Bruce Carson’s Disappearing Websites, Part 2: H2O Water Pros Says Tap Water Bad “Like Cigarettes”
Here’s a hint for organizations that don’t want to look like dubious fly-by-night operations: the moment one of your philandering associates gets called on the carpet for his dubious activities, don’t shut down your website. This advice comes too late for Bruce Carson’s company, H2O Water Pros, the ones that he was going to illegally lobby for in the halls of Indian Affairs. Their main website, H2Owaterpros.com, went offline when this affair started and hasn’t come back up yet.
Interestingly, H2O Pros’s subsidiary H2O Global Group, created to handle the reserve water filtration contracts that it thought Carson was going to land, is still up and running. They look like a separate company, complete with a downtown office at O’Connor and Metcalfe, just a couple of blocks from the Prime Minister’s Office and a long ways away from the company’s shabbier digs out in Gloucester. According to a brochure for this group, which I’ve saved for posterity, this is the company for which Michele and her mother Christine worked. Michele’s name can no longer be found on the public website.
Now, I don’t want to break out the word “scam” unnecessarily, but it does seem to me that H2O Pros’s front-line business was not, shall we say, the sort of thing that wins awards for respectable corporate citizenship. Online Ottawa, in recent months, has been festooned with job ads for “reps to book appointments for water evaluations,” which sounds like glorified cold-calling if you ask me. The Kijiji ad was placed by Binder, so he’s still working there, at least. Also unclear is their connection to Simple H2o, a company which lists the same Gloucester office unit as its Ottawa distributor. Supposedly that company really is a scam, not paying its employees the promised rates and fobbing off barely functioning cheap gimmicks, not quality water purifiers. You can judge for yourself, but it wouldn’t be the first time we tried to sell a bill of goods to an Aboriginal band or two, or two hundred.
Now, drinking water on Aboriginal reserves in this country really is an urgent public health problem — which is why it deserves a serious, mature, concerted solution from government, rather than woo-woo gimmickry from mysterious contractors of doubtful repute. And they are definitely of doubtful repute. Ottawa customers were told on the website that when their salesmen “separate (your) water from what’s in it,” you’ll never want to drink tap water again.
Sorry, not buying it. Doubtless the demonstration works just like an ionic foot bath, which is to say that it is an illusion. Filtered water might taste better than tap water, but a good urban water system is just that: there’s not enough impurities in it to produce an impressive quantity of sludge unless you have a lot of water to work with. The head of the company, Patrick Hill, actually claims that our water systems went wrong when they started regulating to a “safe” level, not a “healthy level.” It certainly sounds like health pseudoscience to me. Elsewhere they imply that drinking tap water is as bad as smoking cigarettes.
One more bit of scamminess to close off. The site encourages you to go into business yourself as an H2O Pros distributor by filling out an online form. This is a classic hallmark of a pyramid business model. A good profitable company usually doesn’t need to hire salesmen that way. It really is worth wondering how an experienced high-level Conservative operative got mixed up in all this.
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Water Watcher
What worries me is any affiliation of H2O Water Pros with Simply H2O which was outted as a scam on CBC’s Marketplace in January of 2011. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/story/2011/01/28/marketplace-tap-water.html
They use scare tactics to frighten people into buying their cheaply built, over priced systems. For the most part, Ontarian’s, and Canadians in general do not need any additional filtering of their water, and many systems out there don’t just remove the “impurities” but the essential nutrients we need from water as well.
That said, there are still many Canadian’s (namely First Nations) without reliable access to clean water. I do not argue that everyone has a right to clean, potable water, but this is not the way to do it. There are NSF-certified systems out there that are a lot less expensive, and much more effective. As far as I am concerned this is a double whammy against Carson. He in no way cared about First Nations people or their BASIC HUMAN RIGHT to clean water if these are the systems he was proposing they use.
Sixth Estate
Fascinating link. There is plenty of references online to H2O Pros selling the Simply H2O units, but I had no idea there had already been an investigation establishing that those units were ripoffs. Thanks!
Holly Stick
The Liberal Party has more about Carson continuing to work for the Government of Harper after Feb 2009:
http://jamesbowie.blogspot.com/2011/03/advantage-of-bruce-carson-over-chuck.html
http://www.liberal.ca/newsroom/news-release/carson-advised-minister-months-conservatives-claimed/
curious
hah their office is a “virtual office” rents for $200 a month
http://www.virtualofficesales.com/canada/9-ontario/18-oconnor-street-ottawa-k1p-1a4.html
Water Watcher
No worries, anytime! Sorry about the typo, I meant Simple H2O.
Sixth Estate
curious — nice… I’m going to have to write another report on this. You’d think the Ottawa Citizen reporter might have noticed this, even if no one else did.
kootcoot
Disappeared websites often live on for ages in Google cached pages – I don’t have time this morning to look for any of these but I doubt if the “Harper (fascist) Government” has even as much sway with the Google guys as China. Hell when Google itself deleted my blog ON THEIR SITE, (for reasons still unexplained but it has since been restored), I was able to recover almost all of it from their cached pages.
People shouldn’t put anything online they aren’t prepared to have last forever……….even pukes with connections in high places!
Sixth Estate
kootcoot — Indeed. See my most recent post: Carson’s school is in the process of attempting to erase his more partisan speeches from the Internet, which will be dramatically unsuccessful.
Christine McPherson
Just to clear this matter up for everyone. We have revamped some content and information and our websites were taken down for a few days as a result. The websites are finished and caching over the internet and should be up some time today.
For clarity purposes, H2o Water Professionals and H2o Global Group are not associated with Simple H2o. We do use NSF systems through our partners which manufacture in Canada.
We do not endorse the scare tactics of companies such as Simple H2o. We simply test the water, TDS levels, flow rates, etc., and recommend the best system for a house. Our reverse osmosis system actually remineralizes the water.
On a last note, people do have serious water issues that Government have failed to address for years now. The sad part is there are systems that can fix these problems. But we continue to allow these communities to live everyday without access to good water.
For those that are on municipal systems the water is clean. But I for one refuse to drink chorline and floride. We wonder why allergies, skin ailments and other diseases are on the rise, just drink your dose of chlorine everyday and enjoy. Clearly Health Canada and Environment Canada have written numerous reports on the issues surrounding water, chlorine and other issues.
Hope this clarifies a few things…..
Sixth Estate
I want to state up front that I am not particularly interested in whether your company is a shining paragon of justice or a fly by night scam. My interest lies in Bruce Carson and in the ways that he subverted our democratic process on your behalf.
But having said that, I do see some concerns here. You state that you are not affiliated with Simple H2O. That certainly appears to be the case now. But you were listed as their distributor until a couple of weeks ago, at least. You say you don’t use unethical scare tactics, but apparently that doesn’t apply to statements like “drink your dose of chlorine and enjoy.”
You’re absolutely right. There are many areas, including in Canada, which do not have sanitary water supplies right now. This is a very serious problem. But it is not a problem that will be addressed by worrying about chlorination in urban environments. Please note the correct spellings of “chlorine” and “fluoride.” Your clients will probably appreciate it.
Christine McPherson
Thanks for correcting my grammar. I guess that is what happens when you type to fast. Drinking chlorine is not a scare tactic we use. We give people their water results from the test, propose a solution and let them decide. I am referring to my issue with drinking municipal water as I have serious allergies. If the Government writes reports on their concerns with treated water, then I guess it should be a concern to us all.
Christine McPherson
APTN aired the Valentine’s Dinner claiming Patrick was at Hy’s Restaurant and picked up the tab for Carson and guests. They show a Canada Trust bank statement with two transactions of $487.92 and $91.36. What APTN did not do was to validate that information with Hy’s. On February 13th we had a business dinner at Hy’s. Being a Sunday the transactions only posted on February 14th. Hy’s was kind enough to send us the receipts validating those receipts were from the 13th.
Now does anyone wonder how APTN ends up with our company bank statement? Well on February 14th late at night, an ex-employee entered the office. On February 15th we discovered our office had been entered and called police. Police arrived in the morning and a case number was provided. The ex-employee boxed up a lot of information, accessed our systems and our banking. We thought the ex-employee had turned in his key, etc., only to find out he somehow had a copy.
This ex-employee was let go last year, when the company realized his involvement in running CMJ (club madellyn jae). It was being investigated by Ottawa Police and The City of Ottawa By-law Services and Kenneth Jackson covers the story. So the taped up secret box of information is handed from our ex-employee over to Kenneth Jackson.
Bank in January 2011, this ex-employee began sending SMS messages to Michele threatening her. We spent a lot of time and effort to get all of Michele’s information off the internet. It was not there at all and I checked regularly to be sure. In January Michele has a falling out with her older sister. Her older sister begins sending her threatening SMS messages to say she will take her down. Michele went to the Police for help on both fronts and the Ottawa Police assigned a Detective to investigate. In February, her older sister re-activates one of her accounts. We then begin to notice her ads and other information re-activated. I confronted her older sister and in the end she said Tit for Tat. Unfortunately, her sister has Michele’s password which is the same for all of her accounts. So her older sister provides some emails and other info to the ex-employee to support hurting her. Sadly both the sister and ex-employee know each other.
In terms of Carson, he has never lobbied or taken any money. He provided limited advice. It was really up to us to work with INAC and First Nations on this opportunity. I am confident the RCMP will find he did nothing wrong.
The contract signed by Michele was cancelled as the deal had been put together by the ex-employee. In fact all contracts were cancelled and re-issued. They are very long contracts and certainly not two pages. They assign a lot of responsibility to each employee and every employee is compensated on performance. The contracts are proper and reasonable now.
Unfortunately, APTN received a lot of information that we do classify as stolen. They also did not try to validate any of their information, which they should have done. It is not responsible journalism as far as I am concerned. The source is running illegal activities being investigated and they never bothered to try and understand how this information was obtained or whether or not it was accurate. We would have been happy to supply them with any information they wanted, but they chose harassing and ambushing us as a better approach.
Sixth Estate
I’m not aware actually of any government reports stating that chlorinated water is unsafe for human consumption. I would welcome a referral to one or more of these, since it would be very interesting information to have.
I am sorry you have allergies. I too suffer from serious allergies (though not related to water treatment). But what you stated was that you refused and then went on to suggest they were responsible for causing new allergies, skin problems, etc., and I am not aware of any studies making these connections.
Sixth Estate
Thank you for supplying all of this detail, and may I say both that I very much empathize with all your family must have been through with these illegal activities, and also that I am sorry APTN did not check with you on what appear to be some important details.
I note, though, that you continue to argue that Carson just “provided limited advice.” Frankly, I don’t believe you. Indian Affairs officials have stated that Carson held meetings with them related to your water projects. He also met Peter Kent in the same time frame and may or may not have discussed the same subject (Kent says not). That would seem to go well beyond “providing limited advice.”
Christine McPherson
There were only four meetings held where INAC clarified their policies; what was required on our part such as having the systems evaluated, etc.. Yes we attended those four meetings. I am pretty sure the information they gave us would have been given to anyone. There certainly were no secrets in those meetings and if APTN would have us we would have supplied them with our information and communication related to INAC. Carson has never met with Kent on our behalf nor have we ever met him.
I can only say at this point that we are willing to turn over all communication to the RCMP as it is very clear we did receive limited advice.
Sixth Estate
This would have been helpful information to offer in the first place. Carson clearly has access that the average member of the public does not have, and arranging and attending such meetings goes beyond the plain meaning of “providing limited advice.” So you can understand my skepticism.
That said, I want to thank you for your general openness here and I think I’m in a position to write a new post suggesting that there may be a much less inflammatory explanation here than the press is after.
Christine McPherson
Thanks! We would have provided anything APTN wanted had they have asked us. They convinced us they were doing a story on First Nations water so we agreed to sit with them and offered alot of information, interviews and even a tour of the plant in Saskatchewan. Within a week it became clear they were trying to create a story that was very far fetched and way out there. They have been given accurate information that contradicts their story but have chosen not to air it. I just came back from 4 years in Qatar, working in Human Resources for a Sheikh and APTN is even trying to imply there is some kind of security issue. Thousands of Canadians work in Qatar and many Canadian companies are over there developing the country in health, construction, education and oil and gas. I can’t believe APTN has such a vivid imagination and whatever they are trying to stretch this story into is absurd.
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