ConCalls: CEAP Adscam 2.0?

The annoying Canadian Economic Action Plan acronym CEAP appears in the latest Conservative phone calling scandal because a company Dean Del Mastro hired, got CEAP money to develop GeoVote. It’s unclear to me at this moment exactly how the economy would be stimulated by a program that identifies voters geographically so a political party that worked with Holinshed could gather support more easily. Is this program Open Source Software that any Canadian can now benefit from in theory? I tried to find GeoVote the other day, and couldn’t find where to download it, so I suspect it’s not OSS.

A Conservative-friendly company received 125000$ of Action Plan money and disappeared? Where’s the GeoVote we paid for? cbc.ca/news/politics/…—
Justin Trudeau, MP (@justinpjtrudeau) June 11, 2012

I don’t know if there’s any evidence Holinshed did, or would work with a party other than one friendly to the federal Conservatives (ie. Harper). What I’ve seen about other voter-identifying companies who work with the CPC, the CPC requires an exclusivity contract. To me, that suggests that giving them money from the taxpayer to promote the Conservatives’ CEAP, for the purpose of identifying voters to make it easier for a political party (the Conservatives for one) to collect donations and support, was a misuse of taxpayer money designed to benefit the Conservatives and not our economy.

At some point Holinshed responded to Kady O’Malley’s article online about them getting CEAP money, but their website is no longer available, so who knows what they said in response?

Am I asking too many questions? Should I stop? I can’t stop though, can I?
Here are five more questions that DDM hasn’t answered. He’s done answering though, for now.

Snow Way That’s Cool

My bad. I put away the snow shovel before June. Sorry Regina.
I saw snowflakes flying in the street lights as I left the Lawson Thursday night.

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As you may have noticed, I’m now an aspiring politician as well as a political blogger. We’ll see how my political blogging insight/baggage/humour serves me in my upcoming race to become a Regina City Councillor. You’re invited to enjoy the show too. If you’re in Regina, I hope you’ll offer to support my campaign too, and help show it’s possible for young people who grew up blogging/facebooking to win political office (despite all of their hilarious hijinks indexed in Google). For instance, did you know I twice sold half eaten sandwiches (the first buyer has already endorsed my campaign, via Twitter)? True story. It’s also true that I can be serious when the time calls for it, so I hope my online personality is taken with a grain of salt if you’ve not met me in person.

If you want the same old Saskboy bloggin’, you’re in the right place. If you want primarily press releases and campaign updates, try my campaign website. A right wing, former SK radio producer sparked an interesting discussion on Twitter the other day about my two accounts. I described them as “channels” so viewers of Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff don’t get too much Regina civic politics.

@tammyrobert It's not like @saskboy could tweet something and not have it known that it was John who said it.—
Ryan Holota (@ryanholota) May 23, 2012

Here’s a handy list of declared candidates for the Regina civic election.

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In important news I’ve not had time yet to blog about, the RoboCon investigation proceeds out of view of the media. As the Etobicoke Centre election nullification demonstrates, EC has been incompetent [paperwork, and enforcing, and not losing it] on at least one front, and appears to take too much time to convict guilty Elections Act violators in other serious circumstances. Four lead investigators will never sift through the 800 serious reports of illegal phone calls made, in time to punish the benefactors and perpetrators of the crimes.

The other Elections Canada investigator whose name has surfaced in connection with the robocalls investigation is Mr. Charbonneau, though he appears to be focused on investigating possible instances of fraudulent phone calls being reported to Elections Canada outside the riding of Guelph, Ont. Based on media reports, Mr. Charbonneau has interviewed people in Thunder Bay, Toronto, and the riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming, Ont.

Once the Elections Canada investigation is complete, the findings would be turned over to Commissioner of Canada Elections William Corbett, who would then decide whether charges should be laid.

Meanwhile, Conservative MP Ted Optiz’s 2011 federal election win last year was declared null and void by an Ontario Superior Court judge on Friday, May 18. Mr. Opitz won the election by 26 votes, but former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj challenged the election result in court over voting irregularities, according to the CBC.

Justice Thomas Lederer set aside 79 ballots in his ruling in Toronto. Mr. Optiz has eight days to appeal, according to the CBC, and if he does, the case could be heard by the Supreme Court by June.

Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives reportedly want the Federal Court to throw out the Council of Canadians’ legal challenge that claims misleading telephone calls were made in the last election in seven ridings, including: Elmwood-Transcona, Man.; Winnipeg Centre, Man.; Don Valley East, Ont.; Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Sask.; Nipissing-Timiskaming, Ont.; Vancouver Island, B.C.; and Yukon.

Will we see the Ontario Tories implicated in a new Robocalls scandal? LaRue says yes. If that happens, it’s interesting to note who the PCs’ current president is, and who he worked for prior to his latest gig organizing for Hudak’s Tories. A bit of homework for you, if you don’t know.

ConCalls: There’s More?

As we near a month since the RoboCon/Robocalls scandal burst onto the blogosphere and main stream media in a big way, there are no signs of it fading. When the breadth of the scandal is known to more Canadians, it will result in a change of government, I’m sure of that.

For some reason unknown to this point, serious violations of the Elections Act all over the country were minimized, ignored, dismissed, and forgotten by most people and the authorities entrusted to uphold the crucial machinery of our democracy. A select few journalists and bloggers have helped keep this scandal under the spotlight like it deserves, and I’m certain Pierre Poutine may be but a minor supporting character in the mess. He’s only made famous by his ridiculous alias, and for being the first to draw attention of investigators.

As you can see from any of the lists built by political parties, news sites, and bloggers, there was widespread fraud, voter harassment, and misdirection, all highly illegal acts during an election. The media goes nuts when signs are knocked down, or pamphlets are stolen, and neither of those prevents people from going to their poll. Why isn’t the media “flipping shit”?

Take a look at this list of crimes in [Toronto,] Ontario. To put it bluntly, this is the sort of crap that I never expected to see in Canada, in my lifetime. It’s profoundly disturbing, since it shows how impotent our authorities really are to protect us from corrupt political parties. An inquiry is certainly required, if not a whole lot more. I don’t expect heaven to help us, but what else can when men and women have failed so spectacularly?

Toronto and Ottawa

From Church St. looking northish.

View from our hotel room. We paid a little extra over the Hotwire price to get this room, but it was worth it.

Security blanket Harper

I can’t have this photo, it’s a library.

Saskatchewan in Parliament

Harper in photos in Parliament

Elizabeth May’s seat in Parliament. It’s number 309.

Most times I remember being here, it rained.

DJ Six

Wedding and Honeymoon

The weather was perfect on July 2nd, just like I told people it would be. It was less perfect today, but still awesome. The hail stones that were half the size of golf balls were problematic, at least one hitting my car in an apparently non-damaging way.

Now April and I head off into our new married life together, starting today with a flight to Ontario. We’ll see family, friends, bloggers (who are bound to become friends) and many sights.

Want to do the math?

More than 1 million new fridges could be delivered to people in Ontario for $1B.
Would that conserve the same amount of power that’s being re-built with a cost overrun of $2B? Possibly not, but you’d certainly see reduced energy use, and more people can make, and deliver, and recycle fridges than they can find jobs rebuilding a nuclear power plant.

Here are some estimates on how much energy (electricity plus other sources) a typical home uses.

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And if you’re living in the United States and have lost your job, it may be uncomfortable to know that very rich people would like to burn your house down. I never before understood what Grapes of Wrath was about; I haven’t read it yet.

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I wonder if ducks ever landed on the now famous tailing ponds in Hungary?

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It’s always a good time to point out the bald-faced hypocrisy that comes from Harper’s Conservatives. Remember this link the next time you hear a Conservative talking about a coalition government as if it’s a “coup”.

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I’m going to send this link to my friend who lost her iPhone in a field. Now she has an Android.

Ending Free Speech

Ontario prosecutors are working hard to make sure your right to free speech will be taken back, one person (or 100) at a time. You weren’t using it anyway, apparently. They’ll get to you eventually, be patient.

Expensive Reactors

Ontario has gone down the road the Sask Party tried to take Saskatchewan. The result is old nuclear reactors that cost billions of dollars more to refurbish than initially expected. Will Ontario keep throwing good money after bad reactors?

Ontario Turns Back on Home Grown Solar Industry

Ontario was paying more than 80¢/kWh for solar power generated by customers, and now pays less than 59¢/kWh. Imagine you’ve just invested tens of thousands of dollars in solar panels expecting to have them paid off by an approximate date, and now it’s going to take about 20% longer to pay off.

But John Verway of Copperhill Alternate Energy calls the proposed rate change counterproductive.

“Please do not allow a misguided and miscalculated change to destroy the progress so many have made so far,” Verway said Thursday in an open letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty.

“The jobs we have created will be lost and the confidence of manufacturers wanting to establish here will be irreparably damaged,” he said.

Due to the lower installation cost of ground-mounted systems, Mr. Duguid said profit margins under the 80.2-cent payment were in the 25 to 30 per cent range.

“A profit margin in the 10 to 11 per cent range … is what the program was based on,” he said.

It doesn’t matter if the profit margin was high for initial investors, it’s not ethical for the hydro utility to decide what the investors’ profit should be. They were supposedly prepared to pay 80¢, and simply got greedy. The province is letting its reputation be tarnished as a result.
Commenter Myhome wrote this:

Ontario, always thinking of others first.

Ontario signed a $7 billion deal Thursday with a consortium led by South Korean industrial giant Samsung Group and Korea Electric Power Corp. to build 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power.
The $437 million sweetener is in addition to Ontario’s rate guarantee last spring to all new players in the renewable energy sector under its feed-in tariff program, which offers as much as 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour for solar power. [...]
“This throws the whole sector into turmoil,” said David Butters, president of the Association of Power Producers of Ontario, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper reports. “Now we’ve got two classes of people: Samsung, and those who are left behind.” …