The Sixth Estate

Events of the past week have demonstrated what the limits of responsibility are in the Harper government. Violating the ministerial code of conduct is fine — Jim Flaherty’s letter to the CRTC, for instance. Expensing a $16 glass of orange juice — okay, too. Bilking tens of thousands of dollars from taxpayers through residence flimflammery, like Mike Duffy or several other senators — also good. Sexual assault, however, is not okay — Patrick Brazeau.

Which is why I have to wonder very seriously why it is that Aboriginal Affairs minister John Duncan has announced his surprise resignation over a letter he sent to the Tax Court almost two years ago on behalf of a constituent. It’s a very long time ago and it’s the sort of influencing that the Prime Minister has tolerated in the past from Flaherty, amongst others. It can’t be Duncan’s own decision to “accept responsibility,” which is how it’s being spun, or he would have resigned a long time ago — or, better yet, have never sent the letter in the first place.

That said, Canadians very much need to know the details of this alleged incident. The rules that caught up Minister Flaherty a few weeks ago are just slightly ambiguous, because it’s commonly accepted that backbench MPs can lobby so-called “quasi-judicial” councils like the CRTC on behalf of constituents, whereas ministers are not allowed to.

But the Tax Court of Canada is not a quasi-judicial organization. It is a judicial organization. The rules were written the way they were because it was assumed that no Cabinet minister would be bone-dead stupid enough to do this. What was Duncan thinking? Who was he intervening on behalf of? What were the contents of the letter? What was the expected result?

Imagine, by way of comparison, that one of our Cabinet ministers wrote a letter to whichever judge Senator Patrick Brazeau will be appearing in front of on his sexual assault charges, trying to influence the outcome. This would be an unthinkable abuse of the justice system. Well, guess what: it’s the same thing. The Tax Court is a court too, even if it isn’t exactly a high-profile one.

The Conservative Party has opened a phenomenal new front in its proxy war against abortion. The new argument isn’t that we should revisit the meaning of life under the Criminal Code, or that we should ban sex-selective abortions. They’ve apparently given up on those fights in favour of a worse one: the RCMP should prosecute, as murder, medically necessary abortions. Not elective abortions, apparently. Just medically necessary ones.

This incredibly screwed-up Stone Age nonsense originates, ironically, in Canada’s lack of abortion legislation. Following Canadian Medical Association guidelines, generally speaking, you cannot get an elective abortion in Canada after 20 weeks. You can, however, get a late-term abortion in extreme circumstances: either because the fetus is seriously or fatally compromised, or because the life of the mother is at risk.

Which leads us to the Conservative claim. They can’t ban elective abortion in Canada because the Supreme Court of Canada has said that abortion is a woman’s right. They do, however, argue that if the fetus emerges from the mother alive (for however brief a time), and then dies, which could potentially happen in the event of a late-term abortion, then that counts as murder. I should stress: as I understand Canadian medical practice, these are not elective abortions that we’re talking about. The Conservatives really are arguing that a doctor who attempts to save the life of a pregnant woman by conducting a late-term abortion are committing murder. In the letter, they actually request that the RCMP immediately commence investigations leading to prosecutions on murder charges.

This is an obscene position to take. It puts the RCMP in an exceedingly difficult position, although it’s a safe bet they won’t be opening any such investigation. The Conservatives who wrote this letter don’t even have any evidence that deaths, let alone murders, have occurred. What they have found is a line item in a Statistics Canada report which counts the number of fetuses who are reported by hospitals to have died during late-term abortions.

I think the Conservatives should have stuck with their original idea: having a debate about the “origin of life.” I very much look forward to having this debate, because it’s one that young-Earth creationists with paleolithic moral codes won’t win. Notice, however, that the Conservatives no longer want to have a discussion or a debate. Instead, they’ve jumped straight to demanding that the police step in and start arresting people.

And some people wonder why the fact that these clowns are in the majority makes me worried.

Oh, Stephen Harper knew about this all right. The gentlemen behind the call for murder prosecutions are sitting Conservative MPs who are advocating illegal and unconstitutional action on the thinnest of pretexts. If the head of the Conservative Party really didn’t want the Conservative brand associated with this sort of filth, he could very easily resolve the problem to everyone’s satisfaction.

Hilariously, it seems that the authors are already having second thoughts. One of them, Leon Benoit, now says that he got the letter over the Christmas holidays, didn’t really read it before signing it, and in retrospect may not want to be associated with it after all. Yikes. Is this the level of credibility we should assign to all of his letters? What about his votes in the House of Commons?

Update: Since I’m such a harsh critic when I feel they fall short, it’s worth noting that the Globe’s editorial board has done the right thing by immediately and decisively coming out on the right side of this stupidity:

Mr. Vellacott and his two allies have failed to take into account that, in Canada, abortion is not covered by the Criminal Code. The Supreme Court ruled in 1988 that using the threat of criminal sanction to force a woman to carry a child to term is a violation of her constitutional right to security of the person… The Mounties don’t exist to do what the government has been unable, or afraid, to do legislatively.

I could not have said it better myself. Thank you, Globe & Mail, for that. Constitutional rights are involved here, which is why, like all cases where politicians propose blatant violations of the Constitution, this idiotic scheme must be squashed from the get-go.

The media has been breathlessly reporting the latest news from Quebec’s corruption commission as though there’s something unusually rotten in that province. I have to wonder, though. Every province should have such a commission. It’s a fairly safe bet that these sorts of shenanigans are bilingual.

The most recent indication of this comes from Lotus Land, where I most recently honoured the far-right Liberal government for going paperless — in this case, meaning, claiming that no actual documents are exchanged within the top ranks of the premier’s office. It’s all voice only at that high level — because, one must presume, premier Christy Clark is illiterate. Of course that has the inconvenient side effect of rendering all such conversations beyond the realm of freedom-of-information laws. C’est la vie.

I thought the paperless premier story strained credibility past the breaking point. Then I read the latest to emerge from the corrupt joke of a government on Canada’s Pacific coast. The government has been fighting a decade-long battle over shady dealings in connection with the fire-sale of the province’s publicly owned railway. A couple high-level aides actually ended up charged. After years of pre-trial maneuverings, they suddenly pled guilty, got light house arrest sentences, and had the government pay their legal bills.

That’s where things got screwy. It seems no one knew where the money to pay the legal bills came from. The government claimed there were no billing records because it had had an outside law firm handle the paperwork. The Auditor-General even took the province to court to get the records. Which the province again claimed did not exist.

Until this week, when, mysteriously, all the information turned up, and the government’s lawyer filed the following spectacularly implausible explanation in court:

“I am surprised by those errors … I must have been aware, even if I did not review them in detail, that the certificates had additional material attached … I have no explanation for how or why … I said the certificates did not have statement of account attached … other than failure of memory and failure to go back and review the files at the times I made those misstatements.”

He now claims that when the first denials that the documentation existed were issued, it was because he was just speaking off the top of his head, going by memory. Now he says he’s checked the files and his memory was wrong. Whoopsie-daisies!

Now seems like a good time to point out that Sixth Estate is still inviting sight-unseen bids on a new bridge he is constructing that will link British Columbia to Nunavut.

It’s come to something when the Assistant Attorney-General of the United States, responsible for overseeing the country’s federal prosecutors, doesn’t just think this way. Doesn’t just act this way. But actually feels comfortable standing up in a public forum, sharing this, and then publishing it on an official website (and h/t Naked Capitalism):

To be clear, the decision of whether to indict a corporation, defer prosecution, or decline altogether is not one that I, or anyone in the Criminal Division, take lightly.  We are frequently on the receiving end of presentations from defense counsel, CEOs, and economists who argue that the collateral consequences of an indictment would be devastating for their client.  In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that global markets will feel the effects.  Sometimes – though, let me stress, not always – these presentations are compelling… Those are the kinds of considerations in white collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement.

I just want to be clear here. This is the man responsible for overseeing the prosecution of white-collar crime in the most powerful country on Earth, stating in a public forum that what keeps him up at night is deciding whether that lawyer or CEO from the big corporation who popped by his office to defend a crime-committing corporation made a “compelling” case that they should just drop the whole matter. The general context is a speech extolling the virtues of “non-prosecution agreements,” which are the U.S. Department of Justice’s equivalent to a letter of warning from Elections Canada

Even as right-wing governments prattle on about the virtues of minimum sentences, heavy jail terms, and various other tools of justice, they are increasingly reluctant even to impose the lightest of all possible sentences on corporate criminals and other white-collar ne’er-do-wells. Recently in Canada, for instance, the Competition Bureau announced that a company had been found guilty of rigging government bids. It paid a fine which looks to my uneducated eye to be equal to one-third of the value of the contracts it won through these means, and then was slapped with court order stating — hilariously — that the company was not allowed to break the law again.

Apparently the good folks at the Competition Bureau, like their colleagues at the American DOJ, feel that corporations need not even be obliged to follow the law unless they are specifically orderd to do so.

The politicians get their own kickbacks from this system, of course. Take the celebrated case of Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Charged with flagrantly ignoring the office-holder’s ethics code, Ford’s argument is that he need not be held guilty because he never bothered to read the code, and because his lawyer never brought it to his attention either.

Ottawa’s crackdown on residency fraud is a timely reminder that a Canadian passport is something to be earned.

That’s the general tenure of the positive media coverage the Harper regime has earned from the announcement this week that several thousand more Canadians will have their citizenship wiped away by the mighty pen of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. The reporters love it. So do the crowds. Over at the CBC, where the comments section usually is at least modestly balanced (still crazy, but full-spectrum crazy, not Sun Media crazy), support for Kenney appears to be basically unanimous.

There’s nothing like illegal immigrants, it seems, to send our country into a foaming, irrational rage. That quote was the first sentence in the Globe & Mail’s fawning praise of Kenney, and it typifies the quality of our national media. I didn’t “earn” my Canadian passport. The majority of my readers didn’t “earn” their passports. Most of the Globe’s editors probably didn’t earn their passports, and Jason Kenney didn’t earn his either. So don’t give me this nonsense.

More to the point, it’s frankly astonishing that the government could announce it was exiling 3100 citizens of this country without raising a peep of at least apprehension from the national media. I’m not defending fraud here. Fraud should be identified. But are mass revocations really the best way to do it? And do you really trust this government to do it without being require to go to court and prove their case?

Let’s not forget what’s going on here. We’re taking the solemn word on this of a man who spent his formative years crusading as an anti-abortion activist at a religious school in California and who has, in just the recent past, ordered political critics barred from entering the country, staged bogus citizenship ceremonies for the benefit of the news media, and argued that he doesn’t have to allow Canadian citizens — genuine ones, mind — back into the country because as a Cabinet minister he is above the law. This is the man you’re trusting when he says that he’s satisfied that 3100 Canadians acquired their citizenship fraudulently.

What rot. I’ll bet Kenney can’t even name, off the top of his head, all the people who are about to be subject to his revocation orders. Go ahead, Jason. Try. Here’s a hint: if you can’t do it, there are too many. We’re talking about people’s lives here. There is no acceptable margin of error.

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It’s a comparatively minor case, but for those who are hoping Canada’s various white-collar crime units will protect us from lawbreakers, this doesn’t exactly bode well:

Corporate Research Group… pleaded guilty today in an Ottawa court to a criminal charge of bid-rigging. The company is also under a court order that prohibits it from engaging in any conduct contrary to the bid-rigging provisions in the Competition Act.

Here’s the backstory: CRG and one of its “competitors” colluded to rig bidding for a real estate contract with Public Works Canada. Bureaucrats noticed that their paperwork was sloppy, and an investigation was launched, leading to CRG pleading guilty in court. It turns out, according to CBC, that they actually won the contract in question, and consequently received a $312,000 payment from the government.

In exchange for which, they are now paying a $125,000 fine, plus — quelle horreur! — they’re going to be subject to a 5-year court order that orders them not to break the law again. Um, what? I realize I’m an ignoramus when it comes to legal matters, but I kind of thought the law was a standing order in and of itself. Why should a company be “punished” with a court order saying it is not allowed to break the law? It’s not allowed to break the law anyways.

New prisons for the blue-collar criminals, new tickets out of jail for the white-collar criminals. The Harper government may be tough on crime, but at least they respect the class system, right?

Over the weekend I found myself wondering who would be the first to start baying for Luka Magnotta’s blood. Now I have my answer: Toronto councillor Giorgio Mammoliti and National Post columnist Joe O’Connor. Both of these men are eminent legal sages that we should take very seriously. Mammoliti is an amateur lesbian film-maker, and O’Connor used to be what he calls “a bully, although never the bully-in-chief.” More worrying to me is that other people are no doubt thinking the same thing, and maybe even that the government thinks this tragedy may be a useful opportunity.

First of all, for their own sakes, these clowns need to shut up. If we start saying that Magnotta will be killed, then Germany won’t extradite him back here. Like all civilized countries, they have laws banning extradition to face the death penalty. My country used to care deeply about its own laws on this subject, back when it was civilized. So either way, we wouldn’t get to kill Magnotta.

The more interesting question, though, is why we ought to kill him in the first place. It’s interesting how self-proclaimed conservatives (and Mammoliti is one now, even though he used to be an NDP politician) forget their whole “big government is bad” mantra as soon as they decide they want something they can’t pay for in their much-beloved market using their own private funds. Government should only be large enough to snoop on people’s cell phones, kill prisoners, bomb foreigners, and outlaw protests. Anything larger than that would be a moral travesty!

Judging from the situation to our south, capital punishment doesn’t really have any significant effect on murder rates. Judging from our situation here, we’re far safer than Americans are, despite the fact that in America you can not only execute prisoners, but stock your very own armoury and even, in some states, shoot to kill whenever you feel threatened. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t think I’d feel a great deal safer in such circumstances. And knowing that my murderer may be executed later isn’t going to of much comfort to me, either. Since, you know, I’ll be dead.

Killing a murderer won’t bring his or her victims back and it won’t make the rest of us any safer.

Update: More stupid sections of this legislation will be gone into on Monday, plus some appaling scientific illiteracy on the part of the minister, but in the meantime, check out Sister Sage’s Musings for a section of the law which bans various — and we both quote the law here — “things.”

Geek that I am, I may not be the best person to make this recommendation, but if you want to read something truly screwy, you could do worse than checking out BC’s Animal Health Act, currently at first reading in the provincial legislature. This new piece of legislation has two objectives: to control the spread of diseases on farms and fish farms, and to control the spread of information about those diseases.

Press coverage so far has been mixed. Somewhat missing the point (which I’ll get to in a second), the Times-Colonist worries that it authorizes the province’s chief veterinarian to release “unlimited personal information.” The Province is rightly more concerned that the proposed law would outlaw anyone, including journalists and ordinary members of the public, from merely discussing a real or alleged disease outbreak on a farm. When one of my readers first sent me this article and asked that I blog about it, I assumed the paper was engaging in some little exaggeration.

This bill is so presposterously Orwellian, so unbelievably over the top, that whoever wrote it must have been on crack. Let’s do another of my patented legislative summaries, shall we?

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If this case can be summarized, in a single observation, it would be that it cannot be good enough to accept that individuals who voted were qualified to do so by registration, in the absence of the registration certificates, in the absence of the poll books recording anyone who registered by vouching and in the absence of the names from the final list of electors. Our system requires more.

I will not be commenting on the political spin of this story. For that, you can check out any of the nation’s editorial pages. I already know what they will say. Some will complain that it’s unreasonable to expect perfection and the result should have stood in the absence of any evidence of actual fraud. Some will say the Conservatives actually stand to benefit — it bolsters their coming denunciation of Elections Canada as incompetent and partisan, in the event that Elections Canada investigators manage to tie Pierre Poutine to the Conservative Party, it will give them ironclad momentum if they win the resulting by-election, and it might even give them an opportunity to dump troublesome Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand on grounds of importance.

Instead, I’m going to provide something more useful: I’m going to summarize the ruling and the case. Then, you can decide whether or not the logic actually makes sense. I already know some people will assume it does, and others that it doesn’t, without bothering to look at the evidence. But here’s the ruling, and you can decide whether you’re prepared to accept it or not.

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Update: Vic says we should respect his privacy. Sorry, Minister Snoops-a-lot. If you thought privacy was remotely important, you shouldn’t have introduced your Big Brother bill.

Honestly, this sort of complete and utter bullshit makes one wonder why the government bothers having press secretaries at all.

I do hope that Vic Toews recovers from whatever ails him, if only because he has yet to receive his well-deserved punishment at the ballot box for odiously asking the Speaker to hold anyone who writes to his office complaining about legislation in contempt of Parliament. But  this is obviously an utter lie, and the fact that it is about such a personal and non-political issue doesn’t change that fact:

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