The Sixth Estate

UBC’s Andrew Irvine has published a useful column in Postmedia explaining why “quick fixes” like electronic voting or proportional representation aren’t likely to improve the sorry state of Canadian democracy. Instead, this man who is paid to teach and write says what we need is more teaching and writing about citizenship and the rule of law. In this case, I agree. But he’s missed what I think is a more important point, and a more important “quick fix”:

Enforce the damned law.

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… because if we didn’t, maybe one of them would rouse themselves long enough to ask how one person can make both of the following statements about the F-35 and not be lying:

“We haven’t yet signed a contract, as you know. We retain that flexibility.”

“The contract we’ve signed shelters us from any increase in those kinds of costs. We’re very confident of our cost estimates.”

According to the Prime Minister of Canada, we have a contract that protects us from cost increases to the F-35, although on the other hand, we don’t have a contract so we’re welcome to shop elsewhere.

No journalist with a sense of ethics, and no citizen either, should allow the so-called “story” of the F-35 purchase to proceed until our Prime Minister has explain to us whether he was lying last year or is lying this year about this contract he claims to have signed with Lockheed-Martin.

I have only two posts planned on the 2012 budget. Unlike the professional media, I am not a trained poodle, and I will not degrade myself through weeks of high-pitched yapping in exchange for the privilege of being invited into the annual budget lockup. The legitimacy of the government is in question because of its refusal to seriously investigate electoral fraud allegations, and until those allegations are addressed, the budget is not a priority. That being said…

Last year, during the elections, I pointed out that despite running on the principle that leftist parties are awful tax-and-spend liberals with no fiscal conscience whatsoever, the Conservative Party of Canada wasn’t exactly a prudent budget planner. This year we see more evidence of that. As you can see from the following table, since 2007, every Conservative budget has started off in a projected position worse than they predicted they would be in, the year before. I guess that’s what happens when you cut taxes like mad, eh?

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Update 32. Back when the media finally returned to covering the robocall scheme, which they eagerly reported on May 2, 2011, but had forgotten the next morning thanks to a really, really wild night, I started up a list of ridings in which irregularities were alleged, substantiating each claim. I want it on the record that as of March 29, 2012, my list is the largest list on the public record. It has, however, been trumped by today’s revelation by the Elections Officer that there are 200 ridings under investigation.

That isn’t the end of my list, of course. I will continue with this list because I believe that each allegation must be documented in order to understand the scope of the schemes underway last spring. My list contains documented allegations in 102 ridings, which you can find by scrolling down on this page.

In the meantime, let me just direct an aside to the Conservative staffers (or MPs, who knows) who read this website from the House of Commons (if the Ottawa Citizen can speculate wildly about who’s behind a Commons IP address, so can I): Your party appears to be behind the largest vote fraud scheme in Canadian history. If that doesn’t shake your loyalty in the Dear Leader, exactly what would be enough? Maybe it’s time to start thinking about a new leader so that King Stephen can be sacrificed to the wolves, no?

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… is that there will not be one single professional journalist who asks the only question worth asking:

How does this government propose to create and maintain a balanced budget while continually cutting taxes?

There is no other question worth asking. I see no further purpose in even making the attempt to communicate in this supposed debate until those I would be communicating with accept the logic that even a child of 6 should be able to grasp: that there is a relationship between the amount of cash you take in and the amount of cash you have available to spend.

We would not have a fiscial “crisis” that required the dismantling of our universal healthcare system if we were not continually cutting taxes, just the same as if you decided to improve your household budget by taking a 10% pay cut every year, sooner or later you’d start having to go without things you used to pay for quite comfortably.

There’s been a great hullabaloo recently about the fact that the Conservatives have scheduled Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand’s testimony for a period when most journalists in Ottawa, we are repeatedly told by the news media, will be in lock-up receiving a special confidential briefing on the budget.

This self-serving pandering cuts two ways, of course. It’s not as if the RCMP are going to lock up every journalist in Ottawa and force-feed the budget summary to them. Unlike Sixth Estate, some major news organizations have two or even three full-time journalists. From time to time they can call on these vast resources to cover two separate events at the same time, and this is one situation where they would be well advised to do so.

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The noose continues to tighten around Pierre Poutine. We have a second alias, and multiple fake addresses. Conservatives have openly leaked that they know who he is, and even stated that it was Michael Sona (apparently falsely). Last week they gave secret briefings to journalists on what they claimed was Pierre Poutine’s target list, derived from their CIMS database. That too was apparently false, given this week’s revelation that the Poutine target list was much larger than the one the Conservatives leaked.

We also know that Poutine covered his tracks. It has now been revealed that he uploaded a second message to Racknine, supporting a Liberal candidate. This predictably led to a wave of headlines in the pro-Conservative Postmedia chain implying that Poutine might have been a Liberal. That makes sense, if you’re prepared to assume that (a) Racknine for some reason violated its exclusivity contract with the Conservative Party and (b) a Liberal would upload a list of “supporters” to whom he would then send both a message urging them to get out and vote Liberal, and also sending them to a non-existent polling station. Yep. That makes complete sense. Or at least it does to the wave of Neanderthal-grade intellects populating the online forums.

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Well, well. The plot thickens. I suppose I’ll start by asking why the new story has been leaked on a Friday afternoon, as the NDP convention gets underway. From what little I can gain from a few cryptic anonymous sources, most of the details were known earlier this week — if not over the weekend. So why sit on them until now?

Anyways, down to business. First, the officially non-partisan robocall service Racknine had an exclusivity contract with the Conservative Party during the 2011 election. Racknine’s services were used to send out the bogus phone calls. Ergo, the mysterious “Pierre Poutine” was able to persuade Racknine that he was actually an authorized Conservative Party operative. That still doesn’t prove fraud on the part of Racknine, I want to emphasize — again, they’re just the service provider, and Sixth Estate does not shoot messengers. But it is evidence that whoever they were talking to convinced Racknine that it was a genuine Conservative message.

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This is the only question worth asking. Tomorrow I’ll be back to the robocalls, but for the moment, let me just repeat that I am disappointed, angered, but not surprised at the Prime Minister’s position that he doesn’t particularly care if Christian Paradis does special favours for their mutual friends in order to help them slip their fingers into the public purse.

To emphasize that point, I’m compiling my own list of Conservative misdeeds. As you can see, Paradis has actually made the list on three separate occasions: once for illegally blocking access to information requests, once for the present affair with Rahim Jaffer, and yet again for suing the NDP when they accused him of using his influence to secure an EI processing centre as a client for a partner in the family’s law business. Can one sue for libel when one has no reputation left to ruin anyways?

The rap sheet is very long on crimes, and notably short on punishments. Harper Cabinet ministers and Parliamentary secretaries have siphoned off public funds to create secret slush funds, withheld required asset disclosures from the Ethics Commissioner, illegally served on corporate boards while sitting in Cabinet, solicited kickbacks from office landlords, slept with foreign agents, funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in dubious subsidies to tobacco producers via the former employer of Harperite communications expert Jason Lietaer, and violated election spending caps (individually and collectively). Harper himself was privy to an attempted $1 million bribe of an independent MP.

And you think he’s going to demand the reputation of Paradis just for helping a friend get a contract? Not likely.

Revenge is such sweet sorrow. One week ago, the Dishon. Christian Paradis, Minister of Industry in the Harper regime, commenced court proceedings intended to silence and punish critics of a government decision to move an Employment Insurance processing facility from an NDP riding into his riding, and not only that, but into a building owned by his family’s business partner. Specifically, Paradis is apparently suing for using the term “conflict of interest” in reference to his good person.

Well, well. As you’ve probably heard by now, this week the Ethics Commissioner used exactly those words in ruling that Paradis broke the law by arranging special meetings for disgraced former Conservative MP, cocaine user, drunk driver, and illegal lobbyist Rahim Jaffer, whose business enterprise was hoping for a nice big helping of taxpayer dollars. So much for your precious reputation, Paradis. Fuck you, and fuck your strongman attempts to silence your critics with the power of the courts.

Absurdly, Paradis has now released a statement implying that the Ethics Commissioner actually cleared him of the charges, much the same as the Conservatives did last fall when they were convicted of election fraud, and that, as far as the government is concerned, is probably the end of the matter. Punishment for breaking the law? Not hardly. This is a government that has argued in court, remember, that Cabinet ministers are not only above the law, but above the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A government in which at least one influential minister believes, and I cannot repeat this often enough, that the Charter is “stupid.”

For me, I’m just happy that I am now once again able to call the Dishon. Christian Paradis an embarrassment to this country and a man who is guilty of patronage and conflicts of interest, without fear of the government attempting to use the courts to silence my Constitutionally protected free speech.

Update: I’m absolutely flabbergasted that the official Conservative line is that Paradis is all right because all he was doing was “helping an old friend.” That’s the whole point. Imagine I walked into court on charges of physical assault and said “yes, your Honour, but in my defence, all I was doing was beating my neighbour over the head with a club.”