Ralph Goodale makes it official – the only Canadians who are allowed to shield income and retirement savings from the insatiable vacuum of Liberal government taxation are those with holdings in the shipping industry. CPC candidate for Wascana, Brad Farquhar has the dirty details;

It all started with this report from Canaccord Capital, in which they tell Ralph Goodale that he screwed up, and that he’s hurting every Canadian.
Canaccord Capital: Trust Reform Hurts Canadians
Wow! The feds are worried about $300 million in tax leakage, and as a result, they wiped $23 billion out of the retirement funds of Canadians. Only a Liberal would call that a good return on investment.
So then the Media picked the story:
National Post: Trust backlash mounts
Globe & Mail: Canaccord goes on attack over trusts

At one time I had a lot of time and respect for Ralph Goodale. Regardless of what one thought of his choice of political affiliation, he had a reputation for being an honest and committed MP, serving his riding well. As I said – at one time.
I know the exact moment when that respect evaporated. Unlike most Canadians, I’ve actually read much of the testimony to the Public Accounts Committee regarding the awarding of improper contracts predating “Adscam” that placed then Finance Minister Paul Martin’s personal leadership campaign team – aka “Earnscliffe” – on the public payroll.
When challenged on this testimony in the House of Commons, Goodale cited a 1997 audit by Ernst and Young in Martin’s defense. The very same audit that he, as a central figure in Paul Martin’s cabinet and current Finance MInister had to have known had been “cleansed” and subsequently discredited in testimony given before Justice John Gomery.
Perhaps the “Honest Ralph” schtick was an act from the get go. Or perhaps he’s feeling the pressure in having realized, a little too late, that he’d traded in his own personal integrity to serve the interests of a wholely corrupt organization. Whatever the case, it seems to be getting to him. Ralph’s on a short fuse these days.

Finance Minister Ralph Goodale lashed out Thursday at a Bay Street investment dealer’s efforts to rally public opposition to Ottawa’s controversial review of the booming income trust sector.
Goodale accused Canaccord Capital Corp., of playing “partisan politics” and following the wishes of Opposition Conservatives with its call for Canadians to lobby their MPs to fight Goodale’s plans to reform the sector.
The report was first shown to him by Conservative MP John Reynolds, whose son is a senior employee at the Toronto-based brokerage, Goodale said outside a regular meeting of the federal cabinet.
“Obviously this particular firm has chosen to take a very political, a very partisan approach,” Goodale said.
“It was John Reynolds. . .the former interim leader of the Conservative Party, that presented the document to me, while he was informing me. . .that it was his son that basically runs the company – which I thought was an interesting partisan comment on his part.”
One day earlier, Canaccord – a well-known Bay Street investment dealer – issued a condemnation of Goodale’s review of income trusts, suggesting it threatens billions of dollars in retirement income by potentially destroying the sector.
“We question whether the consultation process with the Department of Finance will be balanced or is it just a sham,” wrote Canaccord Capital analysts.
“Bay Street cannot protect your investments on this issue, as it alone does not carry political weight,” adds the report, which includes the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of every Member of Parliament.
“The intentional or unintentional destruction of the existing trust market does not need to happen.”
The comments weren’t politically motivated but instead designed to warn the Liberal government the review is creating huge uncertainty for global investors, added Chris Rankin, one of the authors of the Canaccord report.

I suppose it’s time the investment industry started looking into stashing your retirement savings into foreign-registered shipping lines and offshore tax havens and just be done with it.
Be sure to read all of Brad’s post. And if you’re in his riding, be sure to get him elected.

COPPS: But I think the differentiation is a bit of an Ottawa myth, because I don’t think for the public, whomever is responsible, whatever comes out of the Gomery inquiry, I think there are some people on the hill who think they can build this huge wall between the current administration and the previous administration. And most Canadians go, hey, you were there.� You were part of the government.� It’s not going to wash.� So I think whatever comes out of Gomery, you know, take a page from the David Dingwall book.� There were an awful lot of people last week saying all kinds of horrible things about David Dingwall, most of which have proven to be unsubstantiated or, or unable to prove.� So, I’m a little skeptical because I was told during the course of Gomery that there was a very close connection between the questions that were asked by the chief counsel and indeed some of the, the people who are working in the current administration.� Blackberries work very well between people.
DUFFY: So you were told that some of the people here in the Paul Martin PMO were feeding lines…
COPPS: Yeah.
DUFFY: …to the chief counsel of the Gomery Commission, lines of inquiry to follow up?
COPPS: They were Blackberries.� And I’d love to get access to those Blackberries.� Now that I’m a reporter I think I’ll put in an access request to get the Blackberries.
DUFFY: So again, this would be the Martin camp trying to besmirch the Chretien camp.� A settling of old scores.
COPPS: And I don’t think. You know what?� I don’t think it’s a question of besmirching.
DUFFY: I mean we have no proof of this though.
COPPS: I think what they want to show, what they want to show is, vote for us because we’re a new team.� And when a government’s been around for four years or potentially five years, five terms, they have to differentiate themselves and show newness.� So that was the strategy.� They didn’t wake up one morning and say I’m going to go after the previous guys.� I think it was more, how do I survive.� I survive by trying to show that I’m not them.

National Post;

Prime Minister Paul Martin says the Americans have an obligation to help stop the smuggling of guns into Canada.
Martin made the comment Monday as his government prepares a series of gun-control initiatives aimed at curbing a wave of violence in Toronto. Those measures, which sources say could include suing U.S. weapons manufacturers, will be announced next month. But the prime minister used a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to press the issue immediately.
He said the Americans expect Ottawa to help keep their borders secure and Canada expects the same in return.
“The Americans ask us to do things in terms of the border; I think there’s an obligation on their side to work with us to prevent gun-smuggling into Canada,” Martin told a news conference.
The prime minister said up to half the gun crimes in Canada involve weapons smuggled from the United States.

Spokespersons in the Prime Minister’s office refused to confirm that Paul Martin plans to meet next with Jamaican officials about working with the Federal and Ontario governments to staunch the flow of trigger-pullers into Canada.
It seems to me that the Liberals are going about this all backwards. With clear evidence that crime rates in the United States are inversely proportional to the rate of gun ownership, the solution to the problem of “gun crime” in Canada is obvious – smuggle in more Americans!
update… a McLellan-Martin flip flop?

I usually leave these opportunities to other blogs to have fun with, but I’m making an exception for this one.

On the Abotech comments thread below, I caught this entry by “Justzumgai” in response to news that Reg Alcock has announced $40 million in new annual spending to hire up to 300 new auditors. (As an aside – I’ll remind readers that this is the same Liberal government that slashed the number of auditors across government, including the Dingwall/Gagliano/Guite Department of Money Laundering Public Works.)

Whether you have more auditors or less auditors, the waste and theft will continue. The very programs themselves whose alleged integrity the auditors are trying to protect are nothing but nasty and dishonest attempts to buy votes. All of these programs are based on the premise that ordinary citizens and their own voluntary, private and local associations are somehow too ineffective to ever manage anything as complicated as a visit to a doctor’s office; planning for retirement; educating one’s children; and so on.
How do you “protect the integrity” of a health care system, the only two major products of which seem to be (a) rich doctors and unionized staff and bureaucracies, and (b) sick and crippled patients sitting at home waiting for an MRI, a radiation treatment, an angioplasty, or whatever. Oh yes, I forgot – you protect the integrity of the system by establishing “scientifically valid” waiting-list baseline measurements, and you use the rest of the money on a propaganda campaign to blame the victims for being too fat.
And are the auditors to protect the taxpayers so that education money is spent on even higher teachers’ and bureaucrats’ salaries, and even more trendy but useless computers and software? So that an even higher proportion of illiterate and innumerate graduates can be turned out into an even bigger wasteland of lost jobs?
So, Dear Canadians, I would have advised you all to roll up the Gomery Report and related Liberal Party policy papers, and stick them in your pipe and smoke them – but I understand that the government is soon going to start using taxpayers’ money to buy people crack cocaine and heroin.
So instead, just ignore the judge’s, auditors’ and politicians’ reports, drop out, quit, take a out a second mortgage on your house, max out all your credit cards, and sit back and wait for your government to take care of you in the way that you truly deserve.

A cynical conclusion, but given how many Canadians in the ridings of Gimme’-Gimme’, Ottawa Pork and Entitled-N’How embrace the nanny state approach to failure and criminality in this country, perhaps it’s not such bad advice. After all, it’s what they’ve been voting for – with the full expectation that others have a “moral obligation” to foot the bill.

A quote from the latest in a series of posts on Liberal MP David Smith at Angry At The GWN;

So David Smith maintains his links with Jaguar and ASM, which are closely linked to each other.
They both seem to make a good living off of federal contracts, especially those intersecting aboriginal concerns and territories.
Then he splits off to work out of his home for Abotech, a company with no apparent employees or facilities, landing hundreds of thousands in government public works contracts dedicated to aboriginal companies.
Here’s my theory. Abotech is a front for non-aboriginal companies like Jaguar. The government hires “aboriginal” company Abotech to do the work and thus meets its own goal for supporting aboriginal companies. But Abotech is a shell, and after David Smith takes his cut, he passes the work off to Jaguar or to ASM, which are legit, though non- aboriginal, computer firms.
Neither Jaguar nor ASM are listed in the Aboriginal Business Directory, though Abotech is.
It works because David Smith is a status aboriginal

Go read the whole thing.

The judgement is now online.

Here’s a letter that’s bound to set off the conspiracy theorists in the ranks of conservatives…

Paul Martin did some pre-election Oktoberfest visiting in Kitchener-Waterloo on October 12th and how coincidental is it that on the day before he arrived regular gasoline was priced at 95.9/litre and on the day of his visit gas dropped to 85/litre? Earlier in the week the gas had been as high at 103.
The PM flew to Owen Sound that day and their gas matched Kitchener’s. I had an appointment in Owen Sound so I saw they had lowered the gas prices. It’s a 2 hours drive between Kitchener and Owen Sound and the gas was high in all areas between the two cities. I drove back to Kitchener the next day after the PM’s visit and gas was up to 99.9 cents per litre.
Just a note on the side: Harper had visited the area a week earlier and visited a local private gas bar, had a press conference and pumped some gas – but the gas didn’t drop on his visit.

Announcing an RCMP investigation into who is responsible for the leak of contents of the Gomery ADSCAM report to the media?

Justice John Gomery will report in less than two weeks that the Quebec sponsorship scheme was a narrowly held secret with broadly dangerous implications for government integrity.
After months of conflicting testimony, the Quebec Superior Court judge will load much of the blame for the mutant $250- million program on a group of loyalists clustered around former prime minister Jean Chr�tien.
But in the first of two reports, Gomery will also conclude that controls to protect taxpayers failed under political pressure, making it child’s play for rogue civil servants to direct contracts to Liberal-friendly advertising firms.
Gomery will lay bare what many Canadians suspect: An elite few routinely and for ruling party advantage abused a system that buckled and then failed.

Of course, the inquiry was set up to achieve precisely this result. By narrowly limiting Judge Gomery to testimony about transactions involved in the Sponsorship program – and only the Sponsorship program – Paul Martin has been able to protect himself from embarrassing disclosures of how the Public Works audit that uncovered ADSCAM was triggered by events involving the rigging of an unrelated contract by the Finance Department.
None of this clumsy obfuscation would be possible in a country with a diverse and independant media. (I’ll also suggest that none of it would be likely in a country where Senators and Governors General were elected, instead of plucked from the “journalistic” whorew ranks.)
For that reason, expect the leak to be breathlessly seized upon for its disclosures and not the more curious question about who did the leaking, and who stands to gain from it.
And as you listen to the chattering classes debate the findings, remember that we would have remained forever in the dark about Gagliano and Guite and envelopes stuffed with cash, had not Public Works employee Alan Cutler blown the whistle – on Paul Martin’s desire to place his own personal Liberal party leadership team on the public payroll.

The Fraser Institute has released a summary of federal government waste, mismanagement and outright misrepresentation based on Auditor General reports from 1992 to 2005;

20 separate instances in which contract or parliamentary rules were broken, similar to the current circumstances surrounding the sponsorship scandal.

11 instances of government failure dealing with sensitive information such as Social Insurance Numbers (SINs) and immigration information. For example, more than half of current SINs have no supporting documentation and there are 5 million more SINs for Canadians over the age of 20 than there are people in that age group.

22 problems were investigated at the Department of National Defence (DND), more than any other identified department. One example of the many problems at DND was the department?s eight year development of a $174 million satellite communication system, which DND concluded was less efficient than the commercial system it had already been using.
A more recent example is a $220 million radar system, originally estimated to cost $43.1 million, which only works during daylight and calm weather.

A startling 65 examples were found amongst the 284 cases of government failure involving some type of capital misallocation, indicating large-scale inefficient use of resources.

The full report is here. (PDF)
It’s not just the Fraser Institute digging. At Black Rod they’ve discovered this intriguing passage from “Money on the Run-Canada and How the World’s Dirty Profits are Laundered” (Penguin) by investigative reporter Mario Possamai.

“On April 19, 1970, a handful of Canada’s most powerful businessmen met privately at the elegant Montreal home of financier Paul Desmarais. What brought them together was the worrying rise of the Parti Quebecois, a growing force in the Quebec provincial elections that were about to be held.”
“Within days of the gathering, a secret anti-separatism fund was up and running. It was controlled by a trusted Liberal Party bagman. The fund came to light more by accident than design – as a result of theft charges laid against the bagman. It briefly illuminated a usually murky side of Canadian politics-how confidential pools of money are (often legally) raised, laundered, and spent.”
The group raised $55,000, “a hefty sum in the days before the inflationary ravages of the lates 70s and early 80s.”
“The money did not go directly to the separatist-fighting Liberal Party or into its regular account at Montreal Trust. Instead the money went to veteran Liberal bagman Louis de Gonzague Giguere, Pierre Trudeau’s first Senate appointee.”
Giguere was known (affectionately, they say) as “Giggery Bill” on account of his backroom skills. He was Chief Liberal Party Organizer for Quebec in the 1963, 1965 and 1968 elections. He was eventually charged with influence peddling and with theft of left-over slush fund money. He was acquitted, reluctantly, by the judge who said he couldn’t be sure who, if anyone, had been defrauded. (Watch for that defence in Adscam.) Giguere died in June, 2002 at the age of 90.
“According to Giguere, the contributions stocked a secret fund to “fight separatism in all its forms.”
Within days of getting the money, he quickly began dispensing it.
“On April 27, 1970, a cheque for $3,000.50 went to JEAN CHRETIEN, then a federal cabinet minister.”

Think of it as the “Sponsorship Scholarship”.
Read the rest.

Portions of the testimony of the Gomery hearings that was kept under publication ban have now been lifted. National Post editorializes by stating the testimony is “not nearly as sensational” as the evidence given last spring. Says who?

The cash flow eventually ran both ways, according to the evidence released Friday, several months after Justice John Gomery struck it with a publication ban last spring.
Both men said that after he left the federal civil service in 1999, Guite collected thousands of dollars for advising Brault on how to boost his business, often at the expense of taxpayers.
Guite and Brault are now charged with conspiracy and defrauding the government of nearly $2 million. Their trial is set for May 2006. The testimony revealed Friday does not touch on any of the contracts that resulted in criminal charges.
The testimony does illustrate the cosy, back-scratching environment that exploded into the $250-million sponsorship fiasco, which featured ad agencies and other middle-men collecting $100 million, often for little or no work.
The scandal, which featured startling testimony of cash being left in envelopes on restaurant tables and of sponsorship money being funnelled to the Quebec wing of the federal Liberals, almost brought down the Liberal government last spring.
According to Brault’s testimony, his involvement began at the Vancouver Molson Indy auto race in 1995 where Guite taught him how federal sponsorships were really run.
“That’s where he showed me that there was a sponsorship the government gave to (advertising company) Lafleur, and by spending three days in jeans with a beer in hand it’s much easier to establish contacts,” Brault said in the testimony.
“It was the first time that I would say I sowed, as we say in the business, a little seed to get one of these non-conventional contracts.”

The ground provided by the Liberal government was fertile, to put it mildly.

Guite said that once he left the public service in 1999 he worked on contracts for Groupaction, receiving $76,000 from the company through August 2000.
Brault said he had put Guite on a $10,000 monthly retainer by 2001 for his “vast knowledge of … the potential of different organizations working on communications in Canada.”

Guite was no rogue civil servant – he was brought into Public Works at the request of then minister David Dingwall to to “centralize federal ad strategy”.
(Other recent posts on the scandal-ridden Dingwall here)

Hehhhhhh:

The Conservatives broke into a rendition of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall to reveal their disgust at the excessive spending habits of David Dingwall, the former head of the Mint who retired last week amid allegations that he and his staff spent $740,000 last year.
Tory revenue critic Brian Pallister began the rendition with his version of the tune: “You don’t need no information, We’re in charge of thought control, Fine wines with caviar in the backroom.�
The other Tories finished with the chorus, “Hey Tories! Leave those Grits alone.�
[link — h/t: NealeNews]

I’d love to see how this gets transcribed into Hansard.

I’ve been asked by many people why we took down PolSpy, and there were numerous reasons for it, but one of them is that you know it’s time to throw in the towel when reality gets so strange that you can no longer spoof it.
So now you know.

Warren Kinsella, former David Dingwall protege, has been surprisingly silent over his old boss’ fall from grace and resignation from the Canadian Mint. He has been rather quick to defend Mr. Dingwall in the past, so I find the current lack of action on this topic very interesting.
Maybe it’s because Warren knows better than to bother with defending the indefensible?
I’m just speculating, of course.

So David Dingwall got us to pay for his golf game and his limos. But did we also pay him to lobby the government on behalf of itself and did he even lobby his former department?

Remember, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

I wouldn’t exactly call this revelation a big surprise:

David Dingwall, the president of the Royal Canadian Mint, and his top aides racked up total office expenses of more than $740,000 last year, government documents indicate.

Included were over $130,000 in foreign and domestic travel, $14,000 in meals and $11,000 in hospitality. The mint also appears to have picked up a $1,400 tab for Dingwall’s membership in an Ottawa-area golf club, and $1,500 in membership fees in the Nova Scotia barristers’ society. [link — h/t: NealeNews]

That’s a lot of dough. Maybe he spent some of it on SFH CDs? (Warning: Link content objectionable to some.)

A call out to all you Blogging Tories out there – let’s give this initiative by David MacLean at the Taxpayers Federation a push.
Join the army of waste watchers!

Our challenge: Go through the mountains of travel, booze and meal expenses charged to taxpayers by hundreds of politicians and mandarins that are listed here.
Find the waste, look for conflicts, identify questionable expenditures. Take a moment to jot down your thought and email them to me. All of the worthwhile submissions will be posted here. The best submission, as determined by FFT contributors, will receive a copy of Tax Me I’m Canadian! and a free subscription to the Taxpayer magazine.

Details are here.

The AG report on the “Canadian Firearms Program” audit is scheduled to be released in February – the same month Gomery is due to hand down his election-triggering report. Though Fraser isn’t talking, the Winnipeg Sun suspects it will be blistering;

Fraser isn’t doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.
The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.

If the Libranos don’t orchestrate their own fall in the coming weeks, (they’re working hard at weakening the uber-fundraiser Harper for a reason, people) it’s a safe bet that they’ll pull out all the stops to dissolve parliament before she gets the chance.

An old ADSCAM character is back in the news. Globe & Mail;

Industry Canada has frozen federal financing for research projects by an Ontario biotechnology firm pending the outcome of an investigation into the company’s agreement to pay $350,000 in lobbying fees to former Liberal cabinet minister David Dingwall, government sources say.
The move is part of a much broader probe of about 22 high-tech companies that may have hired unregistered lobbyists, or allegedly paid improper contingency fees to lobbyists to help secure federal financing under Ottawa’s controversial Technology Partnerships Canada program.
Bioniche, based in Belleville, Ont., recently admitted to Industry Canada that it agreed in May of 2000 to pay Mr. Dingwall a �success fee� of $350,000, the government sources said.

Adscam? you ask?
David Dingwall was the Public Works Minister who brought in Chuck Guite.
CTV News, Sept 2004;

Controversial bureaucrat Chuck Guite was hand-picked by the Liberal government to overhaul federal advertising policy after the 1995 Quebec referendum, evidence at a public inquiry shows.
A memo tabled Wednesday made it clear Guite was recommended for the job by the office of Dave Dingwall, then federal public works minister. Warren Kinsella, who served as Dingwall’s chief of staff, wrote on Nov. 23, 1995 — less than a month after the referendum — that “recent experience” had shown the need to centralize federal ad strategy.
The same centralized approach should apply to public opinion polling and other communications programs, he said.
Public Works was the logical department to review past practices and put new procedures in place, Kinsella wrote.
“In my view Mr. J. C. Guite … should be assigned to carry out this review on a full- time basis,” he told Ran Quail, the deputy minister at Public Works.
“It is requested that he (Guite) be assigned to a position that will allow him to carry out these tasks.”

Andrew Coyne had this to say about Dingwall’s “testimony” at the Public Accounts Committee in April of 2004;

A minister notorious for his enthusiastic turning of departmental budgets to political ends claims to have had no involvement — none whatever — in what his bureaucrats were up to, on the single most important file in federal politics, during the gravest crisis in our history. Nor, he suggests, did anyone else in Cabinet.
His testimony is contradicted at another point by Allan Cutler, the Public Works whistle-blower who kept detailed notes of what went on at the department in that time.
As PoliticsWatch reports, Cutler testified about a Nov. 17 [1994] meeting between Guite, himself and other members of the contracting group at Public Works.�

“At this meeting, Mr. Guite told us that normal rules and regulations should not apply to advertising,” said Cutler. “He said he would talk to the minister to have them changed.
“A week later, I was informed that myself and two other employees who worked for me would move to Mr. Guite’s section and report to him immediately. At this point in time, Mr. Guite’s responsibilities were expanded to include not only the selection of advertising agencies, but also the negotiation and award of contracts to selected agencies.

A number of bloggers are already following the latest Librano scandal involving Technology Partnerships Canada . “Angry” has been digging into the lobbyist registration database and has a lot more.
Strongworld explains;

This scandal at TPC is starting to look like another Adscam, only bigger. During its existence, TPC put $2.9 billion tax dollars into research & development “loans” to companies. Only about 5% of those “loans” were ever repaid.
Two things about this whole mess need to be thoroughly investigated.

How many Liberal heavyweights like Dingwall and Lalonde improperly received “success fees” for helping companies secure funding from TPC?

How much money was contributed to the Liberal Party of Canada from companies that received TPC funding and also from members of their Boards of Directors?

This comment at Blue Blogging Soapbox summarizes the current state of the investigation;

When you look at what we have so far – 51 companies audited out of 158 and so far they’ve found 15 have paid illegal fees – 29.4%. They still have 15 audits to finish yet out of that 51.
When the contingency fees had been paid, they were paid to unregistered lobbyists or to lobbyists who filed saying that they were not receiving a contingency fee. So far only 2 out of a possible 15 lobbyists have been identified and as far as we know, no action has been taken against the lobbyists.
Even the audits completed so far have been basic in nature. The reports state that they only looked at the six months before the TPC application and the six months following the successful applicaton, as this was the most likely time a fee would be paid. As well, they did not look for any non-monetary compensation.
While we certainly don’t have a ‘smoking gun’ on this one yet – it’s certainly getting close.

I’m run off my feet here for the next couple of days, so I can’t follow this the way I should. I’m going to invite the readers and other bloggers to update or flesh out the details I may have missed.
This thread is restricted to comments directly related to TPC only. If you’ve written something on this emerging scandal, send a trackback, or post your link in the comments.
(update- I’ve changed the timestamp on this post to keep it near the top of the page for a couple of days.)