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“Truth, truth everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”

In these turbulent political times for Canadians, it is all too easy to lose the proverbial forest for the fast-blooming and increasingly impenetrable trees.

Today, after a veritable universal consenus within Canada’s major news media that the Prime Minister had “blown it” in failing to assuage mounting public concerns over not only the initial conduct of a recalcitrant Senator Mike Duffy in allegedly bilking the public coffers of undeserved “housing allowance” claims (to the tune of $90K), but in the “Where’s Waldo” media relations response of the Prime Minister when the shit hit the fan in the press late last week.

Now with his tepid performance before his presumably still loyal Tory caucus on Tuesday following the longest weekend of his majority government’s tenure several thousand kilometres away, our fearless leader has done an abrupt volte-face, eschewing his initial strategy of eschewing reporters’ questions, and choosing, many would suggest, the awkward forum of a public photo op with El Presidente of Peru to finally face the music from Canada.

Too bad, though, about what he actually said, when Mr. Harper broke his silence today in Lima. Because what he actually said, makes no sense whatsoever. At least, not if you compare it to what we were told by his own PMO staff the PM said last week.

“Obviously I’m very sorry … I’m sorry and feel a range of emotions. I’m sorry, frustrated and extremely angry about it,” Mr. Harper offered today, as his Peruvian counterpart stood stoically a few feet across from him on the dais.

The Prime Minister then went on to assert that had he known about the Nigel Wright payment to Senator Duffy a tad earlier than he did–invoking U.S. President Obama’s still fresh excuse in the IRS scandal in Washington, D.C. and claiming he’d read about it in the media like every other Canadian–he would never have approved it in a million years.

Not only that, he would never have allowed it!

The difficulty there is that Mr.Harper’s new-found indignation and moral rectitude over the slimy-looking entente between his late chief-of-staff and the recalcitrant Senator Duffy is squarely at odds with the statement that was issued last week, presumably by Mr. Harper himself, through one of his lesser “spokespersons”, namely, one Carl Vallee.

justinharper

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala (l) greets the Canadian PM in Lima.

This is how he expresses his confidence?

When asked by a feverish media whether in wake of the then fresh disclosures about the secret payment Mr. Wright would be leaving his employ earlier than scheduled, Mr. Vallee replied without a trace of smugness that:

“He has the confidence of the prime minister.”

While LOON‘s senior editorialists and logicians have been struggling hard, they are, alas, still not able to decipher how what was presumably not grounds for losing the Prime Minister’s “confidence” on Sunday, could have morphed into a variation of “had I known, I would have stopped him” barely a week later.

If anyone out there can float a plausible theorem to solve this conundrum, please leave it in the Comments section below.

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Lawyer, lawyer…

As the hackneyed legal adage has it, “never ask a question you don’t know the answer to”.

In the case of our embattled and thoroughly “lawyered up” Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, that should be revised to “never allow a question you don’t have an answer for.”

Case in point—the recent allegation by the CTV national news bureau that UBC law prof Benjamin Perrin and former “top advisor” to the PM on all things criminal law-related and then some, was the same dude who drafted an agreement between (now fallen) Nigel Wright, the PM’s erstwhile chief-of-staff and embattled Senator Mike Duffy (a former CTV national screensaver himself) by which they became ad idem on the transfer of $90,000 from Wright’s private bank account into Duffy’s. The possible mens rea of which was, according to current public speculation, for the purpose of (choose your own catch-phrase):

  • Protecting Canadian taxpayers and eliminating government “red tape”;
  • Heading off a Senate investigation into Duffy’s errant “housing expense” claims totalling the exact same amount;
  • Keeping a surefire media disaster under wraps until the scandal has blown over the Langevin Block yet again;
  • Covering up potentially unlawful conduct on the part of a Senator chosen by the PM himself;
  • All of the above;
  • All of the above, and we don’t even know the half of it at this point…
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UBC law faculty member Ben Perrin (r) has briefed the PMO on everything in the criminal law and public safety bailiwick…and possibly contracts, too.

“He was eating a cannoli…”

Why, those of us without legal pedigree may well ask, would a seasoned legal expert with high-level experience advising the likes of the Tory law-and-order vigilantes on subjects as sordid as human trafficking, prostitution, and organized crime allow himself to be put in the role of consigliere to a Don Harperione version of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot?

As the latest PMO confidante to be implicated in the relentless Senate Scandal, Ben Perrin is, according to the internet website that brandishes his c.v., a “senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute for Public Policy…(who) recently returned from a leave of absence in Ottawa where he served as special advisor and legal counsel to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and was lead policy advisor on all matters related to the Department of Justice, Public Safety Canada (including the RCMP, Canada Border Services Agency, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Correctional Service of Canada, and Parole Board of Canada), and Citizenship and Immigration Canada.”

But there’s more:

“Professor Perrin is an internationally recognized researcher and advocate for victims of crime…Hillary Clinton has called him a “hero”…the Governor General of Canada and victims’ groups have…honoured him for his work to combat human trafficking and child sexual exploitation…(and) Professor Perrin is the recipient of the Wilson-Prichard Award for Community and Professional Service from the University of Toronto, and the Graduate of the Last Decade award from the University of Calgary.”

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But wait, we’re not done yet:

“…Reader’s Digest has profiled him as an “influential Canadian”, and Maclean’s magazine has listed him as one of Canada’s “best and brightest”. Professor Perrin’s book Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking (Penguin, 2010) became a bestseller and was named one of the top books of the year by the Globe and Mail. He is co-editor of Human Trafficking: Exploring the International Nature, Concerns, and Complexities (CRC Press, 2012), and editor of Modern Warfare: Armed Groups, Private Militaries, Humanitarian Organizations and the Law (UBC Press, 2012). He is also the author of numerous law review articles and book chapters, and regularly provides commentary in the media.”

Yikes, Professor! And before anyone can say, well, we all make mistakes, especially where those murky Senate rules and regulations are concerned, check out Ben Perrin’s legal resumé. If nothing else, if the CTV account is true, it would nix any doubts about how much the Professor knew about what he was doing:

Professor Perrin received a Bachelor of Commerce (with distinction) from the University of Calgary in 2001, a Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto in 2005, and a Master of Laws (with honours) from McGill University in 2007. He was called to the Bar in Ontario in 2007 and the Bar in British Columbia in 2010.Prior to joining UBC, Professor Perrin was a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, judicial intern at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, assistant director of the Special Court for Sierra Leone Legal Clinic (which assisted the Trial and Appeals Chambers), senior policy advisor to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, and executive director of a non-governmental organization that combats human trafficking.

All of which may account, though only unsatisfactorily, for Prime Minister Harper’s apparent Rob Fordesque strategic move to make his next official comments about the Duffy boondoggle outside of the inner sanctum of the PMO to the subjegated serfs of the Tory caucus. More tellingly, it explains in part why his dwindling cadre of handlers are already forewarning that he won’t be allowing questions from the media.

One question might be: why does a guy who represents the pro-Tory MLI “think-tank” not see any moral, legal or ethical challenge wading into a matter that potentially involves breaches of the very Rule of Law that our current PM, and the Prof’s erstwhile “client,” never misses–sorry, make that “never used to” miss–an opportunity to lambast the old Liberal Government about ad nauseam during and following the last three federal election campaigns?

For his part, Professor Perrin vehemently denies CTV’s allegation, issuing the following statement the day following the report:

Last night’s CTV story in relation to me, which is based on unattributed sources, is false. I was not consulted on, and did not participate in, Nigel Wright’s decision to write a personal cheque to reimburse Senator Duffy’s expenses. I have never communicated with the Prime Minister on this matter. In all my work, I have been committed to making our country a better place and I hope my record of service speaks for itself.

Have you hugged a thug today? How about a Senator?

And then there’s the interesting coincidental fact that Mr. Harper’s incumbent “tough on crime” public safety minister Vic Toews has regularly cited the same MLI’s ostensibly objective “research studies” to justify, among other controversial big-ticket legislative items, the Harper criminal reform omnibus bill.

One of Professor Perrin’s fellow Fellows at MLI, Scott Newark , is the author of the Institute’s recent February 2013 Stats Can-debunking “study” which purports to establish that contrary to what the “hug-a-thug” federal bean counters and, er, sociologists have been repeatedly telling us for the past decade, the crime rate in Canada is actually going UP, not down! To be sure, no member of the Harper cabinet has touted that study as zealously as Vic Toews.

But while that debate rages on, and Stats Can is further muzzled and undermined by the Harper law and order acolytes, one thing most Canadians have no doubts about is that the crime rate is apparently spiking in some well-heeled quarters of our Nation’s Capital.

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The PM with his 2011 campaign chief Jenni “There’s no Y, just an I” Byrne, now esconced in the PMO inner sanctum.

Stephen Harper’s continuing electile dysfunction

Let’s be blunt. When it comes to the Robocalls voter suppression scandal, Canadians are not buying the “lone gunman” theory.

So when Elections Canada and the chief federal prosecutor laid a solitary, singular Elections Act charge against shitcanned Guelph Tory campaign droid-turned-federal-Tory parliamentary flunkey, Michael Sona, the acerbic pundits here at LOON weren’t the only voices to join the hue and cry of indignant electors screaming “Warren Commission cover-up!” and “Oswald is a patsy!”

For starters, the sporadic dribble of public information that has percolated into the laptops and mobile devices of Canadians since the Robocalls shit first hit the media fan even before the polls closed on Election Day 2011 has been consistent in highlighting the logical if not physical impossibility of one person having had the capacity, prowess, or rank needed to pull off such a large-scale fraud.

Think about it. Thousands of calls programmed to reach voters in the Guelph riding sought by Tory candidate Marty Burke in unison. Sent from a centralized agency in Calgary hired by the Tory campaign and using the same faked pre-recorded “Elections Canada” spokesperson to mislead non-Burke voters into going to a non-existent voting location miles from the genuine article.

Shenanigans orchestrated from well above Mr. Sona’s measly pay grade

And how do we all know it was non-Tory voters who got these calls? Because more than just a handful immediately called federal elections czar Mark Mayrand’s minions to complain about it.

We also know that the federal Tories maintain an expensive and technologically sophisticated computer system acronymically tagged “CIMS” which permits Tory campaign apparatchiks to drill into extensive, detailed and highly personal data caches to determine with Borg-like precision who within any given city, town, or hamlet block is going to vote, who they voted for in previous elections, and who they’ll vote for in the next election.

CIMS, we also know, is under heavy duty security and linked to the highest echelons of the Tory campaign machine in Ottawa. You can’t log in much less manipulate and activate contacts by telephone with individual CIMS-identified non-Tory voters without the clout and attendant authority to do so.

We also have all read the media reports which attended the filing in various Canadian court jurisdictions over the past fourteen months of affidavits from federal elections investigators attesting that they tracedthe CIMS trail back to the same computer “IP” address and determined that it was shared by one Andrew Prescott, a self-avowed Born Again evangelical “Christian Conservative” (he blogs vociferously about same-sex marriage and Islamic designs for world domination) and the elusive false-monikered “Pierre Poutine.

Globe & Mail

Thrown under the campaign bus

The unfortunate Michael Sona, albeit a Tory youth diehard given, by accounts he disputes vehemently, to throwing himself in the path of “illegal” advance polls at the University of Guelph campus during the last federal election, is a low-ranking small fry. His role in the failed Guelph campaign was insignificant, although it did give him one helluva photo op with Stephen Harper.

What was more significant about Sona was the astronomical velocity with which he was shitcanned as an assistant to neophyte Tory backbencher Eve Adams when Robocalls first hit the media fan last year.

The gossip around media watering holes was that Sona was forced to walk the Tory plank at the insistence of none other than the PM’ s campaign manager and now PMO commissar of deceptive appearances, Jenni “There is no Y, only I” Byrne.

One thing that distinguishes Michael Sona as a lone anything is the fact that he has actually appeared in public and actually spoken more than perfunctorily to the media.

Self-serving denials

To be sure, Sona’s public comments have thus far amounted for the most part to a self-serving denial of any complicity in the Guelph Robocalls caper.

But, unlike the aforementioned Andrew Prescott and the other senior 2011 Tory campaign organizers in the precinct, Sona has not “lawyered up” other than to prepare for what he or anyone with an inkling of street-smarts could reasonably expect would result in his being scapegoated and charged.

Now that Mr Sona has been formally and thus far, exclusively blamed, for the political equivalent of a golf caddy’s role in the entire sordid affair, it may simply appear that he is doing what all scapegoats down through history have done without fail. Pointing the finger of blame to the folks further up the chain of command.

stephen and friends

Has Stephen Harper actually started to believe the blanket denials of higher Tory involvement in the Robocalls scandal issued by his head spokesguy, Fred Delorean (r)?

That is, with one important distinction. Unlike the infamous Nixon black ops unit, The Plumbers, who were shrewd enough to remain mute after their arrest for the Watergate burglary, Mr. Sona is one of those rare accused perps who instructs his legal counsel to issue a press statement calling for a full-blown public inquiry into whodunit.

Instead of holding his hand over a flaming candle and avowing eternal lockjaw à la G.Gordon Liddy, Mr. Sona has at least stepped up, something that cannot be said for his erstwhile mentors in the Tory Robocalls containment unit.

Canadians are now left to pray, er, make that, hope that further revelations (sorry, another inadvertent biblical slip) about the continuing Robocalls caper will put the lie to the PMO’s smug but increasingly hollow insistence that Stephen Harper and his 2011 election campaign staff really did play by the rules.

NTSB chief slams Enbridge for “complete breakdown of safety”

In a scathing press statement issued on July 10th, 2012, the head of the federal United States Transportation Safety Board described the response by Enbridge corporation to the 2011 oil pipeline rupture in Michigan as a “failure” and compared the safety and environmental disaster response plan to the Keystone Cops slapstick films of the early silent film era.  In January 2012, LOON posted a feature wiki article on Enbridge’s abysmal environmental safety record, noting that the corporation has nonetheless been the recipient of hundreds of corporate “safety awards” .   For a background post originally posted by LOON in January 2012,  The full text of the NTSB press release is reprinted below.

July 10, 2012

WASHINGTON – Pervasive organizational failures by a pipeline operator along with weak federal regulations led to a pipeline rupture and subsequent oil spill in 2010, the National Transportation Safety Board said today.

On Sunday, July 25, 2010, at about 5:58 p.m., a 30 inch-diameter pipeline (Line 6B) owned and operated by Enbridge Incorporated ruptured and spilled crude oil into an ecologically sensitive area near the Kalamazoo River in Marshall, Mich., for 17 hours until a local utility worker discovered the oil and contacted Enbridge to report the rupture.

The NTSB found that the material failure of the pipeline was the result of multiple small corrosion-fatigue cracks that over time grew in size and linked together, creating a gaping breach in the pipe measuring over 80 inches long.

“This investigation identified a complete breakdown of safety at Enbridge. Their employees performed like Keystone Kops and failed to recognize their pipeline had ruptured and continued to pump crude into the environment,” said NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman. “Despite multiple alarms and a loss of pressure in the pipeline, for more than 17 hours and through three shifts they failed to follow their own shutdown procedures.”

Clean up costs are estimated by Enbridge and the EPA at $800 million and counting, making the Marshall rupture the single most expensive on-shore spill in US history.

Over 840,000 gallons of crude oil – enough to fill 120 tanker trucks – spilled into hundreds of acres of Michigan wetlands, fouling a creek and a river. A Michigan Department of Community Health study concluded that over 300 individuals suffered adverse health effects related to benzene exposure, a toxic component of crude oil.

Line 6B had been scheduled for a routine shutdown at the time of the rupture to accommodate changing delivery schedules. Following the shutdown, operators in the Enbridge control room in Edmonton, Alberta, received multiple alarms indicating a problem with low pressure in the pipeline, which were dismissed as being caused by factors other than a rupture. “Inadequate training of control center personnel” was cited as contributing to the accident.

The investigation found that Enbridge failed to accurately assess the structural integrity of the pipeline, including correctly analyzing cracks that required repair. The NTSB characterized Enbridge’s control room operations, leak detection, and environmental response as deficient, and described the event as an “organizational accident.”

Following the first alarm, Enbridge controllers restarted Line 6B twice, pumping an additional 683,000 gallons of crude oil, or 81 percent of the total amount spilled, through the ruptured pipeline. The NTSB determined that if Enbridge’s own procedures had been followed during the initial phases of the accident, the magnitude of the spill would have been significantly reduced. Further, the NTSB attributed systemic flaws in operational decision-making to a “culture of deviance,” which concluded that personnel had a developed an operating culture in which not adhering to approved procedures and protocols was normalized.

The NTSB also cited the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s weak regulations regarding pipeline assessment and repair criteria as well as a cursory review of Enbridge’s oil spill response plan as contributing to the magnitude of the accident.

The investigation revealed that the cracks in Line 6B that ultimately ruptured were detected by Enbridge in 2005 but were not repaired. A further examination of records revealed that Enbridge’s crack assessment process was inadequate, increasing the risk of a rupture.

“This accident is a wake-up call to the industry, the regulator, and the public. Enbridge knew for years that this section of the pipeline was vulnerable yet they didn’t act on that information,” said Chairman Hersman. “Likewise, for the regulator to delegate too much authority to the regulated to assess their own system risks and correct them is tantamount to the fox guarding the hen house. Regulators need regulations and practices with teeth, and the resources to enable them to take corrective action before a spill. Not just after.”

As a result of the investigation, the NTSB reiterated one recommendation to PHMSA and issued 17 new safety recommendations to the Department of the Transportation, PHMSA, Enbridge Incorporated, the American Petroleum Institute, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the National Emergency Number Association.

A synopsis of the NTSB report, including the probable cause, findings, and a complete list of the safety recommendations, is available at http://go.usa.gov/wsO. The full report will be available on the website in several weeks.

NTSB Media Contact, Office of Public Affairs

_____________________________________

Excerpt from LOON‘s January 2012 post, When it comes to pipeline spills, Enbridge is outstanding in the field:

“And the award for ‘Most Ironic Award Recipient for Environmental Sensitivity’ goes to…”

Ironically, as noted on its own website, Enbridge has suffered no shortage of industry and other awards and accolades in a variety of categories including “green-friendly” ones, including: ”many CSR-related awards and recognition in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Criteria such as financial health; environmental performance; workplace health, safety and fairness; community relations; and public disclosure were considered in the following awards:

  • 100 Most Trustworthy Companies (Enbridge Energy Partners), 2010.
  • Alberta’s Top Employers, 2008, 2009, 2010.
  • Alberta’s Most Respected Corporations (Alberta Venture) — Financial Performance, 2010.
  • Best Utility-Scale Project in North America, (Sarnia Solar Project), 2010.
  • Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures (Waterstone Human Capital), 2009.
  • Canada’s Greenest Employers, 2010.
  • Canada’s Top 100 Employers, 2008, 2009, 2010.
  • City of Toronto Environmental Award of Excellence (Green Toronto Awards),
  • Conference Board of Canada Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index, 2008.
  • Corporate Knights Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada, 2008, 2009, 2010.
  • Corporate Knights Global 100 list - Most Sustainable Large Corporations in World, 2010.
  • Dow Jones Sustainability Index (North America), 2008, 2009, 2010.
  • EnerQuality Corporation Award of Excellence, Industry Partner of the Year, 2008,
  • Financial Post’s Ten Best Companies to Work For, 2010.
  • Forbes.com Most Trustworthy Companies, 2009, for accounting and governance practices.
  • Fortune magazine’s Most Admired Companies, 2008 and 2009.
  • FTSE4Good Index. The Financial Times (and London) Stock Exchange (FTSE) .
  • Gold Champion Level Reporter (Canadian Standards Association, 2008, 2009).
  • Governance Metrics International, 2008.
  • Houston Chronicle 100, 2008.
  • Human Resources Institute of Alberta, Alberta’s Top Employers, 2008 and 2009.
  • Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Aboriginal Relations — Best Practice Award of Distinction, 2008
  • Intranet Design Annual 2010: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets, 2010.
  • Jantzi-Sustainalytics 50 Most Responsible Corporations in Canada, 2008, 2010. Natural Gas STAR for Continuing Excellence,(U.S. E.P.A.), 2009.
  • Natural Gas STAR International Partner of the Year Award,  2009.
  • Outstanding Corporate and Employee Campaign Award 2010.
  • Pollution Probe’s Annual Clean Air Commute, 2008.
  • Toronto Star, “Greenest Companies in Canada,” 2009,
  • Canadian Energy Pipeline Association Safety Awards, 2008, 2009.
  • National Safety Council MillionWork Hours Award (Liquids Pipelines).
  • National Safety Council Occupational Excellence Achievement Award 2008.
  • National Safety Council Perfect Record Award (Liquids Pipelines) 2009.
  • Wisconsin Safety Council (WSC) Awards for safety performance in 2009
  • Work Safe Alberta 2008 Best Safety Performer Award, 2008.

Henry Rollins at the Dominion-Chalmers church in Ottawa, Canada (photo: WB)

Lost in the supermarket

By now, Henry Rollins is already hundreds of miles out of Ottawa and on his way to his next Canadian tour appearance. But last night he spoke to an audience of a few hundred at the Dominion-Chalmers United Church for no less than two and three-quarter hours.

An avowed “work slut”—he doesn’t care for ‘down time’—the 51-year-old “spoken word” performer (uh, he talks with his mouth) from Washington, D.C. covers a lot of “real estate” in a short time both in touring and his on-stage material.

Since the Canadian leg of that global roadshow started earlier this month, Rollins has already criss-crossed a substantial part of our country in his “Bon Jovi- mobile,” a pastime he swears is essential to avoiding the certain depression of staying at home for too long and being impelled to lose his way in a grocery store.

“Henry will speak for about two and a half to three hours…”

The more sedentary (and older) members of last night’s audience who recall Rollins from his Black Flag punk days—an era he variously dated as “1857” or “the Bronze Age” throughout his performance—may be wont to describe his gigs as more of a marathon affair than concert.

As the no-frills promoter from Spectra Sonic announced at the top of the evening, “Henry will speak for between two and a half and three hours.” “Oh, yeah,” he added before leaving the stage, “look for us on Facebook and Twitter and all that crap…” Yup, it was definitely shaping up to be a rare triumph of substance over style.

So the lineups in the tiny church washrooms formed right away and there was a run on the bottled water at the “box office”. And we knew we were in for a very long haul of 1970s Bruce Springsteen time-space proportions.

Rollins was, as they say, hip to that from the very start. When he first came out on stage, he told us that during his usual pre-concert check he hadn’t bothered to test the comfort properties of the seating, so sure was he just by looking of the torture our sorry asses were going to endure.

It’s not like you need to train for a Henry Rollins show but you really can’t watch this man perform without exercising your mind and body over the long haul. Rollins is not your typical “standup” performer.

Fear of a Blank Planet

He speaks sincerely and with intent and with compressed energy that he tells his audiences is borne from a deep fear of his audience’s reaction–an enduring pre-show dread that outsizes any sense of reassurance and satisfaction by a factor of five-to-one.

So how can you not pay close attention?

You have to because Henry Rollins implores you to with his riveting commitment to doing exactly what you are watching before your own eyes—him standing there in front of you, talking to you, reflecting, recounting, extrapolating, riffing, orating, and being funny and serious not always in equal measures.

During his three-hour performance, Rollins is a complete study in concentration—no mugging or hackneyed stagecraft. No timed pauses for sips from a water bottle or draft glass.

Once positioned at centre stage with the microphone in his left hand, gripping it to the hilt, holding it unwaveringly at chin level, his right arm slightly bent at the elbow, right hand raised with palm open, he doesn’t move far off the mark.  Knees bent, feet slightly apart—reverting from time to to time to this, his own version of the Namaste position. He is yours. He will not let you go and so you stay there and listen.

Transformed and informed by punk

Rollins’ Ottawa performance was an intense, geo-politically meandering and seamless narrative rap about American society, continuing education, the punk rock principles that inform his world view, teenage angst, Haiti, vaginas, Joey Shithead and DOA, Tibetan repression, technology that home-delivers pizza on hovering plates, 1970s punk bands that should have resisted the urge to stage reunion tours four decades on, North Korean cult-of-the-personality mausoleum etiquette, and his recent adventures as on-camera host of a National Geographic documentary series.

He was funny, intense (you said that twice), in-your-face, poignant, compassionate, eloquent, blunt, and unsparing with his honesty. His prowess as a raconteur is undeniable.

Although he seems at times as if his thread has been lost or tangled or mired in an infinite regression of Odyssean proportions as he describes past events from his admittedly chequered life and travels, what he is actually doing is layering an intricate psychic template of an event with enough spiritual and sensory details as are necessary to get you as close to the real deal as possible.

Venomous snakes

So you are with him in a raucous Manhattan punk venue in the 1980s when a behemoth mutant bigfoot stage-diving fan hurls himself from a vaunted stage next to Rollins and his Black Flag mates onto a “human bullseye”—a petite female fan who “didn’t get the memo”, as Rollins puts it, soon enough to evack from the abandoned (but for her) club dancefloor that is about to become a ground zero of “atomized” fan matter.

Then you’re part of his NatGeo crew at a venomous snake-infested Pentecostal church service in Kentucky where the preacher segues from spoken word into grabbing a Les Paul gold-top and commences to laying down electric blues licks that summon up a kickass rhythm section soon followed by the eruption of venomous snake-wielding congregation members babbling in tongues and praising God.

And you’re even alone with him in his Bon Jovi-mobile portable crib, fighting back fatigue and jet lag, bothering to answer e-mails from solitary people asking him for answers to daunting questions.  Rollins  feels a responsibility to send back responses and does. Because he tells us that that is what his punk experience has taught him.

And it’s very humbling to hear about his humility and humanity and he puts it out there whether it makes you feel comfortable or, like one of his e-mail correspondents, inclined to pull back and retreat from his unrelenting candour.

Getting what you see

Henry Rollins is nothing if not someone who cares deeply about the world he lives in, the world he is crucially mindful that he shares with you.

So he periodically warns against the “traps” that divide those in authority from the rest of us—sexism, racism, homophobia–and so when Rollins speaks in the first person plural, he doesn’t come up sounding fake or presumptuous. You are getting what you see and seeing what you get.

In an age of instant-everything, where more and more artists either don’t really care or bother to get their audiences to give their brains a workout, Henry Rollins makes a difference.

henryrollins.com

Long March Tour rolls across the globe

Henry Rollins has been a communicator in just about every medium there is going for well longer than most people’s diminishing recent memory. In a fleeting half-century, Rollins has worked as band roadie, a spoken word artist who created his own record label and inspired tons of others, a writer and journalist, film and television dramatic actor, musician, standup performer, “social activist,” and radio host and interviewer sans pareil.

Last week the Henry Rollins Long March Tour blazed a trial across most of Western Canada (including a gig in the Yukon) that will ricochet back through venues in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes before heading across the ocean to Europe. This Wednesday night in Ottawa, Rollins will be appearing at the Dominion-Chalmers church auditorium at 355 Cooper Street at 8:00 p.m. You can buy tickets online at TicketWeb and even print ‘em up yourself.

Most of what you may need to know about what Henry Rollins is up to right now is also accessible through his official website: henryrollins.com so we won’t waste your time mining his Wikipedia entry and paraphrasing it (any more than we have already done). Suffice it to say that Henry Rollins likes to communicate with people and his permanent record attests to his talents in that department.

Henry answers the call of the LOON

That said, as part of LOON’s tireless commitment to bring a fresh and independent breath of fresh air to what the conventional mainstream media and “blogsphere” has to say on the important events and engaging personalities of our epoch, we took full advantage of one of Rollins’ ‘preferred’ means of communication–the e-mail interview–to ask him the following question:

LOON: In his “keynote” speech to the SXSW music gathering in Austin this year, Bruce Springsteen referred to rock critic (and later musician) Lester Bangs’ comment in 1977 that:

“Elvis was probably the last thing we were all going to agree on, Public Enemy not counting. From here on in, you would have your heroes and I would have mine. The center of your world may be Iggy Pop, or Joni Mitchell or maybe Dylan. Mine might be KISS, or Pearl Jam, but we would never see eye-to-eye again and be brought together by one music again. And his final quote in the article was, “So, instead of saying goodbye to Elvis, I’m gonna say goodbye to you.” …And while that’s been proven a thousand times over, still here we are in a town with thousands of bands, each with a style, and a philosophy and a song of their own. And I think the best of them believe that they have the power to turn Lester’s prophecy inside out and to beat his odds.”

So LOON‘s question to you is:

Do you think that the world today is too fragmented and people too caught up in their own separate worlds–be they music or art or sports or politics or social networks–to be brought together to overcome and solve the really serious problems facing all of us?

I do. I think it is human nature to divide and dominate, separate and discriminate. The primary lines of division are financial. Others are determined by race, religion, etc. Music can provide a unique crossover, where people who do no agree on many thing but they might both like a certain band. I think however that bond wears thin very quickly and that music is not, nor has it ever been as powerful or unifying as it has been said to be. Songs can’t stop wars and Bruce Springsteen’s awesome abilities pale when compared to those of DynCorp.

Henry

Far be it for LOON to hog the microphone for the “follow-up” questions or comments that Henry’s answer to that particularly framed question may elicit. The point is that if you want to give your brain and body a workout, check out the Henry Rollins Long March Tour when it visits a locale near you.

(Clockwise from upper left) smeared U.S. presidential candidate, John Kerry; screen capture from 2011 Tory attack ad; ad panel for Mercury Public Affairs LLC; Patrick Muttart at play in Hong Kong; faked Sun News photo, and “Iggy’s War” feature in Sun newspapers;

A political “whiz kid” falls from grace

A week before the Conservative Party of Canada may or may not have stolen the May 2nd, 2011 federal election that brought Stephen Harper back to power with a majority government, he fired his former talented deputy chief of staff, Patrick Muttart, because of the latter’s alleged involvement in political dirty tricks.

Like countless others In April of 2011, Patrick Muttart had been working “on contract” in Ottawa for the Tory election campaign, back with his former Tory inner circle cronies after leaving Harper’s camp in 2009 to work as a managing director with the mega-U.S. consulting firm Mercury Public Affairs LLC.

Prior to his departure from Ottawa in 2009, Muttart had been a prized member of Harper’s inner circle and variously touted as a (choose one) “whiz kid,” “genius,” “boy wonder”, etc., of Conservative strategists, with the PM’s ear in all important areas of policy, communications and political strategy.

But during the last week of April 2011, things went very wrong very fast for Muttart.

Hot on the heels of publishing an “investigative” news article claiming that Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff had been involved while still a prof at Harvard in “pre-invasion” planning for the 2003 Desert Storm invasion of Iraq by the U.S.-led military “coalition, Quebecor media mogul Pierre-Karl Peladeau ignited his own firestorm.

In an “editorial” published in the Sun papers on April 27th, Peladeau accused Muttart–who was also apparently working “gratis and for free”, as it were, as a media consultant for Peladeau’s fledgling Sun News television channel (a.k.a. Fox News North)–of planting a doctored photograph purportedly showing Ignatieff clad in desert camos and commando regalia, toting a machine gun, and posed with a group of other armed jarheads in front of a military transport chopper.

Faked news photo of Fox News North talk jocks: Corncob Bob, Kory Teneycke, Jaime Watt (actually a former Ontario jail-turned CBC “insider”) , Ezra Levant and Michael Coren

Straight Talk and Hard Knocks

According to Peladeau, the Photoshop®-ped image had been provided by Muttart directly to one of Sun News‘ smarmy vice-presidents and whinging heads, Kory Teynacke, himself a former Harper inner circle dweller, who had also left public service a short while earlier for the greener (presumably, because of the high fertilizer content) pastures of Sun/Fox News North. By inference, the faked Iggy pic may have been offered as further grist for the “Ignatieff is a closet warlord” angle being touted in the Sun print media’s “Iggy’s war” report.

Invoking the time-worn (Time-Warner?) cliché that “In war, the first casualty is the truth,” Peladeau’s indignant rant-atorial against Muttart pulled few punches:

Three weeks agoKory Teneycke, was contacted by the former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper, Patrick Muttart. He claimed to be in possession of a report prepared by a “U.S. source”, outlining the activities and whereabouts of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in the weeks and months leading to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The report suggested that rather than being an observer from the sidelines, as he wrote in a New York Timesop-ed piece after he entered Canadian politics, Ignatieff was in fact on the front lines and on the ground at a forward operating base in Kuwait, assisting U.S. State Department and American military officials in their strategy sessions. Muttart also provided a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002….It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff’s campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News.

The bogus image, Peladeau accused, was intended to falsely portray Iggy in a decidedly (make that, ridiculously) pro-military posture simultaneously to then Liberal PM Jean Chretien’s outspoken opposition to Canadian military participation in the U.S.-led “coalition” that invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein.

To use the parlance of U.S. political strategists, Muttart’s conveying of the faked Iggy photo to Sun News was a failed attempt at “swift-boating” Liberal leader Ignatieff. The term derives from a group of Republican-subsidized Vietnam war veterans who, using similar methods of influencing public opinion, succeeded in scuttling Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s 2004 bid for the White House by questioning his courage and leadership as a swift-boat commander during the Vietnam war.

Image from 2004 John Kerry “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attack ad (l) masterminded by Terry A. Nelson (r), Patrick Muttart’s former colleague at Mercury Public Affairs in the company’s “U.S.-Canada” section (LinkedIn photo)

American-style attack ads from those wonderful folks at Mercury Public Affairs LLC

Like the Kerry swift-boat campaign, Muttart hoped to sway strategically important undecided voters in the impending 2011 election away from the Liberal brand and towards the more “trustworthy” Stephen Harper camp. And it was not merely coincidental that one of Muttart’s direct superiors at Mercury Public Affairs LLC was none other than Terry Nelson, the political strategist who devised the first of the highly effective television ads for the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign that killed John Kerry’s presidential bid in action.

Unfortunately for Muttart, the backlash to the Canadian version of this dirty trick template was, er, swift.

Abandoning his putative image as an egghead with a stick up his ass, Michael Ignatieff aptly described the affair as “bizzaro” and did his best to stake out the moral high ground, at least before green lighting Liberal attack ads later on in the campaign.

For its part, the Conservative Party was still said by some in the news media to be internally divided about the ethical propriety of the stunt. According to the Toronto Star, “rattled Conservative insiders…said Muttart…was treated badly by both the party and the Sun” while “some blamed national campaign chair Guy Giorno…believed (by some) to be the force behind Harper’s decision to let Muttart go now.”

Undoubteldy, Muttart had been exposed and vilified by his corporate overseers at Quebecor Media, despite having been enlisted by Peladeau to act as an advisor and consultant on the new channel’s ‘branding’ and production values. It was Muttart who was responsible for importing and adopting the 2008 McCain-Palin slogan of “Straight Talk” into Sun News‘ new tag line of “Straight Talk and Hard News”.

Not surprisingly, the erstwhile “boy wonder” was recalcitrant. According to the Toronto Star, “sources close to him said he is ‘furious’ at having been cavalierly tossed aside by the Harper campaign.” Another more forthright but nevertheless anonymous Tory campaign spokesperson “denied Muttart had behaved improperly in forwarding the information and dubious photo to Sun Media.”

Oddly enough, later on the same day that Peladeau published his “j’accuse” editorial against Muttart, Mercury Public Affairs issued its own media statement denouncing Sun News–its client–and defending its employee to the proverbial hilt. Describing Peladeau’s accusations as “bizarre” and “disappointing,” the Mercury spin-meisters went on to sing Muttart’s praises as contributor to everything from the Sun channel’s logo to its aforementioned “Straight Talk and Hard News” “framing language.”

The faked Iggy’s War photo was apparently only “discovered” when Sun News’ Kory Teynacke asked for a version with higher resolution…

Mercurial equivocation: “To be fair, Pat never actually said it was Iggy…”

But on the issue of Muttart’s involvement with the doctored image of Ignatieff, his Mercury‘s copywriting cohorts did their best to finesse and obfuscate, stating with considerable circumspection that “at no point did Muttart tell Sun Media that he had positively identified Ignatieff in the photo in question” and further that “at no time did Muttart mislead, or intend to mislead Sun Media, in his provision of information to them.”

And so it came to pass that Patrick Muttart was quickly shitcanned and the party announced ostensibly with one unified voice that he would be playing “no further role” in the last four days of Stephen Harper’s 2011 federal election campaign.

But even though he was thrown under the Stephen Harper campaign bus he had once driven, Patrick Muttart’s legacy of value-laden contributions to his leader’s political cause in the 2011 election was not confined to trafficking in ersatz Michael Ignatieff photos.

The multi-talented Muttart was also an expert political “psychographer”, up to snuff on the latest high-tech market research techniques on how to Get Out the Vote (or “GOTV” as it is acronymically coined in the parlance of public affairs consultants and robocallers).

A student and later Jedi-certified course instructor of the dark arts and sciences of political marketing and voter manipulation, Muttart is today touted as an expert on “working class” voting psychology–just the guy you want for those mainly blue-collar electoral “swing districts” that can spell victory or defeat in federal elections.

Indeed, one reason for the evident resentment in some Tory campaign quarters about his unceremonious sacking derives from the prominent and influential role he played in the 2006 campaign and months before the writ for the May 2, 2011 election had even been issued.

Former senior strategist to Dubyah, Karl Rove progressed from campaign office break-ins to outing active CIA agent Valerie Plume as retribution for her husband laying bare the falsity of Bush administration intelligence reports linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Is being called “the Canadian version of Karl Rove” really a compliment?

Barely a year ago, before the intervening spate of cataclysmic political missteps and exposed deceptions by the Harper Government, Majority Edition, Patrick Muttart was lauded as the key political strategist in all of Harperland and hailed as nothing less than a genius in the estimation of political strategists of every stripe, even described as “the Canadian version of Karl Rove, the Bush administration’s key strategist.”

[Note: Rove, who infamously served as George "Dubyah" Bush's chief political strategist until 2008, christened his own career as a right-wing dirty trickster in 1969 when he broke into the office of a political opponent in Illinois, stole the candidate's letterhead and used it to print up and distribute pamphlets promoting a fake rally that promised "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," In 1973, he was about to be investigated by the FBI for allegedly coaching young Republicans in the art of dirty tricksterism when Dubyah's father, head of the GOP, instead elevated Rove to a senior youth position with the Party.]

From his early days as a Reform Party acolyte in the camp of Preston Manning, and founder of that party’s University of Ottawa campus chapter in the early 1990s, Muttart was already committed and active in the cause of right-wing conservativism.

At the tender age of 19, he was vice-president of the Oxford County Reform Party riding in southwestern Ontario which encompassed his home town of Woodstock and mainly rural and agricultural surroundings. A die-hard Manning booster and street-level organizer, Muttart could spout hackneyed Reform talking points like his seasoned mentor: “…we have found the Canadian public has no confidence in the traditional parties”

Repackaging traditional right-wing political themes like “cutting big government and eliminating waste” as bold new ideas, the young conservative’s political vision already extended east to Parliament Hill in the Nation’s Capital.

If elected, he promised student voters, Manning’s Reform Party would not merely cut but eliminate federal government spending on multiculturalism, bilingualism, government advertising and grants to special-interest groups and corporations. “We want to attack the bureaucracy – so much is wasted,” Muttart proclaimed in his salad days.

The PM (l) with National Citizens’ Coalition director and Muttart booster Stephen Taylor (c) and the indefatigable Preston Manning.

As with Manning and Harper, you can take the Reform Party out of the boy….

And Muttart was no less a stalwart in his defence of all things Manning—in January 1992 he sent a letter to the Ottawa Citizen criticizing the newspaper for “singling out” Manning’s “religious convictions” and excluding similar comments about the PC party’s Mulroney and the Liberals’ Chretien:

I have yet to read an article where either Brian Mulroney or Jean Chretien have been questioned about their Catholicism. However, I can just imagine their vague answers to direct questions about their church’s teachings on abortion, the use of contraception, Papal infallibility and homosexuality. Manning has been open and honest about his evangelical faith. Despite intense media scrutiny, he has refused to dilute his most deeply held beliefs. Perhaps this is a good sign that he will stay true to his word on political matters after the next election

Barely two weeks hence, Muttart was the point-man for Manning’s less-than-smooth visit to the University of Ottawa to address a student Reform club rally. Manning was confronted with hecklers who assailed his purported racism and inability to address the audience in French.

But undaunted by Reform party posters defiled by swastikas and threats of physical intimidation against his leader, Muttart hired extra campus security for the event. Two years later, Manning, by then a freshly elected Reform MP from Alberta, hired him as a special assistant.

Former Sun News vice-prez Kory Teynacke (l) and former Ontario jail-turned-CBC News “insider” Jaime Watt of Navigator Ltd.

In with the In Crowd

Like compulsory military service in some countries, right-wing politicos gravitate invariably to private sector consulting firms. Patrick Muttart was no exception, being hired by the infamous Toronto reputation shape-shifters, Navigator Ltd. (his wife, Marni Krebs Muttart keeps Navigator co-founders Robin Sears and Jaime Watt as current Facebook friends.)

Although the details of his subsequent political baptism are less easily traced, media accounts suggest that Muttart “cut his teeth on former provincial cabinet minister (in the Mike Harris regime) Jim Flaherty’s 2002 and 2004 Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership bids.” Through this ascendant period, Muttart consistently described by “colleagues” and political rivals alike as “brilliant” and he is said to have “learned from advertising guru…Watt.”

But skeptics may reasonably doubt the moral nature of that mentorship with Navigator. Watt was himself unceremoniously expelled from the inner power circle of Ontario Tory premier Mike Harris for failing to disclose the little matter of having been convicted of criminal fraud against Oakville business persons and civic figures in 1984.

Serious criminal charges of which Watt, now an “Ottawa Insiders” pundit on the CBC News channel, was convicted and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. A rare exception, perhaps, to what Harris, Watt and others on the right then disparaged (and still do today) as a “soft-on-crime, “hug-a-thug” criminal justice system.

More recently, Navigator launched a “swift boat”-style campaign to rehabilitate the public image of Ontario’s former attorney general Michael Bryant arising from the death of a Toronto bicycle courier during a traffic altercation with Bryant and his wife in September 2009. A steady stream of negative media reports quickly appeared in the local and national media highlighting that the bicyclist had a chequered past including drug and alcohol abuse.

During his tenure with Navigator, Muttart is said to have “proudly displayed” a Ronald Reagan campaign poster in his office and, following, the enactment by Liberal attorney general Michael Bryant of legislation in 2005 banning “vicious” dog breeds in Ontario, Muttart defiantly bought himself a pit-bull.

It was not long at all before Muttart ascended, along with other notable Ontario-based Tory stalwarts like Guy Giorno, Tony Clement, Jim Flaherty and John Baird into the federal political arena. According to journalist and author Lawrence Martin’s account, Muttart fit into well with the top-down, centralized command structure that was favoured in Harperland–“the young Muttart prefers obscurity, declining interviews to one and all…a smart move, given the boss’s penchant for total control, and Mr. Muttart is nothing if not smart.”

Muttart quickly became the “principal architect” of the January 2006 Tory federal election victory that brought Stephen Harper and the Tories to power with a minority government. Thereafter, as Martin recounts, the PM’s newest deputy chief of staff dominated “strategic policy planning, the plan to win a majority, and (had) a big hand in piloting communications strategy”:

That controversial move of the PM’s to reduce reliance on the national media? It was charted by Pat Muttart. The Harper decision to place so much emphasis on five key policy priorities — tax reduction, accountability, health care, crime, child care? It was Mr. Muttart who pressed for it.

Muttart’s wide acclaim as a right-wing political strategist was also attributed to “his passion for tapping into political expertise from outside the country.” In that respect, he meticulously studied and traveled to observe first-hand the political template of Australia’s conservative prime minister John Howard, and was described also as a “keen student” and borrower of winning ideas and election strategies from the camps of U.S. president George W. Bush, Britain’s Tony Blair and Angela Merkel of Germany.

LOON’s Canada includes citizens of many diverse origins, including (top left) U.S. ex-pat, Notre Dame alumni and senior Harper guru Tom Flanagan; and Patrick Muttart’s charming spouse, Marni Krebs Muttart (lower right), also a Yankee and grad of Notre Dame.

“I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A. (oh-oh-oh, oh-yeah!)

Some of us with fond memories of welcoming the odd U.S. “draft dodger” into the Canadian community back in the 1960s and early 1970s will probably always bristle at those “highly effective” but no less repugnant and dishonest Tory attack ads against Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff that preceded and, some even suggested at the time, provoked—the 2011 election. They ran well before the election writ had even been dropped and had all of cyberspace and the media abuzz.

The most notorious featured a grainy black and white, slightly-out-of-focus shot of a geeky, freakish-looking “Iggy” with his hands raised maniacally and contorted freeze-framed visage across which a succession of block-lettered slug-lines foretold of his hidden alien threat.

“Michael Ignatieff is back in Canada,” read the top half of the first chyron panel. Then quickly underneath , a non-too subtle sucker interrogatory: “But can we trust him?

Then the equally brutal follow-up quotes from the Igster’s own Ivy League orifice.

“I love the republic I live in” from a CBC radio interview back in the days of Ignatieff’s distinguished academic career at Harvard University. Followed by too more upper cuts to the low brow: “If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.”

Finally, the tag line that almost certainly galvanized undecided voters against the Liberal leader and gave Harper the narrowest of edges he needed to push through on May 2nd:

“Michael Ignatieff. He didn’t come back for you.”

For sheer impact on voter behaviour, these “American-style” xenophobic Tory attack ads stand up favourably alongside the infamous 1988 Willie Horton revolving-prison door spots that George Bush Sr. and the Republicans used to bludgeon the already floundering presidential campaign of “liberal” Massachusetts Democrat Michael Dukakis.

While they may lack the artistic and directorial grandeur of propagandist Leni Riefenstahl or even Dustin Hoffman’s cineastemanipulator, Stanley Motss in the 1997 Barry Levinson political comedy, Wag the Dog, there is no dispute that they “did the job”. Meaning, they resonated with and swayed the emotions of precisely those undecided Canadian voters that the Conservative Party of Canada needed to manipulate into giving Stephen Harper a majority victory on May 2nd, 2011.

Ironically, these psycho-graphic masterpieces of fear of “The Other”—whether the target is a “fair weather Canadian” like Ignatieff or even Conrad Black, or dependency upon “foreign oil”—originated in the brain of a born and bred Canadian citizen who himself resides with his family and makes his living in the Ùnited States and who, when he has not been an Ottawa insider in the inner circle of Prime Minister Harper, has been hard at work in his adopted home of Chicago, Illinois, as a managing director of one of America’s largest and most influential Republican Party consulting firms.

Sweet Home Chicago

He and his wife, Marni Krebs Muttart (who attended Notre Dame–an elitist” U.S. college that rivals Harvard in the view of Knute Rockne, Ronald Reagan and Tom Flanagan) have purchased a modest $785,000 two-storey, 3,500-square foot home with 4.5 bathrooms in the “toney” Chicago suburban community of Highland Park.

And by “toney,” we of course mean that there are decidedly few non-white skin tones (except for domestic staff) to be seen anywhere in the precinct, which boasts a median annual income of U.S. $ 156,000.00, and counts no more than 1.1 per cent of African-Americans among its residents, and slightly less than 2 per cent Latino citizens.

So the answer to the headline question must be that, far from being banished to obscurity in the Land of Dirty Tricksters, Patrick Muttart not only landed on his feet, but happened to land in the same “foreign country” that his favourite political attack target, Michael Ignatieff, “returned to Canada” from back in 2009, the good old U.S. of Eh?

Which to inquiring minds and political attack ad writers can only give rise to one of several more disturbing questions: Why are the Conservative Party of Canada and prime minister Stephen Harper still relying on the advice and strategic expertise of Mercury Public Affairs and like-minded American “high stakes” political marketeers?

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