The Sixth Estate

Residents of British Columbia may have seen in the news today that the provincial government inadvertently placed a confidential draft report on the future of the forest industry on a publicly accessible website. That report is available as a PDF here, and I will keep a copy in case that link also, um, gets misplaced.

Given that the mountain pine beetle has been a problem for many years now, this report is both a record of an environmental disaster for the forest industry and catastrophically negligent management on the part of the BC Liberal government. It notes that there is enough available timber in the interior to maintain logging at current rates for the next decade, but only if vast amounts of dead pine are taken into account — much of which will be beyond rescue within the next 1-5 years.

This is going to result in further devastation to interior towns’s economies, too. Overall the report estimates 53% job losses in Prince George, Wiliams Lake, Quesnel, and Burns Lake regions.

The government’s response goes by the Orwellian phrase “mitigation” — by which they mean, eliminating current conservation rules which limit the harvesting of young timber (which is supposed to be saved for future logging), old-growth timber, and scenic and recreational areas. For all of this, they expect to save perhaps one-third of the expected job losses. For instance, they propose:

• open up old-growth stands in the Burns Lake region to harvesting, and “redefine” old growth so that much current protected areas are freed up for use;
• harvest the wildlife corridors which were left through old clearcuts for wildlife conservation purposes;
• open protected conservation and biodiversity regions for harvesting (these are referred to dismissively as “legacy areas,” i.e., legacies of a time in which B.C. had real conservation laws);

Towards the end, the report outlines processes for public consultation, although it’s not clear why they need consultation when they’ve already come to a decision. And then, because as we all know civil servants are non-partisan, it closes by noting that the decision on how best to eviscerate our conservation laws must be made by December “to avoid conflict with May 2013 election.”

Of course, once all this is done, we’ll need a re-mitigation plan, to mitigate the damage to the province’s forests done by this round of temporary deregulation. Oh, did I say temporary? My bad. The report actually makes no mention of timespans. The deregulation here is intended to be permanent.

After last year’s election, one of the projects I started was the Pork Barrel, which uses the govermnent’s quarterly Proactive Disclosure files to estimate whether the government is giving out grants fairly or whether it is clustering the majority of its grant money in ridings held by Conservative Party MPs. Partisan spending is an accusation regularly levelled against this government, and there are ways in which it’s certainly true — shifting government offices into Conservative ridings, for instance, or diverting border security funds into slush funds for infrastructure construction in Cabinet ministers’ ridings.

For more analysis, see the Pork Barrel project main page.

Note that this quarter’s data does not include information from the department of Transport Minister Denis Lebel. Mr. Lebel, you see, is negligent and incompetent, even more so than the other corrupt clowns who join him at the Cabinet table.

I take a week off from blogging, and things stay interesting in my absence anyways. The National Post reports that the Elections Canada investigation into the Guelph robocalls has spread to Conservative Party headquarters, where, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know, anonymous gremlins have been hard at work deleting critically important access logs that would have allowed investigators to identify Pierre Poutine. Oops. These things happen, eh?

That’s the part that has intrigued other regular commentators on this scam, like Saskboy, but here’s the part of the story that I find interesting:

The fact that Elections Canada is making inquiries about activities in the Conservative war room appears to conflict with the conclusion of an internal probe, led by Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, who was asked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get to the bottom of the matter.

Hamilton, a veteran who handled the party’s legal business in the In and Out elections-spending affair and the Helena Guergis scandal, is said to have concluded that no party workers outside of Guelph are implicated, a point that party representatives repeatedly emphasize.

I doubt a professional, top-notch lawyer like Hamilton would have concluded that nobody outside Guelph was involved in the Poutine operation unless he also knew the people in Guelph who were implicated. That’s just basic logic. Maybe Hamilton “missed” a connection from the Guelph office to the central office, but you can’t say no non-Guelph people were involved in an operation unless you also have an idea who the Guelph people involved were.

And so the same basic logic returns us to a conclusion I arrived at a month ago, on a somewhat more tenuous basis, but which now is basically proven: the Conservative Party leadership knows the identity of Pierre Poutine. Yet they are not telling us. And they are not telling Elections Canada. It’s worth asking why not.

Something needs to be said about this business of the government “hiding” $10 billion in costs on the F-35, suggesting the cost was only $15 billion when it was “really” $25 billion. Well, it’s true that they lied about the cost being $15 billion. It’s true that they’re lying now about this just being a misunderstanding about accounting — if that was true, why wouldn’t they have said so when the Parliamentary Budget Officer came out with his $30 billion figure, rather than accusing him of simply making it up?

But it’s also true that the $25 billion figure is still cooked. It’s baloney. It’s based on obsolete pricing data, and on a “plan” for the use of this jet fighter which can only be descirbed as bogus: the notion that we will only be using the plane for 20 years before it is replaced. Obviously this is not true. We will be using the CF-18s for around 30-40 years. The F-35 will be around at least that long. DND’s long-term plan starts at 36 years’s use for the F-35, and presumably goes up from there. So, what will the F-35 actually cost us?

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The Guelph Conservative campaign currently under investigation for sending fraudulent calls to suspected opponents has now filed a complaint of its own, alleging that their supporters were targeted by someone using Responsive Marketing Group (RMG) telephone numbers, identifynig themselves as the “elections office” and directing people to the wrong polling stations.

It’s unclear what is happening with this complaint, and it needs to be investigated fully. Obviously targeting the Conservative campaign is no less serious than targeting the Liberal campaign, and again, we can run through a very short list of people with a motive for doing so.

All of that said, the complaint that someone from RMG (or spoofing an RMG number) was calling Conservative supporters, falsely identifying themselves as the “Elections Office,” and directing people to the wrong polling station sounds an awful lot like what we already heard about RMG a month or so ago, which is that some low-level employees, apparently without orders from above, decided to go off script during their “get out the vote” (GOTV) calls and tell people they were actually calling from Elections Canada.

Again, however much it may stretch plausibility, that evidence given in the Toronto Star never suggested that RMG ordered its staffers to do this. However, we now have (a) knowledge that a Conservative contractor’s lower-level employees may have misidentified themselves and given people bad directions, and (b) a complaint that someone using that contractor’s teelphone number gave people bad directions.

I’m not saying the Conservatives are going after their own blunders here, but it’s not beyond the realm of plausibility.

In the meantime, Conservative supporters who received bogus calls last election should be coming forward and making complaints just the same as everyone else. One wonders why, if this incident was so serious at the time (they claim to have known about it beginning April 28), it took them 11 months, and a month and a half of press controversy over election fraud, before they finally got to the point of submitting a complaint about it.

And of course, if the Conservatives are suggesting that multiple parties are now stooping to the level of these cowardly schemes, now seems a good time to repeat my call for a public inquiry into vote suppression. Surely they agree with me, if their own are affected by it.

The following are the words of the Dishonourable Rona Ambrose, Member of Parliament for Edmonton-Spruce Grove and Minister of Public Works and Government Services, spoken in the Parliament of Canada on the subject of the recent Auditor-General’s report indicating that the government lied to Parliament and the nation about the true cost of the F-35 jet fighter:

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Well, well. I bet the Prime Minister’s Office is currently looking up what Cabinet order is required in order to sack an Auditor-General — and my apologies also to said Auditor-General for what I said last time.

“I can’t speak to individuals who knew it, but it was information that was prepared by National Defence,” Ferguson told reporters Thursday. “It’s certainly my understanding that that would have been information that, yes, the government would have had.”

He continued: “That $25-billion number was something I think that at that time was known to government.” And, critically: “It would have been primarily members of the executive, yes.”

So nice to see that the Auditor-General has been willing to display such courage after producing his cautious written report.

Incidentally, this proves why we need a strong independent media and a critically democratic public in this country. With Ferguson’s words, it has become impossible for the Harper regime to blame this on Peter MacKay effectively and dismiss him in order to make it go away. Harper may still do so anyways, but at this point, the government has effectively been forced into a corner. Which they will very shortly attempt to fight their way out of.

By which I mean, in reference to my yesterday’s post, that Auditor-General Michael Ferguson pulled every punch he could in coming out with a report basically accusing the military of conspiring against the government and deceiving them into thinking that the price of the F-35 jet fighter was artificially low. Which the ministers then loyally told to Parliament.

Which is exactly what the government needs the Auditor-General to say. If he came out and said that Peter MacKay knew the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s $30 billion estimate for the cost of the fighters was pretty much dead-on, then that would mean MacKay had lied to Parliament. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it would probably be his last.

Consider which of the following two scenarios is more likely:

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Tomorrow, one of two things will be reported by the Auditor General of Canada: that the minister is responsible for misleading Canadians about the procurement process of the F-35, or that the defence bureaucracy is responsible for misleading the minister about it. Only one of those things can be in the report. (Unless, of course, the Auditor pulls a really fast one and claims the government passes with an A grade.)

That report should decide the future career both of Auditor-General Michael Ferguson and Defence Minister Peter MacKay. If Ferguson finds MacKay responsible for the sham, MacKay must resign.

If Ferguson finds the bureaucrats responsible, then both MacKay and Ferguson must resign. MacKay, because of ministerial responsibility, something this government thinks is even faker than climate change. And Ferguson, because in order to produce such an appalling whitewash, he must have bowed to political pressure, something his office must never, never do. Frankly, with all of the staffers this government has thrown under the bus over the last six years, another “blame the bureaucrats” study lacks credibility.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

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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