The Sixth Estate

Updated below break: Carson being erased entirely from CSEE website.

Yesterday, the Liberal Party and then the media finally caught up to Sixth Estate by going to the website of the Tory Canada School of Energy and Environment, the late home of convicted fraudster and former Harper Government™ chief of staff Bruce Carson, and downloading his abominably partisan speech to the Manning Centre for Building Democracy in 2010, in which Carson, supposedly a clean energy research promoter but still obviously no more than a partisan hack, outlined how to “manage a Conservative agenda in a minority situation.” In response, as you can see here, the School is attempting to pretend the speech never happened by erasing it from its website.

For the moment the erasure is only partial. However, I suspected something like this might happen and so I downloaded a copy of the presentation ages ago, as a backup. I would hate to see Carson’s contributions to Canadian democracy simply vanish overnight.

Among other things, Carson described how the government manipulates government questions in Question Period to “implement our agenda,” how it was important not to get “thrown off our game” by the Afghan detainee and nuclear isotope scandals, whether it was better to respond to criticism or to give no comment, why it is important not to apologize (again, because it “throws” you off your game), and why the defining characteristic of Conservative ideology is “unparalleled… faith in leader.” Actually, Mr. Carson, I believe that is better known as the “divine right of kings,” and real conservatives got rid of it long ago.

Updated: As of afternoon March 25, the CSEE is now engaged in further erasure of Carson from the website. Its Staff Page has been modified and its Executive Director page is now gone. Now the staff consists only of fellow Tory insider Zoe Addington, researcher Andrew Coates, assistant Leah Liberato, and “manager of strategic alliances” Dale Botting. This is big: more on this upcoming.

In the meantime, I will continue my mission of preserving Mr. Carson’s legacy by making available here the bio gloss that CSEE no longer wants online. Note that this biography fails to note his conviction for fraud, his jail term, or his bankruptcy prior to being hired by the Conservatives:

Bruce Carson, B.A., L.L.B, L.L.M. is the first Executive Director of the Canada School of Energy and Environment (CSEE). He comes to the position after more than two decades in politics. Carson served as Director of Policy and Research for the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper when he was leader of the Opposition and as Senior Policy Adviser to Prime Minister Harper. He spent the last three and a half years with Harper working on policy in both the Energy and Environment portfolios and he served as co-chair of a task force developing a new method for dealing with specific claims by First Nations.

In the March 2007 budget, the federal government identified CSEE as one of Canada’s Centres of Research Excellence and Commercialization and, as such granted $15 million to support CSEE activities. Carson was appointed its first director in the fall of 2008.Carson has an LL.B from the University of Ottawa and an LL.M specializing in constitutional law from the University of Toronto. He looks forward to participating as a lecturer on Government Policy at University of Calgary School of Public Policy, as an Adjunct Professor. Since joining CSEE, Carson has taken on several roles at the request of Minister Prentice – Minister of the Environment, and Ministers of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt and current Minister Christian Paradis. He presently chairs the Federal-Provincial-Oil and Gas Industry Working Group on Climate Change, as well as being a member of the Thermal Electricity Task Force on Climate Change.