As Stephen Taylor and MK Braaten examine links between “friends” of the Martin government and Income Trust insider trading allegations (Martin linked Medisys Income Trust stock volume increased 3400% the day before Goodale announcement) , Toronto Tory is providing Paul Martin’s Investment Holding Disclosure to enable further exploration of the issue – a blog project of sorts. See if you can help out.

Sounds like an election slogan to me!


The Librano Election Sign Generator is here.

A commentor responds to the Michael Ignatieff controversy;

Incredible irony is that the riding association secretary travelled to Ukraine (on her own dollar) as an election observer during the Orange Revolution.
A year later she experiences political machinations right here at home, courtesy the Canadian government that presumed to teach Ukrainians about democracy.
Maybe we should demand the government bring over election observers from Ukraine. Maybe conservatives should start wearing orange?

Speaking of Ignatieff, Herman Goodden appears stricken with a serious case of intellectualitis.

At a dinner party over the weekend with fellow fulminating reactionary types of the conservative persuasion, the subject of Michael Ignatieff came up. The son of a diplomat and a painter, this classically educated and unfailingly thoughtful writer, scholar and broadcaster is regarded as a great leadership hopeful for the Liberal party.
Possessing Trudeau-type levels of charm and erudition, Ignatieff would certainly be a change from such uninspiring leaders as the hopelessly dithery Paul Martin and the thuggish Jean Chretien. For a couple of years now, Liberal party canvassers had been seeking to persuade Ignatieff to run for office, and he has finally taken the bait.
It remains to be seen whether a man of such refinement and integrity can retain those qualities once he’s been thoroughly processed through the crude sausage-making machinery of party politics.

In other words, a man who’s never earned an honest dollar in his life.

Such strong-arm machinations are just business as usual in party politics, but they don’t fit so comfortably with a man whose writings have constantly expressed solidarity with the down trodden and those shoved aside.

Or an honest nomination.
Ideal “leadership” material – if you belong to (or long to be accepted by) the class-obsessed culture of ruling Ottawa elites.

Brought to you by the good people at Finance.
Bruce Gottfred pulls together the post of the week, and it’s only just begun…

It began Wednesday at 5:20 pm, when John McKay, the parliamentary secretary of Ralph Goodale, went on live television and casually announced a major tax policy as easily as he might have announced new funding for macram� training for immigrants in a too-close-too-call riding — and didn’t even have his facts straight […]
It’s obvious that some people were in the know as to what was about to happen. In Barry Critchley’s column in today’s National Post, he talks to an investment banker that didn’t get a chance to be ‘consulted’ by the Finance department before it made its decision.

“It’s brutal. It’s third world. It’s unbelievable,” he said.
And this banker wasn’t just referring to the events of last Wednesday. Indeed, the process got off to a good start in early September, when Ottawa announced it was planning a consultation process on income trusts. A week or so later, the process reached amateur-hour proportions when the government announced it would not be giving any more advance tax rulings on trust conversions. More importantly, what did that decision mean for the process, which was kicked off with a 50-page report that indicated that everything was being analyzed?
Since then, it has been full-scale panic as Ottawa dealt with all sorts of anger from all sorts of people — market participants, industry executives, retail investors and pension funds.
And the final straw: “The government then tells a bunch of Bay Street insiders what it is going to do so they can profit. And then it does it. It’s insane,” added the banker.

Read the whole thing.
(Via Angry.)
Update: On the drive home this afternoon, I see this story has broken on a wider scale. But check out this CBC version – which can’t help but tack on a dismissive comment at the end of the report.

Some political observers said the calls for investigations were signs that the looming election campaign could become nasty

“Some political observers” – pray tell, who? If their opinions are important enough to mention, then they’re certainly important enough to identify.
We pay these people with our tax dollars. They can do better than that. Let’s email them and ask precisely who it is they’re referring to.

The story we’ve been following at Angry In The Great White North over Liberal MP David Smith and Abotech has finally broken into print.

And not just in print, but in a local paper. The West Quebec Post, with a circulation of about 5000, distributes in David Smith’s riding. Don’t forget also that Pontiac is just across the river from Ottawa.
So go read the article, and consider what impact it might be having on voters in Pontiac. It’ll also be interesting to see if the story gets picked up by another paper, what with an election call days away driving interest. I am personally gratified that Julie Murray was able to independently verify many of the facts I had uncovered, and that I am credited (see the end of the article) for my work on this.

(To review the work Angry’s done on this file, click here.)

DND news;

The first 60 Gelaendenwagen vehicles, “G Wagon” for short, produced by Mercedes Benz in Graz, Austria, will be deployed to Afghanistan in March for use during Operation ATHENA. An additional 40 vehicles will be delivered to the CF shortly thereafter and the remainder of the fleet will be fielded over the next several months to units in Canada. Delivery will be completed by August 2005.
A $126-million contract was awarded to Mercedes Benz Canada on October 21, for the procurement of 802 G Wagons and 118 armour protection systems (APS). The contract includes an unfunded option to buy up to 499 additional vehicles and up to 135 additional APS kits at an additional cost of $99.4 million�an additional 42 APS were purchased under this option in December 2003 for $4.44 million bringing the total number of APS kits to 160.

Mercedes Benz website;

The legendary G-Wagon has remained virtually unchanged in it’s design since 1979, except for various safety and technology upgrades.� According to Dieter Zetsche, head of the Mercedes Car Group, “Mercedes-Benz wrote automotive history by always ensuring that the G-Class remained state of-the-art over the past 26 years, and it will continue to offer its customers the very latest technology in the future.�
Production for the G-Class will remain at the Magna Steyr Plant in Graz, Austria, where over 185,000 have been produced throughout the years.

Autoparts Report,�March 20, 2002

[Belinda Stronach] also commented: “The increased vehicle project management and assembly contracts awarded to Magna Steyr provides increased opportunities to source more parts content from Magna’s other automotive systems companies and groups,”

Special thanks to CBCwatch for the heads up on this one.

Warren Kinsella;

Canada Steamship Lines is a company owned by a certain Canadian politician.� It doesn’t fly the Canadian flag to avoid paying taxes here, it has had a ship seized for drug running and, now this, found in this.

From the link;

By the time the tunnelmen were done, the Tadoussac would be in Lake Erie. The ship’s master would swing the boom out over the water and pass Macdonald the word to have the electrician start the conveyor belts. The belts would whir into motion, and the sweepings would pour off the boom into the waters of Lake Erie for half an hour, leaving a trail of iron-ore dust in the ship’s wake-the only visible sign of the environmental degradation.
It was a routine task but, even though he was a seasoned sailor, it never sat right with Macdonald. He is certainly no tree-hugger, but thinks there must be an alternative. “It’s been a bone of contention for me for years,” he says. “They call this spillage. I love the term.”
CSL is only one shipping company dumping sweepings into the Great Lakes. Ships have discharged cargo residue there ever since armadas of ore carriers started criss-crossing the lakes in the 1870s. No one knows how much has collected on the lakebeds travelled by major carriers, but cargo sweeping is routine for the 130 lakers that ply those waters today. Fourteen of these lakers are owned or operated by CSL, the company held by Paul Martin from 1981 to 1993, when he became finance minister and transferred management duties to a trustee.

Luckily for Martin, he has Rick Mercer on the payroll and most in Canadian media filling their environmental news quotas with “suspended disbelief reporting” to distract Canadians from the rapidly chilling body of Kyoto.

A Federal Court judge has reinstated Jean Pelletier as chairman of Via Rail, saying the government was unfair in the way it fired him in March 2004.
Justice Simon Noel said Pelletier – a Jean Chretien loyalist who was fired in connection with the sponsorship scandal – deserved to know why has was dismissed and should have been given a chance to respond.
The judge set aside the firing order and referred the whole matter back to the federal cabinet.
Pelletier was chief of staff to Chretien for 1993 to 2001 and was appointed to a five-year term as chairman of Via in 2001.
He was fired after Olympic medalist Myriam Bedard wrote to Prime Minister Paul Martin in February 2004 complaining she had been forced to resign from a Via job

(Background on Pelletier.)
Justice Simon has been in the news before.

From the office of Hon. David Kilgour, P.C., M.P., Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont, dated Oct.10;

An Open Letter
Re: Whistleblowers
Mr. Prime Minister
This is to convey my concern regarding the status of whistleblowers within our federal public service. Although Canadians value such persons highly for their willingness to stand up and speak out on injustices within the government, the response from management is almost invariably swift and severe punishment.
As we saw in the case of Allan Cutler, who almost lost his job and was shuffled around within his department, his attempt to reveal a scandal was ignored for considerable time. As far as I know, the only one who has ever thanked him for his good deed, besides Canadians generally, is Justice John Gomery. Does your government not believe he did the correct thing?
Although there has been some recognition of the difficulties faced by whistleblowers in their attempt to reveal unethical activity, Bill C-11 does not do even a barely adequate job. As Cutler himself points out in the October 17 issue of Hill Times – and he is one who is, as you know, more aware of the difficulties than you or I – C-11 is “still an ‘anti-whistleblower’ law and fundamentally and fatally flawed”. He notes that, among other things, the burden of proof to prove that the retaliation was in response to the whistleblowing remains on the whistleblower; there is no public disclosure; the whistleblower is not assigned a lawyer by the government, while the ‘accused’ is; and most worryingly, there is no authority or responsibility to take corrective action.
Moreover, the case of Joanna Gualtieri – who is one of the very few public servants who has chosen to challenge publicly wrongdoing – demonstrates that the government is not interested in truth and justice but rather in using its vast resources to debilitate and wear down the truth-teller. During the past week, as your government publicly claimed that it will protect whistleblowers, the Department of Justice dragged Ms. Gualtieri back into court rather than consent to her request that she have a reprieve from the court proceedings for a few months to attend to and breastfeed her newborn child. Is this how you intend to “protect” whistleblowers?
Ms. Gualtieri’s case has garnered significant public attention on account of the tax money squandered at the Foreign Affairs Department. Have you ever made any attempt to investigate the legitimacy of her claims of waste and harassment rather than spend much public money on lawyers to fight her? In my view, as a former Counsel with the Civil Litigation section with the Justice Department, it is tragic that such a capable civil servant should have had to spend the last ten years of her life defending her rights in a court case. With the treatment afforded Ms. Gualtieri,
few public servants are likely to dare take on ‘the system’ in the public interest.
Why are the Allan Cutlers, Joanna Gualtieris, Brian McAdams and RCMP Cpl. Robert Reads not given more respect by their peers in the federal public service? Why do they lose their jobs or go into early retirement? What could their careers have been like? And why has no one offered repair, restitution and reinstatement? Our whistleblowers – so necessary, as we have seen, even in a democratic society such as Canada – need to be protected by a serious piece of legislation.
I’d be grateful if you would provide this matter your consideration, and reply to me in a form that can be shared.

Perhaps one of our illustrious talking heads in media can file a question away on behalf of those whistleblowers who have put careers on the line to expose corruption – the next time you have Finance MInister Ralph Goodale at your ready, ask him directly when the Finance Department is going to issue a formal apology on behalf of former Finance Minister Paul Martin, for placing Cutler in the untenable position of rubberstamping Finance Department contracts for Earnscliffe that violated Treasury Board guidelines?
Better yet, when is he going to be at Rideau Hall to receive the Order Of Canada?
Prime Time Crime has more.
Consider this petition, as well; Cutler Meritorious Service Decoration Nomination

Greg Weston has seen the books.

After pounding the Liberals again yesterday, Conservative MP Jim Prentice was kind enough to share with us his 24 photocopied pages of St. Philips school bank statements for our reading horror.
They begin with thousands of dollars in bank machine withdrawals in Hollywood and Sea World, California, plus room charges for a week at the West Coast Anaheim Hotel.
Perhaps not satisfied with the educational value of jumping dolphins and movie stars, the cash-card-toting tourists of Keeseekoose apparently decided to hone their math skills at the Casino Regina.
In one day, the bank statements show withdrawals at the casino — remember this is the bank account to run the local Native school — for $500, then $300, then $600, then another $600. Three weeks later, in one 48-hour losing spree, the school accounts show 14 separate withdrawals totalling $5,600 from casino cash machines.
There were plenty of other bank card charges to the Native school that just keeps giving.
The records show dozens of charges for hotels and restaurants, shoe stores, hair salons and Canadian Tire.
The biggest single charges are for the local “Rangers” hockey team.
The records show direct transfers from the school to the team’s account of $1,500 one day, $4,000 another, $2,000 a few weeks later.
In total, we count over $10,000 that flowed to what has to be the most well-financed little-league team in the country.
All of this happened back in 2002, but federal auditors never noticed a thing, probably because they would never have occasion to check what happened to millions of dollars in federal money given to reserve schools such as St. Philips.
Someone on the reserve did finally call in the RCMP, and two officials have been charged.
As for all the loot that went to the luckiest little league hockey squad, the president of the team was the then band chief.
He was never charged with anything.

He was, however, the Liberal candidate in the 2004 federal election.
Via Newsbeat1
Previous post here

Globe & Mail;

Liberal campaign manager David Herle was given an untendered federal government contract for $23,112 to provide advice on communications and polling about this week’s mini- budget.
And another firm, Decima Research, was paid more than $320,000 to conduct polls and focus groups about the mini-budget and to test reactions to Finance Minister Ralph Goodale’s speech on Monday.

Speaking of Decima!

…by a two-to-one margin, Canadians would prefer to have a spring federal election rather than a vote in January or February, a new Decima poll suggests.

Back to Mr. Herle…

Mr. Herle is the Liberal Party’s campaign co-chair and Prime Minister Paul Martin’s closest adviser. He also has had a long relationship with Mr. Goodale, serving as his adviser when Mr. Goodale was leader of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party in the 1980s.

The Culture of Entitlement lumbers on….
Speaking of which… ouch!
This is a reader tips post for items related to Canadian politics – send a trackback or drop your own in the comments.

Angry’s chase of what appears to be an aboriginal company shell game has run smack into an iceberg.
David Smith, who sits in Parliament for the riding of Pontiac and claims to be an aboriginal, ran a company called Abotech, a computer consultancy firm, out of his home. Now the company is run by his wife, a nurse. Smith insists he has no idea what is going in Abotech.
Abotech has been caught up in a KPMG audit at PWGSC. Several contracts between Abotech and the federal government have been terminated. Why? No one is saying. Also, a bureaucrat named Frank Brazeau has been suspended without pay in connection with the audit. Frank Brazeau is also David Smith’s cousin. Why was he suspended? No one is saying.
The theory is that Frank Brazeau directed contracts meant to go to an aboriginal businesses to Abotech. Smith took his cut, and passed the work to a non-aboriginal firm. The evidence to back it up is in his archive of Abotech posts.
But then came news about a $30 billion lawsuit going forward against the Liberal government. Unions representing 300,000 public servants are suing to recover pension surplus money that Liberal finance minister Paul Martin took to pay down the government’s debt.
What does that have to do with Abotech?
Here’s something the newspapers haven’t reported. It turns out that the company that managed the RCMP pension fund, Morneau Sobeco, did not deal directly with the government. The government gave a lucrative contract to another company that would direct Morneau Sobeco in the management of the fund. In fact, that company set up the contract, selected Morneau Sobeco to execute the contract, and dealt with any contract amendments.
Presumably that contract included directing Morneau Sobeco to hand over pension fund surpluses to Paul Martin.
The name of that company? Abotech.
Was all that about aboriginal set-asides just a side business for Abotech? Was all this time the real story about David Smith’s involvement in the management, and mismanagement, of the pension funds of civil servants under the direction of the Liberal government?
(In Angry’s comment section, it’s mentioned that the National Post has finally picked up on this story – if you spot it online, send along a link.)

It’s back!

A week ago, Charlebois noticed the devil in the details;

Poor Jack.� He thought he had a deal with the Liberals but instead he’s been made a fool.� On the NDP’s website, they proudly proclaim the “first ever NDP budget” passed in 2005, referring to Bill-C48, which sure enough has passed and received Royal Assent.�
[…]
But when Jack came out saying he no longer supported the government, did he do so knowing about the details of C-66 and the Liberals near- contempt for parliament?� Check it out.� In C-66, the Liberals have introduced legislation detailing how that $900 million will be handed out.� Part 2 deals with energy efficiency and Part 3 deals with Public Transit.� (e.g. in Part 3, they actually name the Minister who will requisition the money, and count out how much will be spent each year!)� Bill C-66 has only just gotten to first reading; no one has yet even spoken about it in the House.�
Once parliament has expressed its opinion on one subject you can’t go back and try the same thing again to get a different result.� Everyone thought C-48 was a fait accompli.� Now the crafty Liberals have stuffed enough new measures into C-66 that they will be able to dodge that charge (some good lawyers could maybe prove otherwise).� However, if C-66 isn’t passed, then that $900M Jack promised every Mayor in Canada and that his website claims to have delivered will not materialize.
Basically, with C-66, the gov’t lawyers will be able to say that all C-48 did was put $900M into the bank ready to be spent.� But C-66 is required to, y’know, actually spend it.� Heh and something tells me the gov’t won’t be in any hurry to pass C-66.� Surprise surprise, Jack’s been double-crossed.� Get used to Martin & the Gang everyone, they’re not going anywhere.

Today, Darcey had thoughts of C-66 dancing in his head in response to Paul Martin’s carrot and stick performance that promised to yank a $250 fuel rebate from shivering Canadians;

This rebate is a part of Bill C-66 so I wonder how sincere he really is:

“The bill was introduced on October 6th, 2005. No money will flow to any Canadian until the bill is passed by both the House of Commons and the Senate. To date, the Liberals have pulled Bill C-66 from the Order of Business three times � October 19th, 24th, and 27th � which seems to indicate that they are not interested in passing this legislation as a priority.”

Emphasis mine.

Beryl P. Wajsman isn’t impressed with the Gomery report. Or Martin. Or Sheila Fraser, or the media or nearly anyone, it seems. Though, I like this part;

We did not find out why there is no Inquiry into the reported $167,000 in Canada Steamship Lines contracts awarded during Mr. Martin�s tenure as Finance Minister being in reality $167,000,000. Nor why there is no Inquiry into the millions of dollars of contracts awarded to Earnscliffe Strategies where many of Mr. Martin�s political operatives worked. Nor why there is no Inquiry into the $1.5 billion dollars in guarantees awarded under Mr. Martin�s watch as Finance Minister in favour of Bombardier whose lobbyist was Mike Robinson, a principal in Earnscliffe and national campaign co-chair for Mr. Martin, who admitted on CTV to having talked with Mr. Martin�s Chief of Staff on this file. Nor why there is no Inquiry into the CSL affiliates transferred to the tax haven of Barbados that, according to Radio- Canada�s �Enjeux� documentary, avoided $300,000,000 of taxes by taking advantage of rule changes enacted while Mr. Martin was Finance Minister. But then one can reasonably conclude that Mr. Martin was not �mad as hell� about these matters since some of them touched very close to home and were beginning to appear almost daily in the press just before the Auditor- General�s report in February of 2004.

By the way, Wajsman was one of those “banned for life” from Liberal Party membership, though he states he wasn’t named in any wrongdoing. He wasn’t a member, either.
Give it a read.

Paul Martin has applied the “Public Safety and Anti-Terrorism” model to purge the the Liberal Party of Canada of Adscam suspects;

However, party officials admitted yesterday that only three of the 10 people that Mr. Martin banned for life from the Liberal Party of Canada for their role in the sponsorship scandal are still members of the party.
Nor does it appear that Mr. Martin can arbitrarily toss them out. Under the constitution of the party’s Quebec wing, the party’s board of directors can suspend or revoke a membership in the party, but only after giving the member notice as well as a hearing.
The party is also checking to see if it can even legally ban someone for life.

Of course, it could have been worse – he might have created a Canadian Liberal Registry.

Busted;

For several years, an exasperated Abbotsford businessman has been getting misdirected e- mails containing inside information about the Liberal government. Bill Sadar has seen details of planned political machinations, draft press releases, an e-mail containing racial epithets and references to sex acts. He’s even received such sensitive data as credit card numbers.
But the final straw, he said, was a recent e-mail outlining a scheme aimed at discrediting two of Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s star candidates.
The message was from Ruth Thorkelson, a long-time senior Paul Martin adviser who recently left as deputy chief of staff, and who says she is now helping MPs and candidates as a volunteer.
Her message, to Liberal MP Judi Longfield, outlined plans to leak to “a friendly media outlet” accusations that Tory candidates Jim Flaherty and John Baird are violating the Canada Elections Act.
[…]
Among the e-mails Sadar shared with The Sun:
– On May 10, Jean Collins, of the federal Western Economic Diversification Canada’s Saskatoon office, sent Sadar a news release on a pending announcement, along with a draft copy of possible media questions and answers. It was intended for Gerry Maffre, assistant deputy minister at Infrastructure Canada.
– In June, the Liberal party’s Quebec wing sent Sadar an invitation to a Quebec Young Liberals “mega happy hour” gathering at a bar. It also sent him an e-mail around the same time outlining Liberal party defence of ethics of party volunteers at the Gomery Inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.
– An e-mail from Liberal-connected Vancouver lobbyist John Paul Fraser urges political staffers from Industry Canada, Transport Canada, and Infrastructure Canada to help arrange a meeting with the Fraser River Port Authority and a handful of top bureaucrats. The subject was the port’s demand for funds for dredging in order to prevent flooding.
– Sadar provided the racist and lewd e-mail to The Sun on condition that no details were published that would identify the government employees involved. However, it referred to sexual boasts by government employees and a reference to the sexual predilections of a person from a certain ethnic group.

Very nice.
While others concentrate on the leak of a planned smear campaign by the “Entitlement Liberals” using Government of Canada assets, I have different question – just who is this “friendly media outlet” Ruth Thorkelson refers to?
More, thanks to “Shaken” in the comments. Hansard;

Mr. Bill Casey (Cumberland/Colchester, CPC): Mr. Speaker, Ruth Thorkelson worked in the Prime Minister’s Office for 10 straight years. She left only long enough to negotiate a $17 million grant from international trade to the Forest Products Association of Canada. Then a staffer in the office of the Minister of International Trade, Andre Albinati, followed that grant money to Earnscliffe which received $800,000 of the $17 million grant.
What is the point in having post-employment rules when the Prime Minister allows this abuse to go on?
[…]
When the Forest Products Association of Canada received the $17 million grant, it first gave $800,000 to Earnscliffe advertising, untendered. Then it gave approximately $8 million to the Burson-Marsteller agency. Now Burson-Marsteller is buying Earnscliffe.
Under the terms of the grant, they were required to produce four reports on how they spent the money. Will the minister make public the four required reports so we will know for sure that the grant money is not funding the purchase of Earnscliffe?

Paul Martin has forwarded the Gomery Report to the RCMP – and by the looks of things, they’re already on the case!

Great post by Stephen Taylor, who was on Parliament Hill for the post-Gomery action;

Yes, I heckled the former Prime Minister as he arrived to give perhaps the most serious press conference of his life and it got a good response from the press waiting out in the cold. Chretien bowed his head and grimaced as he walked into the building without a word. I guess that this perhaps one advantage of being a blogger instead of a full fledged member of the mainstream media; you get to rip into politicos when they deserve it while not risking your media clout.

Time for a little reminiscing …

Translation and comments.
more…