Tag Archives: Harper

PM Puts Up Hand “Cheque Please!”

Posted on by John Klein

Harper hurried out of the country, and who could blame him? He had angry professional journalists on his tail, asking him questions that have no other true answer than to admit that a crime took place in the Prime Minister’s Office. His old friend Nigel Wright was under the CPC Bus, and Stephen Harper remained at the wheel, driving it over Mike “Loose Lips” Duffy at the same time Wright was hanging onto the front bumper before resigning himself to be chewed under the heavy Harper wheels of staffer sacrifice.

The non-existent Office of Public Prosecutions was busy not at work, not charging Wright with bribing Duffy with $90000 so as to get out of trouble that an audit bearing down on him was about to unleash in greater waves.

A Conservative government would institute an independent office of public prosecutions responsible for investigating criminal activity on Parliament Hill, party Leader Stephen Harper said Wednesday. [Nov. 30, 2005]

“I invite you to look forward to … a bold future where people are held responsible for their actions,” Harper said on the second day of campaigning for the Jan. 23 federal election.

Under current rules, Harper said, politicians have had too much say in how those involved are dealt with and how much money should be repaid.

“Conservatives believe as a basic principle that politicians should not be accountable to other politicians, that government should not be accountable to itself,” he said.

“A new Conservative government will ensure that decisions about criminal prosecution are independent of politicians and independent of politics.”

Government should not be accountable to itself? Hell, he’s done a bang-up job implementing that promise, because not only is this government not accountable to itself, it also escapes scrutiny of the RCMP, Elections Canada, the Head of State, and the professional snoozing media who still dismissively sounds like this:

Um, I’m not sure “comments” can settle a gross ethical and legal violation of Senate rules, unless they were, “I accept responsibility, and I resign in the hope that the Crown prosecutor goes easy on me.”

–
Hat tip to Nathan who liked this part best from 2005:

‘I invite you to look forward to … a bold future where people are held responsible for their actions.’ – Stephen Harper [2005]

DuffyGate Continues #cdnpoli

Posted on by John Klein

This whole Mike Duffy scandal isn’t new, but it is big news now, because further details came to light last week. We learned that Duffy was basically bribed by the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, so an audit wouldn’t continue or look so bad for the Duffster Fraduster senator.

Will the Conservatives survive the month intact? Sixth Estate assumes so, but I’m hoping this straw might finally break a little “Nasty Party” back. The Liberals eventually came down after people assumed they were so corrupt due to Adscam that anything would be better. Well, the Conservatives were anything back then, but now they are the party with the corrupt Senators stealing money from taxpayers because they fudge where they are living on government documents to get cushy, powerful jobs, and hundreds of thousands in expensed perks.
Continue reading →

Harper Understood

Posted on by John Klein

Here’s Stephen Harper giving a description of the Canadian federal political system. It’s obvious that his blubbering since about not understanding something about how the Prime Minister has unchecked power, is a charade. His “coup” talk during the coalition agreement of 2008, was bogus, he knows Parliament selects the Prime Minister, not citizen voters.

Now he’s ordering unpaid checks, and is a political imbalance.

Do you think he knew about Wright’s cheque to Duffy, the Senator “buddy” and “fundraiser” he appointed?

On the surface, you can make a comparison between our political system and yours [America]. We have an executive, we have two legislative houses, and we have a Supreme Court.

However, our executive is the Queen, who doesn’t live here. Her representative is the Governor General, who is an appointed buddy of the Prime Minister.

Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper house, is appointed, also by the Prime Minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers and the like. So the Senate also is not very important in our political system.

And we have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process.

So if you sort of remove three of the four elements, what you see is a system of checks and balances which quickly becomes a system that’s described as unpaid checks and political imbalances.

What we have is the House of Commons. The House of Commons, the bastion of the Prime Minister’s power, the body that selects the Prime Minister, is an elected body. I really emphasize this to you as an American group: It’s not like your House of Representatives. Don’t make that comparison.

What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral college. Imagine if the electoral college which selects your president once every four years were to continue sitting in Washington for the next four years. And imagine its having the same vote on every issue. That is how our political system operates.

In our election last Monday, the Liberal party won a majority of seats. The four opposition parties divided up the rest, with some very, very rough parity.

But the important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every issue. So if you ask me, “What’s the vote going to be on gun control?” or on the budget, we know already.

If any member of these political parties votes differently from his party on a particular issue, well, that will be national headline news. It’s really hard to believe. If any one member votes differently, it will be national headline news. I voted differently at least once from my party, and it was national headline news.

Harper also famously said the following, perhaps partly in jest. Probably he was serious, and hamming it up for the friendly crowd he was trying to flatter.

Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours [America], a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States.

ADDED:

Wright Quits, Wallin & Duffy Half-Quit, May Lashes the PM #cdnpoli

Posted on by John Klein

What dirt does Duffy have on the Prime Minister, that would have had him order his Chief of Staff to cut Mike Duffy a cheque for more than $90,000?

It’s not this video with Duffy and climate change denier Greene-Raine fluffing the Olympics for partisan gain.

Is it this one that has a clue in it? Did the Prime Minister promise a journalist (Duffy) a Senate seat if he helped throw the election? Remember the unconventional airing of the do-overs that Dion did? That was Duffy that determined that damaging display of dialogue.

One question put to me yesterday, was of legitimacy Wallin, Braz Man, and Duffy have for remaining in the Senate at all, after the Prime Minister who put them there has caused or accepted their removal from the Conservative caucus. I would suggest that a Prime Minister who appoints, then fires partisans, to the Senate, calls into question their own legitimacy to govern. As it stands, we’re entering unheard of territory, and so far as I know, there’s nothing written in our Constitution about what to do. We’re writing that unwritten bit of our Constitution now by what we let this rogue Prime Minister get away with.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May said Sunday that, regardless of Wright’s resignation, important questions are still outstanding about why he would have offered his own money to save a floundering Duffy.

“Why would Nigel Wright do something that was so obviously wrong? Intuitively, it would make sense to ask ‘Did the prime minister ask him to do it?’ as opposed to ‘Did the prime minister know he did it?’”
Continue reading →

Rob Ford and Mike Duffy

Posted on by John Klein

Rob Ford, Mayor of Toronto, is alleged to appear in a video of him smoking crack.

Mike Duffy, former Conservative Senator, is now just another failed Senator, sitting as an independent.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Conservatism has gone horribly wrong in Canada. What else connects these two awful men besides their political party? Stephen Harper.

$90000 Favour To Senator Duffy Not a Bribe? #cdnpoli

Posted on by John Klein

“S.17 Senate Conflict Code: “a Senator [shall not] accept… any gift or other benefit… that relate[s] to the Senator’s position”. Oops. Duffy took a $90,000 gift from a ‘friend’.

The Conservative Party of Canada paid more than $40000 to refund money illegally accepted by Peter Penashue’s Conservative campaign. Penashue was defeated in a byelection this week, and is a previously disgraced and resigned Conservative Minister.

I used to respect Mike Duffy, decades ago, when he worked at CTV. That respect took a sharp turn into scorn when he helped torpedo Dion. It took a further nose dive into negative territory when he accepted a Harper appointment to the Senate, and was caught cheating taxpayers for a housing allowance he was not entitled to, and a Senate seat he was not eligible for because his primary residence is in Kanata, not on PEI.

ConCalls: No Robo #RoboCon #cdnpoli

Posted on by John Klein

Good news on the RoboCon front: A team of talented, non-political-party-aligned Canadians is working to notify masses of people of the piles of evidence detailing the largest election fraud scheme in Canadian history.

There are piles of evidence. I’ve collected some of the most important bits here for you to listen to, or look through.

==

“The Conservative Party can say absolutely definitively it has no role in any of this.” – Stephen Harper, PM, in the House of Commons, 2012. Now it’s 2013, and Conservative campaign worker Michael Sona is charged with illegal robocalling.

Guelph was Ground Zero for the 2011 election fraud scandal, where Michael Sona ran official communications based on national campaign direction, and was pitched under the Conservative Campaign Bus (but he stood up and refused to lie down!) when Pierre Poutine was exposed by Postmedia.

“Agreed — we were told in media training at last Saturday’s Campaign Training session exactly that — ALL media must go through the “press secretary” — in our case, Michael [Sona],” Padanyi wrote [in Guelph to fellow Conservatives].

The email exchange also includes a note from Sona urging other campaign insiders to maintain a link with national headquarters.

“I am in National Caucus with the Minister until noon, so I would like until then to be able to see what the PM has to say to us in Cabinet before we submit this article,” Sona wrote.

“The Conservative Party can say absolutely definitively it has no role in any of this.”, said Stephen Harper, the liar.

ConCalls: Gone Since December #RoboCon

Posted on by John Klein

The verdict for the Robocalls Federal Court challenge is still not in, after the judge started deliberating and writing back in December. No rush, I guess. Why hurry when we’ve coped for 2 years already with a probably illegitimate government? They are willing to run a confessed election criminal in Labrador, and promise him a cabinet seat again should voters be stupid enough to vote for Penashue again. Fool them one, shame on the Cons; Fool them twice, it’s from working closely with Elections Canada and a compliant, docile media.

I’m pretty pissed off that it’s nearing the middle of May, and the Cons haven’t lost their six ill-gotten seats being challenged. The sooner that happens, the sooner that corrupt party can start to tear itself apart as the people with still an ounce of shame and honour try to weasel out from under the crashing brand.

==

It’s not easy being a DRO or Poll Clerk, especially when a nefarious party will throw gobs of illegitimate voters your way to clog things up when you’re already having a hard time keeping up. Online voting isn’t the answer, because an abusive and controlling person will use the situation to their advantage by viewing a victim’s vote.

The Audit With a Twist #cdnpoli

Posted on by John Klein

$3.1 Billion is missing according to a damning audit of the Harper Government. Let’s see what political pundits recently have said about audit failure:

Federal government audit ‘severely critical’

- The Star headline

“The independent audit [...] speaks for itself, and we accept its conclusions and recommendations,” said Jan O’Driscoll, spokesperson for the Minister.
[The auditor] called the lack of records “inappropriate for any recipient of public funds.”

- The Star

“I cannot in my lifetime recall such a devastating audit. [...] A stunning indictment.”

- Ian Lee of the Sprott School of Business

“It just seems to be difficult to do the basics, and then that raises red flags [...] for the government,”

- Chuck Strahl

John Ibbitson said that the audit will be a smoking gun for people who those who criticize the [government] system.
Rob Silver said that even if the audit was leaked to discredit [a politician] doesn’t mean that it’s not important, and that it reads like any other audit of a government bureaucracy gone wrong.

Embattled Senator Brazman has an opinion:

“Just because [an audit is published], it does not mean money is well spent,” said Sen. Patrick Brazeau, a controversial and outspoken critic [...]. “Where does the money go? Is it being properly spent . . . and more importantly, is it going to [where there are] needs?” “Accountability is a two-way street.”

The perpetually petulant Levant even gets in on the audit pile-on action: “Audit nightmare: The RCMP, [...] should be meeting with [those involved]“

“If the people involved had Italian names and were from the Montreal construction industry, or French-Canadian names from Montreal ad agencies, [...] there would be resignations and criminal charges flying.”

Wait a moment, there’s a twist. The above quotes are all real, but they seem so unlikely, don’t they? Well, that’s because they are not talking about the Conservatives’ most recent audit failure, they are talking about another recent audit of which they were more critical, over much less unaccounted-for public money. They said these things about much less than 3% of the unaccounted-for $3,100,000,000 Harper has frittered away without proper documentation.

Continue reading →

ConCalls: 701 days, 1 charge, 234 ridings #RoboCon

Posted on by John Klein

It’s been more than 701 days since Elections Canada first became aware of a nation wide malicious robocalling scheme to misdirect non-Conservative voters away from legitimate polling stations for the May 2, 2011 election where Stephen Harper swept to power as a majority government.

RoboCon

I don’t think Michael Sona, who has been charged by Elections Canada, can be fully responsible for the robocalls made in Guelph on behalf of Conservative supporters, nor could he have had sole access to phone numbers used in other parts of the country. I’ve documented the technical reasons behind these beliefs, over the past 13 months.

“Sona is charged under a section of the Act that makes it illegal to “wilfully prevent or endeavour to prevent an elector from voting at an election.”” We won’t know until Sona is served with the papers charging him, but I’d be more satisfied if he were charged for his interference with a special poll that wasn’t set up to code.

Meanwhile, a perversely smug person who did have CIMS access to the phone numbers of Guelph, and a legitimate robocall account at RackNine, and happened to share a browser session with Pierre Poutine, and used the same anonymizing proxy service as Poutine did when making legitimate robocalls that did not show up on the initial campaign return… is going on vacation.

234 ridings are waiting for fair elections. Justice is taking a long nap while criminals gallivant about the country.

Sona’s lawyer, Norm Boxall, issued a statement late Tuesday afternoon.

“Although the charge is disappointing, it represents an opportunity for Mr. Sona to finally address the allegations in a court as opposed to in the media and resolve it permanently,” he said. “I cannot help but comment, that if the government was interested in the public being fully informed and the issue of robocalls being properly addressed, a Full Public Inquiry would be called, rather than a charge laid against a single individual who held a junior position on a single campaign and who clearly lacked the resources and access to the data required to make the robocalls. I am confident the public agrees.”

ADDED:

A statement by Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said the party is pleased the investigation “has progressed to this point.”

“The Conservative Party of Canada ran a clean and ethical campaign and does not tolerate such activity. The party was not involved with these calls and those that were will not play a role in any future campaign.”

Oh really? So, how did Sona gain access to CIMS, DeLorey? And who or what enabled him to remove logs from CIMS to cover his tracks? Lying sacks of dog poo…

–

Be sure to watch Sixth Estate, as he always has interesting insights and research into stories like this one.
Continue reading →