The Sixth Estate

A couple people have written me recently, and one has commented, asking me whether I know much about the entry into Canada of private prison contractor GEO Group, on a mission to soak up government funding running the public prisons that the Harper regime is currently shutting down. I’m afraid I don’t. I could launch into a long rant about the stupidity of public-private partnerships, but you could get that from any number of authors.

What I do know a little about, though, is GEO Group’s lobbyist, and that fits more into the themes of this blog, so I’ll comment on that today, instead. In Ottawa, there are dozens of lobbying firms, ranging from tiny outfits with a couple of high-profile former staffers and a few people just out of public policy school, all the way up to branch plants of giant international outfits like Hill & Knowlton (which is now “Hill + Knowlton,” I’m sure for very important reasons, so everyone update your contact lists.)

Among the most interesting, though, are the specialized “former public official” firms. For instance, if you want a firm that specializes in using retired Canadian Forces generals to land military contracts for their private-sector clients, there’s CFN Consultants. If you want to talk to a retired deputy minister or the former head of a Quango, there’s the Sussex Circle. And then again, if what you want is to buy a former MP for a day, there’s the Parliamentary Group:

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A couple weeks after CP spread a nasty and false rumour that Chretien and Martin ran Parliament far more secretively than Stephen Harper does, electronic versions of its hit piece have become rare as hen’s teeth. Some are still out there, but CP’s retraction, prompted by fact-checking by exactly two journalists across the dozens of papers which gleefully printed the story (Kady of CBC, and myself), means most have vanished down the memory hole. Sun Media’s gleeful pro-Conservative editorial has vanished without a trace, too. True to form, Sun didn’t bother with a retraction. Now you’re just greeted with a warning that “there’s something wrong” with the page, which was true all along.

So far in my own Open Government study, I have shown that the time Parliamentary committees met in secret, away from the public, rose from 22.5% under Martin to over 25% under Harper. CP’s misleading numbers on those two Parliaments involved concocting a seemingly made-up “joint committee” on national security, plus including hours Senate committees spent in secret under Martin but not under Harper. I also pointed out that the Public Accounts Committee met on average 21.8% of the time under the Liberals, but 32.1% under Harper.

I’ve now finished calculating two more Parliaments’ worth of data: the brief fall 2008 session which ended in surprise prorogation, and then the one in 2010-2011 which ended with the downfall of the government over allegations that it was lying about the cost of the F-35 jet fighter. Which, as recent events have shown, it was. Here’s how it all stacks up so far:

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As promised, the second installment in my new series of Pork Barrel audits involves the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (aka FedDev). This initiative got into the news over the weekend when the government excitedly announced that $10 million from its southern Ontario small business subsidy program was being diverted to a German multinational frozen pizza manufacturer, Dr. Oetker, whose Ottawa lobbyist just happens to be a Conservative insider. Don’t blame Dr. Oetker, blame the government. Dr. Oetker is just doing what any good investor does: going where the money is.

Because it’s a relatively young program and the funding announcements are just ramping up now, it’s too early to draw final conclusions. But so far it appears that this, like so many other “Economic Action Plan” programs, is seeing a disproportionate amount of funding sent to Conservative ridings. This dovetails with my last audit, which had similar findings for HRSDC’s Enabling Accessibility Fund.

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As I said last week, BC’s new Animal Health Act is crystal clear — unusually clear, which is nice for laypeople like Cabinet ministers and bloggers. Section 1 defines animals — as any member of the animal kingdom, including humans. Section 16 states that “any person,” including any member of the public, can be sent to jail for sharing the “specific location” of any animal, including a human; the identity of the owner of any animal, including a household pet; or the existence of any contagious disease carried by an animal. Section 17 then spells out an additional set of restrictions and privileges for the subcategory of “persons engaged in the administration of this Act.” The legislation is quite clear. You can read it yourself.

Which is why I don’t know whether I should be weeping, shivering in terror, or howling with laughter at the wave of rank stupidity which washed over the BC legislature when this appallingly incompetently written bill came up for discussion. Transcripts can be read here, here, and here, for starters.

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When I first expanded my Pork Barrel study to include audits of individual programs, I said I’d start by working through Minister Diane Finley’s increasingly incompetent HRSDC first. Since then, however, my attention was piqued by a press release claiming that FedDev Ontario, which is dedicated to promoting small business in southern Ontario, would create 300 jobs by funding the expansion of a frozen pizza plant owned by a very large German multinational corporation. (Oetker is actually more honest than the government, and says that the real number is 120 jobs; the others are construction labour.)

It so happens that Oetker’s registered lobbyist is John Capobianco of Fleishman-Hillard, a former Conservative Party candidate sometimes cited in the media as a leading Conservative strategist.

Supposedly Oetker received its funding from FedDev’s Prosperity Initiative. Of the iniatitive’s three funding streams, two are for non-profits and the third, the Regional Diversification program, is for Ontario businesses with less than 1000 employees. I suppose if you count Oetker Canada as an entirely separate entity from Oetker, which I’m sure Oetker shareholders will cheerfully agree with, than it qualifies for category 3.

Not that I mind Oetker having a plant based in Canada. I wish them all the best with that, and I hope that 120 Londoners find good full-time jobs as promised.

But still. So, all of this said, I’ve decided to make FedDev Ontario’s Prosperity Initiative the second target of my Pork Barrel audits. Stay tuned for updates.

Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz is hopping mad. He put a civil servant in Guelph, one Bill Teeter, in charge of a spending review in Ottawa, had him travel back and forth for a year, and in the process let him rack up $100,000 in expenses that were then charged to taxpayers. Now that the number has come out, Ritz says he is not responsible for the behaviour of his employees and has ordered the agency to “go back through and identify all costs” — sort of redundant given that we already have that number — and denounces them for racking up such an enormous bill.

Which is all to the good, as far as it goes, except for this: Gerry Ritz is being a wee bit hypocritical here. (Gosh the media has short memories, don’t they?) In his last four quarterly expense reports, Mr. Ritz reported $140,835 in travel costs. That’s in addition to the $121,000 in travel expenses and $22,000 in accommodations he reported as an MP. All told, it adds up to $283,835 per year. Basically, Ritz is mad that his subordinate spent less taxpayers’ money than he does.

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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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I’m writing this because I’m once again forced to wonder how small-government “libertarian” conservatives can actually express support for the present government. The new proposal for EI, according to the minister, doesn’t mean kicking off people who would be eligible for EI today, or at least it only involves kicking off about 1% or so. And to achieve that grand objective, it may mean — must mean, given what’s been described to us by the government, the establishment of a new and enormous Big Brother-esque bureaucratic surveillance machine.

So far all we have to go on is a press release authored by the minister’s chief liar Alyson Queen, which suffers from a disturbing number of grammatical mistakes and bloopers resulting from some left-in remnants of early drafts. Let me be the first to declare shenanigans on this press release. It contains numerous errors and obviously has been through at least one major revision (since a couple parts got left in by accident and now float mysteriously, referring to nothing.) Some parts are duplicated. Several “backgrounders” are tacked on at the end, even though the “press release” itself is a Backgrounder — so you have Backgrounders to the Backgrounder. And so on. So Finley is both a liar, and incompetent.

Anyway, here’s the summary:

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News picks for May 24, 2012.

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A month or so ago I reported on independent journalist Brian Michel LaRue’s claim that Guelph Conservative activist Andrew Prescott, whose blog can be found here, was actually “Pierre Poutine.” I also noted that Prescott denied being Poutine. I said that Prescott might of course be lying, but on the other hand, that LaRue might be a crank. Someone with pretensions to being taken seriously as a journalist, yet uses profanity in their domain name, must of course be taken with a grain of salt.

At this point I’m beginning to side more and more with the notion that Prescott is telling the truth and that LaRue is a crank. I may, of course, be wildly off base on both points. But let me explain why. Especially because LaRue got quite, well, cranky a couple weeks ago over the fact that I had labelled him a crank, as you can see on his blog, Unfuckwithable.

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