The Sixth Estate

As you may have heard by now, the Auditor-General is not happy about the fact that the Harper Regime gave over $280 million in subsidies to the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers’ Marketing Board to pay off tobacco farmers to kick their habit, so to speak, only to miss the fact that a large number of farmers were pocketing the money, engaging in some creative accounting (something the Ruling Party knows a lot about, I should add), and keeping right on growing tobacco after some dubious “quota transfers”:

• [Tobacco Transition Program] recipients working on their own farm as employees;
• independent children of TTP recipients renting their parents’ land and infrastructure, and obtaining a license to grow tobacco; and
• TTP recipients loaning money to a licensee or co-signing at a bank for a loan for a licensee.

Now, every so often, you can hear Conservative ministers crowing about how their government has made unprecedented advances in making government finances fair and free from the stain of lobbying. The tobacco scandal illustrates why we should look further. You may recall that Harper’s head PR flack during the 2011 election was an Ensight Canada lobbyist named Jason Lietaer. Lietaer is well-connected and his name was bandied about to take Harper’s communications director post last year, and then again earlier this year, after director Dimitri Soudas’s political career was tarnished by allegations (never seriously investigated) that he might be given a bribe in exchange for securing an appointment on the Montreal Port Authority.

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Pushed Left has alerted the blogosphere to the disturbing background to a new “survey” of Canadians which has received appallingly credulous coverage from our nation’s media. The report in question is a purported “survey” of focus groups by a lobbying firm called Ensight, called Mind Your Majority, which purports to show that Canadians are unanimously enthusiastic about the privatization of healthcare and Harper’s welcoming stance toward the business sector. It has received favourable coverage in the CBC, Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, and Vancouver Sun.

There’s only one problem with this coverage: Ensight is not, as the Post calls it, a “pollster.” It is a lobbying firm. And it is a specifically Conservative one, with a staff chock full of Tory veterans and Harper loyalists. This sort of report is plainly not trustworthy. I wonder if this is the sort of shenanigans we can expect from the Harper Government™ over the next four years. Don’t take an Ensight opinion analysis any more seriously than you would a propaganda piece from the Fraser Institute — which is to say, direct it swiftly to the recycling bin. But from a broader perspective, this is it, folks. The opening shots of the final battle for public healthcare have now been fired.

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Update: Mr. Lietaer’s own Twitter account, as I write this, contains no reference to his position in the Harper war room. In fact, he implies he doesn’t have one, saying “no title here, just keeping my head down, ” before spewing out the typical B.S. about coalitions. I guess he forgot to mention his anonymous status to colleague Guy Giorno, who outed his position as head of the “media relations team.”

It’s day zero of the election campaign, and the Conservative Party is already not just hiring, but celebrating the arrival of paid lobbyist shills in its election war room. Today Guy Giorno, using Twitter, welcomed the new head of the media relations team, Jason Lietaer. Lietaer is one of what I expect to be a number of political operatives active during the campaign who sell their politics for cash to the highest bidder.

Lietaer currently works at Ensight Canada. Previously he did a stint working for the Conservative causus research unit. Before that, he was at Ensight Canada again, where his clients ranged from the World Wildlife Fund to the tobacco industry. Lietaer actually has a substantial history working for the tobacco industry, going back at least to 2004.