Travis Davies, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said the oil and gas industry is the single largest capital investor in the country. He said most of the industry’s $100 billion-plus in revenue goes back into royalties, operating costs and capital investment.

He said the industry as a whole pays $3 billion in corporate income taxes.

Oh, boo hoo. Stop lobbying for Chinese and American oil companies, start looking for a Canadian citizen who pays a 3% income tax rate on a 12-figure income, and I will feel sorry for your clients.

That sort of marginal rate, incidentally, must warm the heart of Minister of State for Small Business Maxime Bernier, who thinks that corporations should not be required to pay any taxes at all. None! Zip! Nada!

The following are among those who have now joined Cannon on the Patronage List, which with the latest updates has risen to 1083 names:

• Sylvie Cloutier, the wife of a 2008 Conservative candidate whose name came up as a victim of the Liberals’ adscam conspiracy years ago, has been appointed to the board of Farm Credit Canada.

• Guy Dufort, a PC candidate in 2000 and Conservative Party candidate in 2008, has been appointed as the arbitrator in the government’s dispute with the Canada Post labour union.

The latest update has also given me the opportunity to begin some housekeeping with regard to old appointments which didn’t go up yet:

• Out of six non-politicians on the government’s vile Red Tape Reduction Commission (more on this in a future post), four appear to have Conservative ties. They are  Bill Aho, executive secretary of the Western Arctic riding association (h/t Impolitical); Bernard Belanger, apparent donor to the Bernard Genereux campaign in 2011; Stirling MacLean, a Nova Scotia PC donor via his company WearWell Garments; and Gord Peters, an apparent donor to the Merv Tweed election campaign; again, same Commission.

• The Old Port of Montreal chair currently caught up in his staff’s expenses scandal is Gerry Weiner, a Cabinet minister in the Mulroney government. He was first appointed to that board in 2009 at the sime time as Anis Nazar, an apparent Conservative donor. Other appointments to the Old Port, which I have never included before, include former Mulroney government Principal Secretary Bernard Roy, former PC Youth Federation head and now National Post columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, Mount Royal riding association financial agent Claude Thibault, and apparent Conservative donors Patrick Kenniff, Helene Desmarais (yes, that Desmarais family).

• One of the Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges company directors caught at a Conservative fundraiser a couple years ago, Paul Kefalas, also appears to be this donor who was Liberal in 2005, but switched to the Conservatives in 2006. The other who was caught at that event, Serge Martel, has been described as “a buddy” of corrupt Conservative Senator Michael Housakos.

Interestingly, the losing candidate that Mr. Belanger donated to, Bernard Genereux, has also received his own patronage appointment, to the Quebec Port Authority.

Patronage appointments are not a reflection that the people receiving them are corrupt, incompetent, negligent, or unethical in any whatsoever. The Sixth Estate Patronage List does not exist to attack the jobs or the reputations of any Crown appointees. Instead it is a record of dubious decision-making on the part of the Government of Canada. There is no crime in getting a job; there is, however, something distinctly seedy about giving the lion’s share of “non-partisan” government appointments to people who appear to have ties to the Conservative Party of Canada.

I am now in a position to call upon the Canadian Press and the Library of Parliament to make available whatever analysis report is the basis of their numbers on this issue. Shortly I will be examining the other sessions referenced, but the easiest one to start with is the Martin government, because it was so short. So far as I am aware, the only way for public citizens to do this kind of research is to go to the Parliamentary committee minutes and count up all the time spent in camera, which is duly recorded there down to the minute.

The results are intriguing.

According to the CP report, 36 hours of secret testimony — or an average of about 20 minutes a day over the entire session — was heard by one single committee: the “joint parliamentary committee on national security.” This committee, as I have stated before, did not exist. Not by that name and not, at least within the jurisdiction of Parliament, by any other name either.

Next, the total given by the CP report actually includes both Senate and House of Commons committees. This is why my own numbers were so dramatically different from theirs, prompting my dissenting report on Monday. 52 of the 182 hours of in camera meetings took place in the Senate. Once these are subtracted, we fall back to about 70 minutes per day of actual in camera discussion inside the House of Commons. That’s about 22.5% of all Parliamentary committee time.

If we want to talk about total time including Senate committee time, that’s fine, but we should be clear about what we’re talking about. To date, the talk about Parliamentary secrecy has not included discussion of Senate committees, just Commons committees. Juicing the statistics by adding in Senate time isn’t necessarily illegitimate, but people do have a right to be informed that that’s what you’re doing.

My next task will be to add up time in the current Parliament. Pins and needles! In the meantime, you can check my math here, if you want to.

I didn’t like last year’s report, not least because of its draconian proposal for a privatized Big Brother-style surveillance network that would monitor immigrants’ employment, sick time, etc. I also speculated that the numbers they were using were a little bit flimsy, and a little while later, some SFU academics said I was right. In fact, they said, immigrants only cost an extra $450 per head. Ah, statistics. You can prove anything with statistics.

Which is why I’m so happy to see that Mr. Grubel has published a new study, revising his old results and updating them with a new, sophisticated methodology. Right?

In 2011, we estimated that in 2005 Canada’s immigrant selection policies resulted in an average fiscal burden on taxpayers of $6,000 for each immigrant. Later that year, Mohsen Javdani and Krishna Pendakur from the economics department at Simon Fraser University (J&P hereafter) presented an alternative estimate of this fiscal burden of $450…

After taking into account some new data and some issues raised by J&P, this study presents new estimates that show that the fiscal burden imposed by the average recent immigrants is $6,000.

Well, I’m sold!

The authors have a new policy proposal, one a little bit less offensive than the Privatized Big Brother Network: a new special fast-track process for immigrants holding job offers. Since the Fraser Institute’s last charitable tax return reported that they did not engage in political activity, and since the government is currently engaging in open warfare against the charitable tax sector for being overly political, now might be a good time to remind the Fraser Institute of the Canada Revenue Agency’s guidelines on charities and political activities:

We presume an activity to be political if a charity… explicitly communicates to the public that the law, policy, or decision of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country should be retained…, opposed, or changed.

I would hate for the Fraser Institute to get caught in that net, too.*

* For the record, I don’t particularly care whether nonprofits get tax deductions for engaging in political activity. Neither do the Conservatives, by the way — they’re a nonprofit, and they soak up more tax deductions, credits, and refunds than anybody. I do, however, want to make sure everybody is playing by the same rules.

On Sunday, a strange and surprising report began making the rounds of the Canadian professional media thanks to Canadian Press: a claim that, contrary to the protests of the Official Opposition, the Harper regime is actually less secretive than its majority government predecessors, under Paul Martin and Jean Chretien. It’s not impossible, of course. But there’s enough red flags in this report that I’m going to have to reserve judgement.

It so happens that following a story which reached a different conclusion a couple weeks ago, I started compiling my own spreadsheet of Parliamentary committee in camera statistics. I immediately went to that spreadsheet yesterday after reading that story, and my numbers were so at odds with the CP report that I figured one of us — probably me — had to be wrong. So I’ve decided I’d better recheck my math — even if it means a long couple days’ worth of work (and it will). Which, in the meantime, has meant that in announcing my suspicions I’ve been scooped by the Venerable Kady. Not that I’m bitter.

I want to emphasize this: maybe my work’s wrong. It’s hard to imagine being as wrong as some of the figures would suggest, but I’m loathe to go on record with the only other logical conclusion without double-checking. But in the meantime, please note that I do not have confidence in the CP report, and that I will have more to say on this later in the week.

In the meantime you need to know the only statistic that for some reason CP didn’t bother to share: the percentage of committee time spent in secret. That’s because committees can meet for more time, and therefore more often in secret, without actually pushing an unusual amount of work behind the veil of the in camera rules. A couple weeks ago iPolitics suggested that the 2002-2003 Chretien session, which came second on the CP list, was more secret than Harper’s recent session. That’s possible; I haven’t checked those figures yet. But according to my spreadsheet, Harper’s committees have spent 25.1% of their time in secret since the last election; Martin’s committees, again according to my spreadsheet-in-progress, spent 22% of their time in secret.

More seriously, the CP says that under Martin, the most secret commitee was the “joint parliamentary committee on national security, which spent more than 36 hours in secret deliberations.”

This is the claim which has made me go public even with only tentative figures, because it threw me for a loop, just as it threw Kady for a loop. There is no such committee listed in the minutes for 2004. To my knowledge there has never been such a committee. There was a non-Parliamentary committee on this subject in 2004, with a different name than the one given here, and Kady thinks that’s what they’re referring to maybe. But they didn’t start hearing witnesses until after this session ended, according to their report. And the main thing is, they’re not a standing committee of the House; they’re a special committee created by the Minister of Public Safety outside of Parliament. So they don’t count.

What’s really interesting is that, since they’re using the (alleged) hours from a non-Parliamentary committee, CP’s source for this information can’t have been the Parliamentary minutes. Consequently, we need to know what data source they are using. Now.

The opposition and the prattling classes are unhappy that Defence Minister Peter MacKay attempted to conceal a $105 million conversion of 13 new Leopard 2 armoured engineering vehicles (AEVs) by German arms dealer FFG under the heading “Vehicular Power Transmission Components, Quantity: 1.” And so they should be. MacKay’s accounting hasn’t exactly been what it should be lately, between the Close Combat Vehicle contrat problems, the lies to Parliament over the F-35, and his recent attempt to retroactively alter a deliberately falsified report to Parliament on the flimsy pretext of “typographical errors.”

But the AEV scandal may not quite be the one the Opposition was hoping for. Let’s not be distracted from the F-35 with these petty scratchings in the dirt. And has anybody even started talking about the new shipbuilding project seriously yet? The government’s own estimates for that project are already three times as high as for the F-35 acquisition. If the government’s off by the same ratio in that case…

But in any event, let’s reconstruct the AEV deal. It’s surprisingly difficult to do this, because the government hasn’t exactly been free with its information. Considering that AEVs are basically just armoured bulldozers (and plows, and excavators, etc., depending on what implement they’re equipped with), both the secrecy and the controversy is more than a little bizarre. And so here we go, back into the magical mystery world of Conservative military accounting.

Deciding on the Purchase

According to the Auditor General’s 2009 report (and love these while you can, because very shortly they will be dwindling away), the AEV is part of the Force Mobility Enhancement Project (FME). It was spun off from the Tank Replacement Project under which the government bought 100 used Dutch tanks in 2007, when they realized there was not enough money left in that Project’s envelope to convert 10 of the tanks tanks into AEVs. Here’s the Auditor General’s explanation of the incompetence at work in that episode:

Plans were prepared on the basis that the Leopard 2 tanks to be purchased would be fitted with important implements such as mine ploughs and bulldozer blades. No research was done to find out if these implements could actually be fitted on the tanks. Later, it was determined that it would be more difficult and time-consuming than originally expected to install them on the purchased tanks. As a result, National Defence has now transferred this requirement into a related project—the Force Mobility Enhancement Project. This project, estimated at $376 million, will also provide special-purpose Leopard 2 armoured vehicles.

The following year, DND provided further information. First, they will buy 13 AEVs, and an option for five more if desired, plus two Armoured Recovery Vehicles (ARVs) — in layman’s speak, battlefield tow trucks. All of these will be Leopard 2 tanks which are stripped down and then refitted with the appropriate constuction equipment and put back into operation. Next, they will buy 29 “sets of implements,” including “dozer blades, mine ploughs, and mine rollers,” to put on the AEVs. The implements apparently can be swapped in and out for greater flexibility.

Note that the 10 AEVs which would have been converted under the Tank Replacement program has thus been transformed into 13-18 tanks under the Force Mobility Enhancement program.

According to that press release, the first of the new AEVs would be online in 2011, and all 13 bulldozers (plus the 2 tow trucks) would be operational in 2015, and remain in service until 2035. In accordance with the Industrial Regional Benefits policy, which the F-35 was somehow exempted from, the winning bidder is required to invest an amount equal to the purchase price on manufacturing in Canada (but not all of the in-Canada manufacturing has to relate to this specific project).

Even at this point, if this post by a military insider is any indication, Peter MacKay was already running the project with his customary degree of careful coordination and competence:

The situation about the Leo 2 AEV and ARV is very fluid at this time and changes are happening on a weekly basis. I even have a sngle [sic] slide in my office to help me keep track of what phase of the project we are talking about at what time (it is very confusing sometimes).

You know, I’m not sure about DND contracting policy, but I’m fairly certain there should only be one project phase happening at a time. That’s why they’re called phases.

Finding a Tank

By the time the 2010-2011 DND annual report was filed, it was clear that some delays were slipping in: the first of the bulldozers would be active in 2014 instead of 2011, but somehow they’d still all be in place by the following year. At that point, $11 million had gone out the door to fund the Definition Phase, in which the government is supposed to draw up its requirements and afterward begin searching for a seller.

At this point, not in the Parliamentary documents but in information made available to defence industry media, the military spelled out what was going on. It planned to take a dozen or so Leopard 2 tanks — 20-year-old vehicles, the same kind we purchased used from the Dutch and borrowed from the Germans to operate in Afghanistan over the last several years — and convert them into AEVs.

Essentially there are two current processes for doing that. The first is the Kodiak AEV, made by Rheinmetall in Germany. This is what the Swiss ordered in 2006. Their purchase was priced out at 95 million Swiss francs for 12 vehicles — in today’s values, something like $8.5 million per vehicle. In 2008, the Dutch and Swedes also bought in, at a cost of about $8.7 million Cdn per vehicle. Once in operation, they forecast operating costs of $170,000 per vehicle-year. Remember this information; I will use it as a baseline later.

The second option is another German refit, this one by FFG, which calls the resulting vehicle the Wisent 2. I can’t find anyone who’s actually purchased the Wisent 2 yet, which unfortunately means I can’t price them out. But still — Canada leads the way in using 20-year-old factory-refurbished bullldozers!

Buying the AEVs

In early 2011, DND started to acquire the stripped-down Leopards which would be used for the FME. According to press coverage of the little-reported sale, they bought an extra 12 used Leopard 2 tanks from Switzerland. Amusingly, the Swiss government provided more information about the sale (and the tanks’ intended use) than the Harper regime was willing to, a sure line that we live in an authoritarian country. Where the 13th AEV is going to come from is not clear.

One of the items that hasn’t been disclosed anywhere I can find is the cost of these tanks. They are, however, surplus, 20-year-old Swiss-made models. When we bought Dutch Leopard 2s a couple years ago, they cost $6.5 million each. That would mean $78 million for the Swiss ones last year. Actually the price is probably significantly discounted, because we let the Swiss take out the guns and electronics before shipping them (since we were just going to pull them out anyways).

How discounted? Hard to say. So far DND has spent $12 million, in addition to the Definition phase funding, and it is going to spend another $36.5 million over the next year. Is that to pay for the Swiss tanks, or is that the first installment to FFG? I’m honestly not sure.

Finally, the government sought a contractor for the conversion process. This is where FFG was selected, and this was where the bizarre and deceptive announcement of a $105 million “Vehicle Power Transmission Component, Quantity: 1″ announcement came from. What’s doubly weird about this is that there doesn’t appear to be any reason to suspect there was anything actually untoward about the sale. The math comes out to $8 million per vehicle, which means it’s pretty much the same price as Rheinmetall’s similar offer. In other words, not outlandish.

Unless, of course, the Swedes and the Swiss and the Dutch were getting the actual blades, scoops, and other implements as part of the deal too. We’re not. Last summer the government also announced they were preparing to sign an additional $50 million contract with Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, the original maker of the Leopard 2 tank, to purchase the implements. That puts the price up to about $12 million per vehicle.

All in all, that’s anywhere from $25-70 million for the old Swiss tanks, depending on what we paid for them; plus $105 million for the refits; plus $50 million for the implements, adding up to a total of $180-225 million. The FME program has also budgeted for the purchase of two tow trucks through a similar conversion — assuming they’re similarly priced, and building in the $10 million for in-house contract planning, that would bring us up to $210-255 million.

And then there’s the option to refit an additional five AEVs; assuming those would be using the Leopard 2s already in Canada’s inventory, the additional cost there would be $60 million. So, $270-330 million total. Even building that in, we’re a far cry from the official budget of $376 million for this project. Either there’s more going into it somewhere, or MacKay is actually — for once — coming in under budget on this one, and should be congratulated for it.

Unless it includes operating costs — the loophole he got trapped lying to Parliament about with respect to the F-35. The operating costs are uncertain, but the Kodiak variant costs about $170,000 per year to operate. Assuming the operating costs of the Wisent are similar, and I assume they would be given that they’re essentially the same vehicle, that yields $2.5 million per year (plus another $850,000 if the extra five are converted). Over 20 years of operational life, which is the official plan (at which point the vehicles would be over 40 years old), that adds up to $50-67 million.

Which leaves us a grand total of somewhere between $260 million (cheap Swiss tanks and no options exercised) and $397 million (expensive Swiss tanks and full options exercised) for a Force Mobility Enhancement Project originally budgeted at $376 million. All in all, although the organization of the planning process is pretty dodgy, on this one I think we can probably give the government a pass.

And so, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming on Peter MacKay’s falsification of annual reports, lies to Parliament about the F-35 costs, and lies to the press about the cost of the Libya operation.

So here’s my actual opinion. If you’re attending a government university and paying a tuition fee, then by definition, you are paying a tax to the government. When the government discusses raising tuition fees, what they are actually describing is raising taxes on students. And the vast majority of national pundits not only support this tax increase, they think that the students who oppose it are spoiled brats who are just throwing a childish tantrum. Well. At least we found a tax increase that the national media support, for a change.

Which, you have to admit, is hypocrisy of the highest order. Watch these greedy, self-interested, short-sighted pricks scream and stamp their feet like spoiled children if the government ever proposes a similar tax hike on them. The moment that happens, they’ll start screeching endlessly about how if you raise their taxes, their fragile will to work hard and be productive will go up in a puff of self-interested smoke, the good people will all flee to sanctuary in countries that still respect free wallets, and Canada will follow Greece and Italy into socialist hell. Greece and Italy, those well-known bastions of the Scandinavian tax-and-spend welfare state.

Recent events offer an illustration. According to Corbella, McGill’s current tuition is $2168; for McGill students, therefore, a $325 tuition boost therefore amounts to a 15% tax hike. Now, when the Ontario Liberals were brokering the survival of their government by agreeing with the NDP to introduce a temporary 17% increase in the highest tax rate in that province (from 11% to 13%), one offended Bay Street banker promptly denounced their scheming as “ethnic cleansing.” Pressed for an apology, he instead offered a new comparison: this catastrophe was like the sacking of ancient Rome by the Visigoths, and the NDP were like the ancient barbarians, “wandering down the Via Aurelia into Rome.”

I must tell you, it appears that Mr. Banker has earned his degree from the Harper School of History. So far as I am aware, the Visigoths actually entered Rome not by the Aurelian road to the west, but by the Via Salaria, to the north. Moreover, I’m not totally convinced that he helps his case by comparing his own situation as an affluent Canadian facing a modest tax increase to a brutal totalitarian dictatorship finally facing the music after centuries of rape, plunder, and slavery. Although on behalf of the 99%, let me just say that it is an entirely appropriate analogy.

It would be a small start — a very small start — but I think our country would move one noticeable step towards a better future if our financial community didn’t think Roman slave-owners were good role models, and if our Albertan newspaper columnists (and Prime Ministers) stopped attending churches which preach that we must respect as the “inerrant” word of a supernatural overlord a motley collection of ancient superstitions, bundled up together as a “Bible,” which claims that the Earth is flat, that gay people should be summarily executed, and that God made women inferior to men.

Meanwhile, I’ll just start doing it myself, which is how I’ve learned is the only way to get things done in Canadian journalism. It’s a tough go, so there will probably be one profile a week (that, and I don’t want to bore my readers with the ugly details). We’ll start with the low-hanging fruit at the National Post. As with the guest commentary side of the Media Bias project, in this case I’m only interested in specific organizational connections, past and present. I will not be dragged into unceasing debate about positions really count as “right” or “left.”

I am, however, going to do things a little differently here, simply for the sake of argument. I’m going to define “progressive” and “conservative” absurdly broadly here. Conservative includes social conservative, neo-conservative, and free market organizations which get counted separately in the main Media Bias study. They also include representatives of all self-proclaimed conservative and right-wing political parties. Environment groups that are devoted to denying climate change go in this group.

Progressive is even broader. It includes all labour groups, all environmental groups which recognize the scientific existence of climate change, and all parties which are self-proclaimed liberal and left-wing organizations. That includes the New Democratic Party and, despite its policies under the Chretien and Martin governments, the Liberal Party of Canada. I personally think this sort of political “spectrum” is transparently silly. I’m using it only because I suspect that even with this rather shallow vision of politics, one side will still be a clear winner.

Just to emphasize this: I’m doing this because people often claim the Liberals are now progressive. I don’t believe it myself. But in any case, it doesn’t matter. The National Post does not appear to list any NDP insiders as in-house columnists. This will be a little more of an issue in future profiles. I will, however, welcome anything that can move people from the Unaffiliated list onto one of the other lists.

Now, for scoring. It would be unfair to reward the Post for being so conservative simply because their list of columnists is so much larger than anyone else’s, so we’ll do it on a percentage basis. They list 35 commentators, including on their Full Comment blog, which are listed below; of these, 15 are classified as conservative and 2 are classified as progressive. That’s 43% versus 5%, which equates to a ratio of 8.6:1 in favour of conservative columnists. On the new Sixth Estate Media Bias study, that will be a score of Conservative 8.6.

Conservative Columnists

1. Andrew Coyne — Energy Probe director
2. David Frum — Former Bush adminsitration speechwriter and author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again
3. Parker Gallant — Energy Probe director.
4. Lorne Gunter — Past president of Civitas whose bio (as of 2012) describes him as a former Trudeau government advisor who is now “right of centre”
5. Barbara Kay — Newsletter editor for Civitas and member of the board of directors of the Prince Arthur Herald
6. Jonathan Kay — Visiting fellow (as of 2012) at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies
7. Tasha Kheiriddin — Former director at Civitas, the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation and the Fraser Institute; former vice-president of the Montreal Economic Institute; author of Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution with Adam Daifallah.
8. Jesse Kline — Formerly a Alberta PC staffer, associate editor of the Western Standard, and intern at the Reason Foundation.
9. Charles Krauthammer — Widely regarded as a leading American neoconservative. Has no connection to Canadian political organizations. Board member at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.
10. Jack Mintz — Former head of the C.D. Howe Institute and current chair at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.
11. Marni Soupcoff — Former board member of the Canadian Constitution Foundation
12. Lawrence Solomon — Climate change denialist. Energy Probe fellow who has moved rightwards from his Democrat roots in the 1970s.
13. Raymond De Souza — Catholic priest and fellow at Cardus.
14. William Watson — Research fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and at the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
15. George F. Will — Former editor of the National Review and Reagan administration advisor.

Progressive Columnists

1. Dan Arnold — Identified as a “Liberal blogger” when he contributes to the National Post’s Full Comment blog
2. Jeff Jedras — Identified as a “Liberal blogger” when he contributes to the National Post’s Full Comment blog

Unaffiliated Columnists

1. Conrad Black
2. Christie Blatchford
3. Claudia Cattaneo –
4. Terence Corcoran — Climate change denialist
5. Barry Critchley
6. Peter Foster
7. Diane Francis — Climate change denialist
8. Brian Hutchinson — Western columnist
9. John Ivison — Joined the Post in 1998.
10. George Jonas – First husband of Barbara Amiel (before Conrad Black).
11. Peter Kuitenbrouwer — Joined National Post in 1997
12. Garry Marr
13. Kelly McParland — Editor of Full Comment
14. Rex Murphy — Climate change denialist. I wouldn’t curse any category with Rex Murphy as a member. Murphy is an ignorant, uneducated climate change denialist who in the past has seen fit to run both as a Liberal and as a Conservative.
15. Joe O’Connor
16. Chris Selley — Joined the Post in 2008.
17. Scott Stinson — Joined the Post in 2000.
18. Theresa Tedesco –

That’s it for today. If Rory doesn’t come up with his post by next week, I’ll continue with the study. (Translation: I’ll continue with the study.)

Rabbi Mendelsohn submitted a proposal on behalf of his Ottawa-based national organization to expand the Chabad in Markham. The project promises a new fully accessible social hall, kitchen, classrooms and gym, and programs for the disabled.

A briefing note to Ms. Finley from Human Resources officials said the internal federal assessment found “a number of weaknesses” with the proposal and gave it 53 out of 100.

“Given that the cut-off score was 82/100, this project was not one of the 25 sent for external evaluation,” states the Aug. 26, 2011, memo obtained by The Globe and Mail under Access to Information.

The rabbi in question is a declared “good friend” of foreign minister John Baird, whose office freely admits that he intervened on Mendelsohn’s behalf. After that happened, Finley ordered a new evaluation of the project, and it got an even lower score. As a result, she approved it.

The good rabbi, who is either a wily old cynic or a complete twit, opines that his “gut” feeling on the whole matter is that organizations like his aren’t well-known enough to get a “fair shot” and that they’re entirely “deserving” of such ministerial favours. My gut feeling is that the money should have gone to a project which actually met the criteria for funding, or, barring that, to a decades-old government institution like the National Welfare Council. I draw this comparison in order to demonstrate that, far from this government being a “responsible financial manager” or whatever the rhetoric of the day is, what they are actually in the business of is transferring money from the public sector to their friends, allies, and supporters.

Both the Enabling Accessibility Fund and the late National Council of Welfare are administered by Minister Diane Finley, the wife of Senator Doug Finley of election money laundering infamy. The fact that she would intervene in this manner shows both why my own Pork Barrel project is so important, and also why it is so unable to track the true extent of this government’s corruption. Not without the government posting full and frank details of every granting program on the Internet, which, come to think of it, is exactly the sort of easily afforable transparency and accountability measure which the old Reform Party, and the old Harper, said was a grand idea.

On a somewhat unrelated subject, I am deeply disturbed at the possibility that this government’s penchant for deleting websites will mean rich troves of reports on vital subjects to Canadians will shortly vanish from the Internet once the Welfare Council and the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy are shut down in the coming months. Precautions are being taken to ensure that this will not happen.

For instance, they have identified the proxy server company which Poutine used to hide his/their IP address, but by the time they headed out to speak to the firm earlier this year, it no longer had the records from last spring. Same thing with Shoppers Drug Mart, where Poutine purchased a number of untraceable pre-loaded charge cards: Shoppers doesn’t keep its security video footage for very long, so Poutine couldn’t be identified there either. And the Conservative Party’s CIMS database would let us know who downloaded the contact list used by Poutine, but the CIMS database’s access log has been conveniently scrubbed, too.

There is still hope that one of the members of the Poutine ring accidentally connected directly to Racknine on one occasion without using the proxy server, perhaps because he was in a rush, and there is some speculation that the individual in question was using the computer of Andrew Prescott (a Conservative campaigner in Guelph), or perhaps Michael Sona (another Conservative campaigner in Guelph). But this is pretty thin pickings.

Had this investigation been launched immediately and with the proper resources, we would already know the identity of most if not all of the members of the Poutine fraud ring. As it is, we will be likely to identify the member in Guelph because of his accidental slip-up with the proxy server. The other members, who number at least a half-dozen and possibly dozens — enough to account for similar events in dozens of ridings, and official Elections Canada investigations in 200 ridings — presumably are unlikely to have made similar slip-ups, and therefore will never be identified.

Not that it would matter, with the glacial pace of Elections Canada investigations. So far, it’s been one year and we appear to be more than midway through the Guelph investigation. At that rate, the current crop of open files should be closed by approximately the year 2400.