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cinch
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Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Jul 2002
time: 22:33
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I haven't seen any posts about Kilgour yet... Perhaps I am just blind.
Anyway, that's another interesting development...
I really have no idea who I'll vote for next election. As long as the Conservatives stay social reactionaries, there is no chance I'll toss a vote their way. I don't mind the NDP, but Layton does very little for me and I often think that there's a much better way the Left could be run.
Maybe I'll just hope that the Liberals purge the bile... At least a little bit, anyway.
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notyoueither
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of naught
Aug 2001
time: 22:33
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Some interesting perspectives from the outside.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4429231.stm
quote:
Scandal anger mounts in Canada
By Lee Carter
BBC News, Toronto
As sensational revelations continue to pour out of a Canadian government corruption scandal inquiry, public anger is mounting across the country against the governing Liberals.
The larger question will be whether that anger will translate into calls for a new election less than a year after Canadians last went to the polls.
On Thursday explosive testimony from the previous week, by an advertising executive, was released for the first time, when the judge presiding over the public inquiry lifted a publication ban.
The inquiry is investigating how millions of dollars were paid by the Liberal government in the late 1990s to advertising firms in the province of Quebec, after Canada's auditor-general concluded that little or no work was performed and the money was largely unaccounted for.
'All the way to the top'
Under the leadership of the former Liberal Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, the so-called sponsorship programme was supposed to promote national unity in the primarily French-speaking province.
According to the allegations released on Thursday, Jean Brault, the owner of the Groupaction advertising agency at the centre of the scandal, claimed that illegal campaign contributions worth millions of dollars were also channelled back to the Liberal party through an intricate system of false invoices and cash payments.
And at the end of the week, a Groupaction employee alleged that some orders to the advertising agencies came directly from the Canadian prime minister's office.
Mr Chretien, who has already appeared before the enquiry, denies any wrongdoing.
His successor, Paul Martin, told the inquiry that although he was the country's finance minister at the time, he knew almost nothing about the programme and the missing millions.
Tantalising ban
Mr Martin came to office vowing to get to the bottom of the scandal.
But with each new revelation, public anger with the government seems to grow.
The opposition parties will be trying to gauge just how disaffected Canadians are with the Liberal's teetering minority government in the days ahead
The story was made all the more tantalising by the surreal sight of a media champing at the bit, but being unable to report any details for several days, because of Justice Gomery's publication ban, imposed because he felt it could prejudice a future criminal trial.
Instead Canadians heard such phrases as "explosive revelations considered so damaging they could topple the government" blaring out from their nightly TV news, without any details.
No smoking gun
Kady O'Malley, a journalist for the Ottawa parliamentary newspaper The Hill Times, says the media may have got carried away and become a victim of its own hype.
"You've got to wonder whether journalists' imagination were going a little crazy as they imagined colour photos of Paul Martin handing over big bags with dollar signs on them to Groupaction," she said.
"While there's definitely a lot of meat there and new things we didn't know before, the testimony generally supports what we've heard already."
Ms O'Malley also believes the opposition parties did not get the one piece of evidence they were looking for.
"If they thought there was a smoking gun linking the current prime minister, they were probably disappointed." she said.
'Soap opera'
The part of Canada where the scandal has been the number one issue for political debate is French-speaking Quebec, because that is where all the alleged corruption took place.
As most of the testimony has been in French it has been virtually treated as a ghoulish nightly TV soap opera by many in the province.
After all, the sponsorship programme was introduced to quell the separatist sentiment that led to a 1995 Quebec referendum that came within a hair's breadth of choosing secession from the rest of the country.
Benoit Dutrizac is a TV presenter for the French-language station Tele-Quebec.
He said people in the province are disgusted by what they are hearing from the public inquiry.
"To see all this quarrelling and money being wasted, I think they're really fed up with all this cheating and lying."
Separatism 'waning'
Mr Dutrizac said people in the province are also upset about how they might now be perceived by the rest of Canada.
"Canadians from other provinces probably see Quebeckers as opportunists, liars and thieves. That hurts me. I'm sure that Quebeckers see these French-speaking witnesses at the enquiry every day and feel embarrassed."
The Canadian media has even been debating whether the scandal will lead to renewed anti-federalist sentiment in the province.
But Mr Dutrizac says that separatist sentiment is declining, despite the scandal.
"The last time I checked about 40% of Quebeckers wanted a new deal with Canada," he said
"But frankly, nobody cares about that any more really. I think people want to hear real solutions to real problems."
Meanwhile the slightly more unreal world of Justice Gomery's public enquiry continues.
He is expected to make his final report in November.
It may however look like a crumpled footnote, if Canadians end up going to the polls between now and then. |
Anybody know anyone who blames this mess on Quebec or the people who live there?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/ameri...l.ap/index.html
quote:
Canada's Liberals scramble to save government
Tuesday, April 12, 2005 Posted: 7:18 AM EDT (1118 GMT)
OTTAWA, Canada (AP) -- Canadians call it their Watergate -- a kickback scandal that has badly damaged the Liberal Party and now threatens to bring down the government of Paul Martin.
How long Martin can remain prime minister is anyone's guess. The halls of Parliament were rife Monday with speculation about whether new elections were around the corner.
The separatist Bloc Quebecois could introduce a confidence motion by Thursday, though the more powerful Conservative Party was hedging, knowing most Canadians are not keen on new elections.
Martin reiterated that he had nothing to do with the ethics fiasco, in which Liberal Party members are accused of having taken kickbacks from advertising agencies hired to promote federalism in the rebellious French-speaking province of Quebec.
"Not only do I have the moral authority, I have the moral responsibility," to keep the government afloat until the full inquiry into the scandal concludes in the fall, he said. "Canadians are entitled to ask someone to step forward and I'm the prime minister of this country. I can assure you that anyone who has been implicated is going to be punished."
Canadians don't seem to buying his argument. A poll published by the Toronto Star on Monday showed the Conservatives would easily win fresh elections if held today.
The poll indicates that only 25 percent of those questioned last week would vote for the Liberals. The Conservatives were backed by 36 percent, up 10 points from a survey taken in February.
The poll, conducted by EKOS Research Associates, surveyed 1,125 Canadians over voting age between last Thursday and Saturday and had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
"There is a depth of anger there. The Liberal Party is in deep, deep trouble," said Richard Simeon, professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
The scandal, based on a secret program that dates back to the 1990s and the Liberal Party leadership of former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, erupted anew last Thursday when a judge probing the alleged misuse of public funds lifted a publication ban on testimony by a Montreal ad executive.
The executive, Jean Brault, who faces fraud charges stemming from the now-defunct program, told the federal inquiry that senior Liberals forced him to secretly divert more than $818,000 to the party's Quebec wing in exchange for sponsorship contracts. During his six days of testimony, Brault spoke of hushed-up payments to Liberals in restaurants, money being given to a brother of Chretien, and reluctant contributions strong-armed out of employees.
Brault said he got $141 million in government business for his firm.
Chretien and Martin have vehemently denied any personal knowledge of wrongdoing.
The so-called "sponsorship scandal" outraged the public when it was uncovered in 2002, after the auditor general determined that $82 million from a $204 million national unity fund went to Liberal-friendly advertising firms.
The program was developed to promote national unity in Quebec following the narrow defeat of a separatist referendum in the French-speaking province in 1995. Advertising agencies with Liberal ties allegedly received millions of dollars in exchange for little or no apparent work.
The scandal led to a deep rift in the Liberal Party, in particular between Chretien and Martin.
Amid shouting in the House of Commons on Monday, a red-faced Martin told lawmakers he was the one who dissolved the program, convened the commission to investigate the project and filed lawsuits against 19 ad agencies to recover government funds.
Martin may still have to take the fall even if it is determined that he had no knowledge of the misuse of government funds.
"The problem with corruption, when it occurs -- and Watergate was a good example of this in the United States -- it undermines confidence in not just the people who are involved, but in the institution that they represent. That's the real worry," said Wesley Cragg, head of Transparency International Canada, a global anti-corruption coalition. |
Anybody heard anyone call this Watergate?
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Wezil
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Ontario, Canada
Nov 1999
time: 02:03
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quote:
Originally posted by notyoueither
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/ameri...l.ap/index.html
quote:
Canada's Liberals scramble to save government
Tuesday, April 12, 2005 Posted: 7:18 AM EDT (1118 GMT)
OTTAWA, Canada (AP) -- Canadians call it their Watergate -- a kickback scandal that has badly damaged the Liberal Party and now threatens to bring down the government of Paul Martin.
. . .
"The problem with corruption, when it occurs -- and Watergate was a good example of this in the United States -- it undermines confidence in not just the people who are involved, but in the institution that they represent. That's the real worry," said Wesley Cragg, head of Transparency International Canada, a global anti-corruption coalition. |
Anybody heard anyone call this Watergate? |
Nope. Although, we must be calling it that or CNN wouldn't report it. 
Has anyone ever heard of this Wesley Cragg guy, or his organization? I wonder at CNN's sources.
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St Leo
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Member of the Apolyton Social Democratic Party
Jul 2005
time: 00:33
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quote:
Manning-Harris report backs private health care
Health care bomb lobbed as possible federal election campaign looms
OTTAWA - Preston Manning and Mike Harris tossed an electoral bomb into the lap of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper today, issuing a joint report calling on Ottawa to get out of medicare and let the provinces experiment with private health services.
Manning, the Reform party founder, and Harris, the former Ontario Tory premier, insisted their report, commissioned by the right-wing Fraser Institute, was non-partisan.
But it quickly became fodder for a potential federal election.
Prime Minister Paul Martin, seeking a respite from his woes over the sponsorship scandal, vowed to fight "tooth and nail" to defend medicare.
The Conservative agenda is no longer hidden, Martin told the Commons.
"It is no federal role in health care, it is no Canada Health Act, it is no one saying `no' to the privatization of health care."
Martin sought to portray Manning and Harris as little more than mouthpieces for Harper - a claim adamantly denied by the Conservative leader.
"It's not my position," Harper said of the report as he emerged from the House.
"It's not the position of the Conservative party. It's the position of an independent think tank."
Harper also accused Martin of trying to divert attention from the continuing sponsorship furor and branded the effort "a pretty pathetic performance."
Earlier, speaking outside a party caucus meeting, Harper had been ambiguous in his initial response to the Manning-Harris report.
He noted that most provinces are already experimenting with private delivery of some health services, but are doing so within the overall context of a publicly funded system.
"That's an experiment that I said we support," said Harper.
"Mr. Martin has said he doesn't support it, but Mr. Martin not only signed an accord with the provinces that allows it, unlike myself he goes to a private health care clinic."
That was a reference to a Montreal clinic where Martin's personal physician practises. But Amy Butcher, a spokeswoman for the prime minister, described it as an "open clinic" that anyone can attend.
"When he visits his doctor, the prime minister - like all Canadians - uses his (public) health card," said Butcher.
Harper has been trying to move toward the political centre on health care and other social issues, hoping to deprive the Liberals of a weapon they used against him in the last election campaign.
The federal Conservatives, at their recent convention, adopted a policy that supports the public health system but would allow the provinces some room to manoeuvre on how they deliver services.
Manning and Harris, by contrast, recommend what they call ``critical surgery" for medicare.
They say Ottawa should cease funding the system and transfer more tax powers to the provinces so they can take up the slack.
They also say the Canada Health Act should be scrapped or drastically reformed to eliminate all barriers to private services.
"We could all achieve greater things if Ottawa would learn to trust us and stay out of our way," said Harris.
"Canadians can look after their own health and the health of their families if they're given the right and the tools to do so."
Both men insisted they weren't looking specifically to Harper to champion the proposals.
"We just hope that all the parties might find something attractive in this presentation of a third option," said Manning.
"You can have universal coverage and a two-track system. There's 20 or 25 countries that do it, and they get better results per dollar spent than we do."
But Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh saw the proposals as a recipe to "demolish and dismantle" the Canada Health Act, the federal law that lets Ottawa enforce national health-care standards.
"They want to have a checkerboard, privatized health care in Canada across this country," said Dosanjh. "This must not be allowed."
The health-care proposals were not the only contentious recommendations in the report co-authored by Harris and Manning after three years of study.
They also urged the transfer of $300 billion from the public sector to the private sector over six years, through tax cuts and strict limits on government spending.
They proposed as well a new economic deal with the United States that would go far beyond NAFTA to include a customs union.
On that point they weren't too different from John Manley, the former Liberal deputy prime minister, who has urged a similar course. |
So...
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notyoueither
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of naught
Aug 2001
time: 22:33
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Son of a *****! Even the CBC is publishing critiques of our parliamentary system.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/g...ngscandal3.html
quote:
Handling Scandal: How Canada measures up
CBC News Online | April 5, 2004
Reporter: Brian Stewart
The federal sponsorship scandal has been dominating federal politics and the national media ever since the auditor general released her report in February.
We're going beyond the details of the scandal to the bigger issues it raises beginning with how such a spending fiasco could happen here in Canada in the first place and whether other countries are more immune to corruption.
When Canada admits scandals, it often likes to think other democracies behave worse.
But this scandal, tens of millions of untracked dollars gushing out to friends of government, is breathtakingly crude by advanced democratic standards.
Washington's Congress certainly has scandals, few recently as blatantly partisan. In the United States, the sponsorship abuses would have been hard to even imagine under the fierce glare of congressional committees and thousands of budget inspectors.
In Britain's Parliament, financial scandals are rare. MPs and civil servants are sternly eagle-eyed in money matters.
Ottawa's scandal astonishes Canadian Anthony King who lives in Britain and is one of the world's leading experts in democratic government.
"Looking from several thousand miles away, one of the oddest things about the Canadian experience is that people thought they could get away with it. No Brit, whether politician or civil servant or people in a semi-governmental organization or an advertising agency, would imagine for a moment that they could bring it off," King says.
The reason: ever since the late Victorian era, Britain's top civil servants have been both powerful and protected from political pressure. They've special powers to account for all money.
"The British equivalent of the Canadian deputy minister is somebody called the permanent secretary in each government department, and he is... the accounting officer for the department," King says. "He is held legally and politically responsible for every penny that the department sends out, wherever it goes. I should have thought that any permanent British secretary would find it very difficult to let this kind of thing happen. He would be professionally obliged himself to blow the whistle."
By comparison, Canadian civil service independence has been eroding since the Trudeau era, according to Patrick Boyer, former Tory MP, now political affairs writer. "The senior officials were being drawn in to the political side of selling and being responsible for the electoral success of the government, and meanwhile, the elected officials were getting more and more into the operational side of the administering of government," Boyer says. "So we effectively lost that arm's-length relationship. We have very few checks or balances in the Canadian system of government. That was one more that disappeared through the '60s and '70s, and we see the end result of that today."
Another problem, our Parliament seems less vigilant than British and American bodies or those in Australia and New Zealand. They had more active committees studying money flows. Our MPs are far more enthralled by television performance than by lengthy service, and often media-ignored backwaters of committees. In fairness, our MPs on committees don't have as much time or staff as in those other legislatures to follow government spending, but perhaps above all, party discipline in Canada is much tighter than in Congress or Westminster. This means members of governing parties are often reluctant to inquire into questionable activities.
Not so in Washington, certainly not in London where sheer numbers of MPs make subservience less a factor. Canadian David Docherty, a political scientist, has closely studied both systems and agrees Britain encourages more MP initiative.
"They [the U.K.] have a much larger House of Commons, some 650 plus members," Docherty says. "The result of that is not everybody sees themselves as potential cabinet ministers. You've got an awful lot of private members with a great deal of time on their hands who can become parliamentarians and specialize in that exact type of thing."
Even our auditors general admit they're not as independent as British counterparts. They've repeatedly asked for direct funding from Parliament, but instead have to annually ask the Treasury Board for funding. That puts them ultimately at the mercy of the prime minister's inner circle of power. British MPs would never stand for that. They decide in all-party committee what the auditor will get, then inform the prime minister.
Prime Minister Martin is introducing new safety measures to try to check corruption, but reform is in early stages. Meanwhile, Canada has much to learn about watching public money from others who seem to do it better. |
They even use that six letter word *gasp* reform!
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St Leo
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Member of the Apolyton Social Democratic Party
Jul 2005
time: 00:33
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quote:
Prime Minister Gilles Duceppe? That's just one of the way-out-there ideas making the rounds on Ottawa's cocktail circuit
SUSAN DELACOURT
OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF
OTTAWA—As the threat of a snap election hangs over Ottawa, a cottage industry seems to have developed, churning out wild political scenarios.
Suddenly, everyone is a pundit and prognosticator, with pet theories on how an election could be avoided. If you'd like to try this at home, here are just a few of the way-out-there ideas feeding the buzz around the federal corridors and on the cocktail circuit.
Each one paves the way for even more outrageous speculation.
Prorogue, Play Turtle: Serious people are talking about this scenario, in which Prime Minister Paul Martin would avoid the collapse of his government by simply shutting down the House of Commons and retreating into a shell until the coast is clear.
Here would be his reasoning: The opposition parties are paralyzing Parliament with all their games and election threats. Nothing is getting done and Canadians are disgusted. Moreover, all the polls are showing, in overwhelming numbers, that citizens would like to hear more from Justice John Gomery's inquiry into the sponsorship scandal before judging the parties in a general election.
So it follows, according to this theory, that Martin could shut down Parliament, thereby denying the opposition parties any opportunity to defeat the government during the day-to-day business of the Commons. All he'd have to do is brazen out the opposition's outrage until it dies down — by normal media attention-span standards, about a week.
In a month or two, when the furor has subsided and Gomery has stopped hearing from witnesses, Martin could pull the plug and go into an election when the political climate is less toxic toward Liberals.
UPSIDE: It almost sounds plausible, doesn't it?
DOWNSIDE: The outcry might not die down, and in fact, might increase.
Handing over the keys to 24 Sussex: This one has also been the subject of idle musing by Liberal insiders.
Say, for the sake of argument, that Martin simply wearies of the daily barrage and instead of calling an election, marches over to Rideau Hall and says to Governor General Adrienne Clarkson: "Stephen Harper has essentially been running the show in Parliament, working with the other opposition leaders, so why don't you ask the Conservative leader if he wants to take over?"
After all, the prime minister of Canada is the person who commands the confidence of the House.
It's not such a stretch, either. Back last fall, when the opposition parties were negotiating the terms of supporting the throne speech, Harper and the other leaders talked about making this case to the Governor General. Their worry was that Martin would provoke his own government's collapse whenever the poll numbers looked favourable.
What would happen thenis that the Conservatives would be even less able than Liberals to hold things together and that they would have to plunge the country into an election with the memory of their governing failure fresh in the public's mind. Martin could point out on the campaign trail that Harper had to rely on separatists to prop up his fragile rule; perhaps the Conservative leader would have had to invite Conservative senators into his cabinet to round out regional representation.
UPSIDE: Might take that smug smile off Harper's face when he suddenly finds himself prime minister.
DOWNSIDE: Harper might make it work and end up surviving longer than Martin before an election needs to be called.
Prime Minister Gilles Duceppe: This is by far the most outrageous scenario. In it, Canada does go through an election, in which Quebec votes en masse while the rest of the country fragments among the other three parties and a smattering of smaller parties and independents.
Do the arithmetic: The Bloc gets all 75 seats in Quebec. The other 233 seats would be divided roughly three ways, but because of the presence of independents or Greens, none get as many as the Bloc. Say, for the sake of wild speculation, the Conservatives get 74 seats, the Liberals get 74, the New Democrats get 74 too — a three-way tie, with another 11 seats scattered among Greens, the Marijuana Party and independents. Would the Governor General be obliged to at least ask Duceppe to form a government? What if he said yes?
UPSIDE: When Quebec separates, it takes the rest of Canada with it.
DOWNSIDE: Kind of embarrassing, internationally. |
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13-04-2005 12:58
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