, calculated that the cost of the Afghanistan mission not including military equipment will be about $18.1 billion by 2011.
The second, published shortly before Diamond Jim Flaherty vowed there would be absolutely no chance of a deficit next year, projected a deficit for next year.

"In his economic statement, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty projected a budget surplus of $100 million for 2009-10 based on the sale of about $2 billion in assets that he didn't identify."

Mr. Flatulence has since reluctantly come around to Kevin Page's assessment, predicting a $15-billion deficit, only to be promptly contradicted himself by Steve who is now calling for a $20 to $30-billion deficit.

So it won't come as much of a surprise to hear that in the matter of the Department of Finance vs the Parliamentary Budget Office, old Kev has had his budget frozen -( h/t Far and Wide ) - presumably because accurate financial forecasts are a dime a dozen lately in Steve's Fiscal Funhouse.

Actually it's a testament to Mr. Page's perseverence that he has got this far. Both Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Peter Milliken want him reined in, arguing that the "budget office is simply an extension of the services the Library [of Parliament] already offers."

"The parliamentary library operates on a solicitor-client basis. This means any research the library collects for MPs and senators is "privileged" and can be withheld at their request. As an adjunct of the library, Mr. Page's reports would be done for MPs and committees who then can could use the information as they want."

Privileged. Witheld at their request. As they want.

In 2006 a document at the Library of Parliament outlined the various forms the Parliamentary Budget Office could take and decided it should not be granted the same independence enjoyed by the Auditor General. Evidently no one bothered to inform the Man of Steel.

Cross-posted at Creekside

"Goodbye George" from McClatchy . . . .

McClatchy's Washington Bureau bids an early farewell to george bush today.

Commentary: Bush makes a farewell tour. Good riddance

Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

December 18, 2008

We've been treated to a real spectacle this week as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney limped into the home stretch of their Magical History Tour, employing distortions, half-truths and untruths in a final, desperate attempt to pervert or somehow prevent history from judging them accurately.

_______________

The great gray eminence himself, Dick Cheney, of no known address, went on national television pleading guilty to committing a war crime. Yes, Cheney said, he participated in the White House discussions on the use of torture in the interrogations of suspected terrorists. Yes, he said proudly, he approved the use of such outlawed practices as water-boarding, the simulated drowning of bound and helpless prisoners to make them talk. So what?

Photo credit: Kevin Seirs of the Charlotte Observer

_______________

Over in the White House, the president was busy signing a flood of executive orders opening the gates to oil drilling on massive chunks of previously protected public lands in the West; protecting big corporations from lawsuits in state courts when their products harm or kill innocent Americans, and generally giving his fat cat friends one last shot at looting a national Treasury of any remaining table scraps.

The president and his spinmeisters keep talking about how, with the passage of time, historians will come to judge his presidency a huge success, much as history has come to judge the administration of Harry S. Truman.

Balderdash. Or as I much prefer to say in situations like this: Bullshit!

_______________


Bush told his War College audience that of all the things he loved about the job, he was proudest of all of his role as their commander-in-chief.

Why then did he and his minions oppose virtually every attempt to reinforce their numbers and shorten the time they spent in Hell? Why did they oppose virtually every attempt to increase their pay and their benefits, and those of millions of American veterans of these and other wars?

How could so proud a commander sit idly by while soldiers and Marines were sent off to war without the armored vehicles and body armor they so desperately needed in this new kind of war?

How could his administration pinch pennies when it came to funding and manning the military hospitals that treat the thousands of wounded troops flowing home from his wars?

How can this man talk about making the world a safer and freer place by his actions when so much innocent blood has been shed by civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan? When millions have been turned into homeless refugees inside and outside Iraq? When America is left with far fewer friends and allies among the nations of the world?

The only good news left to us this gloomy, cold December is that we only have to put up with this wretched spectacle for another 30 days or so.

George W. Bush should make a hurry-up call to his architect and see if it's not too late to substitute firing slits for the ground floor windows in his new Presidential Library in Dallas.

Good-bye George, and good riddance.

Well done, Mr. Galloway.

Well done . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

Pesky things, those citizens. Aren't they Campbell?

Really. British Columbia's Gordon Campbell has some explaining to do. Why not just do away with legislative sittings altogether?

Oh right. That.

Campbell has clearly been taking accountability lessons from brother Harper.

Hey Harpercrites, how's that new era of accountability and transparency coming along?

Not content with merely shutting down the access-to-information registry and taking months to release heavily redacted documents obtained via freedom-of-information requests, the Cons have decided that when it comes to cabinet ministers, they would prefer it if you didn't ask questions at all.

Tories do turnabout, go to court to block access to ministerial offices

"Opening the offices of cabinet ministers to scrutiny under freedom-of-information legislation could compromise sensitive material that ought to remain private, the Harper government is telling Federal Court.
The argument is a sharp turnaround for the federal Conservatives, who complained bitterly in opposition about Liberal secrecy and vowed to reform the Access to Information Act to fix the problem."

And just what case examples are the Cons using to illustrate what a terrible violation of ministerial privacy such freedom-of-info requests really are?
Four access requests, three of which originated with Alliance and Con party members.when they were in opposition.

"The Conservatives promised, in their last election platform, to bring in amendments making it clear that cabinet offices come under the law, but they have failed to deliver on the pledge."

The Cons not only "failed to deliver", they are now in Federal Court actively arguing against having to comply with that very same campaign pledge.

Cross-posted at Creekside

This is NOT open and accountable government, Steve

The G&M reports this morning that access to information from the federal government since Harper took office has turned into a cold porridge.

It's taking more than a year for some Canadians to obtain government documents because the federal Information Commissioner isn't demanding swift action from departments bogged down in increasingly lengthy reviews, critics say.

Several recent requests under the Access to Information Act have been returned to applicants with a notice that they require a 240-day extension - a delay three times the previous average, making information outdated and often useless when it is released.

Users of the system say Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has imposed so many layers of scrutiny that even the most benign material gets caught up in reviews for months, even years.

"The intent is to frustrate efforts ... and ultimately you're going to go away," said Michel Drapeau, a retired colonel and expert in access to information legislation.

We know that DND and the CF have imposed an additional layer of information blocking on the "access to information" system, but what's going on elsewhere?

The extensions are linked in part to additional checks by the Privy Council Office, which advises the prime minister and cabinet, and that now reviews most requests filed with the government.

Ah yes. The Privy Council Office... which visits TGB several times throughout the day. (Yes. We've noticed.)

That is a sign of outward paranoia. A government which is worried that something dirty will slip out and be used against them. The petulant little micro-manager wants to know what information you do get when you get it so he can cut you off at the pass... just in case you might use it against him.

And you can bet your bottom brass dollar that Sandra Buckler's little working group gets handed your Access To Information request if there is the slightest chance that anything in that request or the information associated with it might damage Harper's chance of locking down a majority government in the next election.

It's a part of the Conservative perpetual election campaign. Far from governing, the Harperites spend a majority of their time covering their own asses and that, in both the long and short run, is costing you.

Conservatives getting things done for Conservatives

As Impolitical suggests, you should file this one away and haul it out when the time is right.

Karlheinz Schreiber's descriptions of a shadowy world where operators with corporate cash buy favours from politicians has trained the spotlight again on Conservative promises to tighten lobbying rules, and other unfulfilled aspects of their Federal Accountability Act.

The Act received royal assent exactly one year ago, but critics point out that key elements have never been implemented. Among them, new lobbying regulations that would require individuals to record every meeting they have with a public office holder.

Schreiber, the arms dealer who says he paid former prime minister Brian Mulroney $300,000 in cash for lobbying work, said things work essentially the same in Ottawa as they did 20 years ago when money helped secure huge procurement contracts.

"Today, it's the same as when it was then more or less with the same people to fight for big money," Schreiber told MPs this week.

Not that I would take much of what Schreiber says with more than a grain of salt, but he has certainly raised a good point. Harper hasn't changed much in Ottawa at all. In fact, he has the legislation in place and has either failed to act on on it or has blatantly ignored it.

"To date, the Conservatives have been dining out on the fact they cleaned up Ottawa and did the job, when in actual fact they never implemented several aspects of the Accountability Act that would have changed Ottawa in a significant way," New Democrat MP Pat Martin told reporters Wednesday.

Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch said: "Incredibly, it is much more likely that Canadians will be caught and punished for parking illegally, than for a politician to be punished for taking money from a lobbyist in secret."

Treasury Board President Vic Toews told the Commons last week that he would publish new lobbyist rules in January, and implement them sometime in mid-2008. But besides the lobbying measures, the government has also failed to put in place other key promises.

The Conservatives did, however, impose the new accountability rules at the middle civil service levels. In my dealings with Ottawa on a number of issues the flow of official work has slowed as it gets gummed up with emails between departmental officials describing plans to each other without ever getting anything done.

Anyway...

For example, a Parliamentary Budget officer that would ensure the government's budget bookkeeping is in order. Toews' office says that issue is in the hands of the Library of Parliament, which is tasked with recommending a name for the job.

A Public Appointments Commission, designed to avoid political patronage in top government appointments, has also fallen by the wayside. Prime Minister Stephen Harper abruptly cancelled the commission in May when opposition MPs questioned the non-partisanship of the man he chose to head it.

Since then, Harper's government has named dozens of Conservative party activists and former politicians to key federal boards and panels.

"We have backwoods Tories lining up at the trough for their piece of the public action and the reason why is because the PM has kiboshed a key element of the act which is the public appointments commission," NDP MP Charlie Angus told the Commons on Wednesday.

Then there is the case of reality biting Harper on the ass. After promising a better Access to Information Act, he suddenly realized that his weak minority could not withstand active scrutiny. Rather than open government up, he went the other way.

Harper also promised to beef up government transparency when he won office, and introduce separate legislation that would reform the Access to Information Act. That legislation has never materialized.

Information Commissioner Robert Marleau said he wrote to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson in April, asking him to table draft legislation to get the debate going, and perhaps seek the advice of Parliament for its scope. But he said he hasn't received any formal response from the minister.

All parties supported a committee report from 2005 to make changes to the access laws. But that committee has yet to hear from Nicholson on his plans to follow through.

"I ... sensed there was very little appetite for a fundamental review of the statute," Marleau said in an interview.

And then we have the Sandra Buckler effect.

Harper's campaign vow of heightened government accountability and transparency has hit a number of other bumps in the road since he took office. Some of the information roadblocks that have frustrated MPs and reporters include:

-Cabinet ministers who use government aircraft have failed to list those expenses in public quarterly reports.

-A refusal to divulge what taxpayer-funded budget was being used to pay for Harper's personal stylist.

-A failure by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to provide detailed information on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.

-A stonewalling of requests for information on Canada's participation in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

-A failure to provide a detailed explanation of Canada's new policy on Canadians facing capital punishment abroad.

File it away and jam it in their faces when they tell you how they cleaned up government. The next election would be an appropriate occasion.