Whatever became of Patrick Muttart, the Tory strategist who “swiftboated” Michael Ignatieff?

Posted May 31, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Media
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

(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 ago…Kory 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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Ottawa’s Mike MacDonald is a standup guy…

Posted May 21, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Celebrity Jeopardy, Current Events
Tags: , , , ,

(Clockwise from top left) Rotters’ Club band poster; Mike MacDonald at the Rotters Club mic; at Standup For Comedy; back in Ottawa waiting for a liver donor, May 2012 (Citizen photo); Mike with fan, site of the Rotters Club, Bank and Frank Sts., Ottawa;

Straight Outta Ottawa

Many of us in Otta-fuckin’ wah!! (as Twisted Sister‘s Dee Snyder told us all to pronounce it back in 1985) remember Mike MacDonald as a high school friend, classmate or neighbourhood character, others were first exposed to him when he had the sheer courage and foolhardiness to launch himself as a standup comic in what remains one of the most laugh-challenged regions of the known Universe, Ottawa.

And some us first saw Mike perform standup at the very long defunct and unlicensed Rotters Club, Ottawa’s first “punk club” located in the sumptuous cellar of a Lebanese restaurant at the corner of Bank and Frank Streets.  The kind of venue that at first glance might just as easily have been the site of Eastern Ontario’s first creamed corn wrestling contest or a place where the Satan’s Choice motorcycle gang could  “interrogate” suspected informants.

But back in 1977, the Rotters was the location of a fledgling “alternative” scene–the tables were standard restaurant issue square pedestals with chipped aborite tops, crammed in to a dingy and cramped room with a low ceiling and minimal lighting.  The patrons were mostly suited-up “punklings” trying their best to be angry and not having to make much effort.  At least one-third of the audience was comprised of the musical lineup for the evening.  Chains, leather, the odd Mohawk haircut, and what the Brits used to call “baseball boots” (sneakers) were out in full force.

The clientele were mainly in their teens and early 20s, willing to chain-smoke through the musical-chairs like routine of club-owner Stuart Smith announcing an impending liquor inspectors’ raid over the stage mike followed by the mad scramble of the tiny waitress whipping alcohol off the tables at light speed, followed by a few tense minutes as we all sat in the dark like guests at a dimented surprise party, waiting for the LBCO stormtroopers to exit the premises, whereupon Smith would issue the all-clear only to repeat the same routine twenty minutes later.

The Rotters Club

As the crowd grew restless waiting for The Bureaucrats or The Red Squares or whatever the musical billing had to offer that night, Mike MacDonald had to fill the bill  as the opening act.

Smith, an expat Brit who played and produced music, used the club to showcase local talent and may well have been the staid town’s first punk or “new wave” impressario.  So on came Mike MacDonald to a polite smattering of applause and–something you can only feel in a living-room sized venue like that–the sympathetic cringing of the audience’s laugh muscles as we waited nervously and watched one of our own “local boys” attempt the equivalent of cold fusion in front of a live Bytown crowd.

Mike did a number of bits that were drug-related (let’s say, sixty-five percent) and that drew a lot of laughs.  He also employed what has since been labelled “prop comedy” (probably after successive generations of the genre bled it dry of anything original, e.g. Carrot Top….)

There was no real “spotlight” or any stage lighting of any description.  He just stood up there spiritually “naked” and opened himself up to the possibility of ridicule, heckling, abuse, and worst of all, dead silence.  But he did do it and he did it the way most standup comics do it–all by himself with nobody there to catch him when he fell or pick him up and dust him off and persuade him to keep on going to the next laugh, or gig.

A Standup Guy

Gradually Mike moved on to bigger venues, university clubs, opening for out-of-town acts and eventually he hit “the big time”.  But he could only have gone on to do that by taking that initial plunge back down there in the musty cellar of the Lebanese restaurant in Ottawa’s Centretown neighbourhood.   .

We all know that Mike has been reminded of those “early days” in the past couple of weeks as he is deluged with the love of his hard won fans across Canada and the planet.  To be sure, his rise to fame and success is obviously an inspiration to budding comedians, actors, persons suffering from mental health problems and even gainsayers of the possibility that anything funny could ever be exported from the Nation’s Capital, except the daily CPAC broadcast of Question Period.

Two years ago, Mike was told he had Hepatitis C, likely the result of drug addiction in his youth.  By that point, Mike’s comedy career had already taken a hit after he “went public” about the fact that he suffered from bipolar illness. Ironically, in an industry where psychotherapy jokes abound, there was reluctance to hire a “manic” Mike MacDonald.

Undaunted, he persevered and worked standup as much as he could as his diseased liver gradually deteriorated, leading to a “domino effect” on the rest of his system.

You Can Support Mike MacDonald

By the end of March 2012, Mike was forced to cut short his Blackjack Comedy Tour of a multitude of small-town venues across Canada when he was hospitalized with severe liver and kidney problems.   It was around that time that his liver specialist confirmed that his illness had become life-threatening and that he needed to find a live donor to regenerate the blighted parts of his liver.  He was told in no uncertain terms to stop working and stay close to home.

The web link to the site where you can make a financial contribution to Mike MacDonald is:

http://www.gofundme.com/mikemacdonald

There you can find more information on Mike MacDonald’s illness and about the campaign to help he and his wife offset the costs of overdue debt payments, relocating from California to Ottawa, and his continuing inability to work while he waits for a live liver donor.  You can also make an  online donation by credit card.

Elsewhere there will be a plethora of Mike MacDonald benefit concerts and events across the country, including his hometown, and there are links to those sites both at the abovementioned GoFundMe site as well as at Mike’s personal Facebook page.

Comments: 1 Comment

Meet Marty Burke, the failed Tory candidate who may bring down the Harper Government®

Posted May 20, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Four Legs Dumb Two Legs Dumber, LOON, Media, The Bawdy Politick
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Prime Minister Harper (l) with failed Tory candidate for Guelph, Marty Burke (r)

Man of Letters

As Canadians continue to wait for the results of the Elections Canada investigation into widespread national voter suppression allegations involving 700 complaints in 200 federal electoral districts, an inordinate amount of attention has been focused on the small Ontario community of Guelph, whence the robocalls scandal originated.  And part of that intensified coverage has centred on the Tory candidate who brought the unwelcome glare of media lights to the sleepy burgh in the first place, one Marty Burke who lost the seat to his Liberal opponent by more than six thousand votes.

It would be intriguing and more enticing if Marty Burke were an enigma and prone to the same kind of elusive, Garbo-esque avoidance of the media spotlight as most of his campaign deputies of late.  They have, we are told– in the face of mounting public indignation bordering on rage over the apparent theft by the Conservative Party of Canada of the May 2nd, 2011 federal election–clammed up and gone to ground. Burke we are left to assume from his conspicuous absence since the scandal erupted and widened, has also gone into hiding or is being muzzled.

But while Burke, along with all the other Tory players in the Guelph and Ottawa have “lawyered up” on the instructions of their party’s counsel, Arthur Hamilton–who is nevertheless front and centre in “pro-actively” assisting the Elections Canada investigators dig up evidence–LOON has discovered other almost as entertaining ways of making Burke talk to our readers.

As a serial letter-to-the-editor writer for most of the past decade, it is not that difficult to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of Marty Burke’s mind or to glean his unique and pithy ‘takes’ on the human condition and the big political issues of the day (er, except for the robocalls thing).  In fact, one can scarcely scan a microfilmed or internet edition of the national or local newspapers during that period without tripping over the inimitable editorial stylings of a Marty Burke letter-to-the-editor.

To be succinct, Burke has barely let a month or even two weeks pass by in recent memory without one of his letters appearing in (in order of prevalence) the National Post, the Globe and Mail, or Guelph Mercury.

A cursory inspection of Burke’s publishing history reveals, in fact, that his practice is to send off multiple copies of every letter he writes, as on one notable occasion (see samples below) he apparently scored an editorial “hat trick” by having the same letter appear on the same day in the Post, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

To be sure, even before he donned the mantle of a Conservative Party candidate in the 2011 election, Marty Burke apparently felt himself compelled to blanket the national media with his views on every national issue from the Afghanistan mission (on which he has taken opposing sides over time), the personal hygiene of British rock musician Bob Geldof, abortion (he’s agin it), the UN (he’s both strongly critical and supportive), and the English-language elocution of former Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion.

Marty Burke (l) on the hustings with Guelph campaign apparatchik Michael Sona, (r) the only Tory to be shitcanned in the “robocalls” scandal so far…

No mere ‘loose cannon’ he

But to dismiss Burke as a right-wing crackpot or a loose cannon would do him a disservice.  He is nothing less than the epitome of the “average” or prototypical Harper Government® supporter, and his characteristically cranky, acerbic rants seem to typify the ultra-conservative, frightened, xenophobic, tough-on-crime, anti-abortion, anti-welfare, anti-government sentiments of the aging Boomer demographic that cast ballots for the Tories in the 2011 election.

And unfortunately for Stephen Harper and his anal-retentive information hoarders at Tory headquarters, Marty Burke’s loose cannon is recorded for posterity and for the whole rest of the reasoning population to read (and wince at) at their leisure.  Like the phalanx of born-again ultra-Christian zealots who have turned up under rocks during the Elections Canada investigation into robocalls, Burke is the kind of Tory whose electoral failure has proven more significant than if he had won on May 2nd, 2011.

If that had occurred, we might well be hearing the type of vitriol contained in Burke’s written posts to the Post during parliamentary debates where it would be tougher for the PM and his ilk to keep the lid nailed on.

On Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan  (Kitchener-Waterloo Record,  January 28th, 2004)

  • “Another priceless Canadian soldier dies on a near worthless operation, all in the name of saving face for a useless Liberal government.”

On the appointment of Michaelle Jean as Governor General (Guelph Mercury, August  13th, 2005)

  • “Canada’s reserve of female, visible minority, immigrant, former CBC commentators with odd husbands available to become the governor general has been dangerously depleted to crisis levels…In fact, by my calculations, there are none left.”

On  defending our most important freedom, the right to vote (National Post, January 16th, 2006)

  • We Canadians so often take freedom and democracy for granted. We forget that the only reason we have them is because of the courage of Canadians who died or were willing to die in a foreign land defending our way of life, or trying to extend that way of life to others.  Those who want to honour and respect the courage of Glyn Berry and our injured soldiers should do one thing. Do what they were defending our right to do. Do what they were trying to extend to the people of Afghanistan. Vote next Monday.  God bless our dead and injured.

On Canada’s DART mission after the Haitian earthquake (National Post, December 30th, 2004)

  • Canada’s military has a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to do one thing: respond to disasters.
    When the Liberals triumphantly announced DART a few years ago, it actually seemed like a good idea, but look at what has happened since then. It was not sent to Haiti earlier this year because the Liberals claimed it was too expensive. Now we have the enormous disaster occurring in and around the Bay of Bengal. This time the Liberals say they won’t send DART because none of the shattered countries in that area have requested help. If my neighbour’s house is burning down, I don’t stand there holding a phone but not calling the fire department because he didn’t ask me to call. What has been the Canadian response? To cut a very small cheque to be used by agencies like the Red Cross and to send an airplane filled with empty jerry cans. Empty jerry cans, empty promises. What does DART really stand for? How about Disaster Avoidance Retreat Team

On Bono, the “foul-smelling Bob Geldof” and Paul Martin, “doddering hipster” (National Post, July 4th, 2005)

  • I must give the purportedly foul-mouthed, foul-tempered and foul- smelling Sir Bob Geldof credit for at least having a go at raising awareness of impoverished Africa’s many problems. But what is Canada going to do about it? Not much if you listen to our decidedly un- impoverished prime minister. No, the man who spews gobs of tax money on ill-defined, open- ended fixes for child care and health care says a clear 10-year goal of 0.7% GDP for foreign aid is too ill-defined and open-ended for his liking. No, the doddering hipster who slobbers over every word from one rock star — Bono — blows off the impassioned entreaty of another. I am not sure how much, or where, or exactly what we can do to help Africans, but I know we must do something. Paul Martin’s inaction on that front is mysterious until you remember one simple thing: Africans can’t vote Liberal.

On the London bombings, “flaccid” Liberals and al-Qaeda’s plans to attack Canada (National Post, July 8th, 2005)

  • In light of the bombings in London, readers should remember that last year Canada’s Integrated National Security Assessment Centre issued a report stating that al-Qaeda lists Canada as “the fifth most important Christian country to be targeted, following the U.S., the U.K., Spain and Australia.” The Americans had 9/11. The United Kingdom has these London bombings. Spain had train bombings. Australia had the Bali bombings.  The clock is apparently ticking. Do you believe our government, which has left the military, national police force, border services and immigration system in tatters, is protecting Canadians?  While Paul Martin potters around in la-la land, we are in danger. What will it take for this flaccid Liberal government in Ottawa to wake up to the reality of today’s world? I guess that may unfortunately be answered if the al-Qaeda “to do” list continues.

On “despicable” Liberal attack ads during the 2006 election campaign (National Post, January 19, 2006)

  • Having served 23 years in the military I was horrified to see once more the utter contempt that the Liberals have for our military. Our Armed Forces represent the best this country has to offer. They sign on the dotted line that they are willing to die to protect their fellow Canadians. For the Liberals to suggest that our soldiers and their families are a threat to urban Canadians is one of the most despicable things I have ever heard. Once again, but I hope for the last time, Paul Martin has used the military, the diplomatic tool of last resort, as the political tool of first resort.

On his navy days and having a PM with “the courage to put his arse on the line” (National Post, March 15th, 2006)

  • It’s about bloody time. Canada finally has a prime minister who has the courage to put his arse on the line to demonstrate support for the best we Canadians have to offer the world: our servicemen and servicewoman. As a 23-year military veteran who took part in peacekeeping operations in Lebanon, I feel like a piker compared to what our troops in Afghanistan have faced and will face. Do not doubt the fact that Stephen Harper’s very presence in Kandahar is fraught with peril. This bodes well for our country. From my experience there is only one type of courage. Physical courage leads to moral courage which leads to the easiest courage of all: political courage. From my navy days, the ultimate accolade was to simultaneously hoist two semaphore flags indicating a job well done. Therefore I say Bravo Zulu (well done) to our prime minister and our troops.

On being a former UN peacekeeping observer and nothing in particular (National Post, July 28th, 2006)

  • As a former UN military observer who manned the UN observation post (OP) in Lebanon, I may be able to shed some light on the tragic bombing that took the life of Canadian Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener two days ago. The Khiyam OP is located at the point of a precipice overlooking the Lebanon-Israel border. Approximately 100 yards to the north is the former El-Khiyam prison, one of the most heavily fortified buildings in the former security zone. I suspect it was one of the “Hezbollah static positions in and around our patrol base” referred to by the Major. Tactically, it makes sense for Hezbollah to occupy this site and tactically it makes sense for the Israelis to try to displace them.  What doesn’t tactically make sense is the presence of those peacekeepers two weeks into a conflict of such intensity. As Major Hess-von Kruedener pointed out, the job of a military observer is to observe and report on “violations from both sides without bias.” Hunkered down in the bunker, very little observing will take place.  In the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, similar OPs on the Golan Heights were evacuated as the conflict intensified. War is not a spectator sport, and Prime Minister Harper is correct in asking the definitive question: Why was that OP still manned?

On writing inane, bigoted anti-intellectual rants while watching  Star Trek re-runs  (National Post, Feb. 22, 2007)

  • [Liberal leadership contender Stephane Dion's] poor showing in yet another leadership poll leads to the inevitable comparison for my generation — what do Stephane Dion and Star Trek’s Captain Kirk have in common?  Aside from the obvious — both have Vulcan second-in-commands and they share a staccato delivery of the English language — the answer is precious little. While Kirk attended Star Fleet Academy and whooshed around the universe in a starship, Mr. Dion spent much of his adult life whooshing around the book stacks of various university libraries in Quebec and France. While I am sure this has locked up the librarian vote for him in future elections, librarians don’t usually put a candidate over the top.  It would appear the Liberals have made a crucial mistake; they have chosen a leader who has never led.

On his “military days” and the rule of  law (Globe and Mail, March 17, 2007)

  • Re Supreme Court Upholds Blackout On Early Election-Night Results (March 16): From my military days, I recall my crusty warrant officer (all warrant officers were crusty, for some reason) advising me: “Sir, the golden rule of making rules is don’t make rules you can’t enforce.” Too bad the Supreme Court of Canada isn’t led by a chief warrant officer rather than a chief justice.

On, actually, we’re not really sure, other than “God bless our war dead”… (National Post, April 10, 2007)

  • On the eve of the 90th anniversary of Canada’s greatest military victory, we received news of Canada’s greatest military loss since 1985 in Edmonton, when 10 airmen died in the mid-air collision of two Hercules aircraft. 3,598 Canadians died at Vimy in April, 1917. In total, 116,000 Canadian soldiers have given their lives, starting with the Nile expedition of 1884 to the current Afghanistan campaign of 2007. Statistics right? And as the saying goes, statistics are for losers. These men and women, however, aren’t losers. They are the biggest winners of all. They gave their lives for their fellow man, and I do believe there is a benefit to that.  God bless Canada and God bless our war dead.

On the “little voices” of aborted fetuses (National Post, February 5, 2008)

  • Both sides in the abortion issue generally seem to agree on one significant point– no one wants abortions to happen. That is why it is particularly disturbing that Dr. Garson Romalis gleefully tells us that he “loves his work” and is “privileged” to carry out abortions — with no apparent remorse. To highlight the “personal and professional satisfaction” he derives from his work, he tells us about a medical student he runs into who states: “Dr. Romalis, you won’t remember me, but you did an abortion on me in 1992. I am a second-year medical student now, and if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here now.” Given that Dr. Romalis tells us he has been conducting abortions since 1972, I wonder how many little voices there are out there that could say to him: “If it weren’t for you, I would be here now.”

On did I mention that I served in the military for 23 years? (National Post, February 12, 2008)

  • This headline could and should have been ripped from the front page of a newspaper in the 1980s. I served 23 years in our military and can vouch for the fact that NATO’s dirty little secret is that it always was a multitiered structure in terms of the level of commitment by member nations. In the numerous NATO operations and exercises that I was involved in you could virtually always count on the Americans, the British and ourselves to take on the tough or difficult missions. In some circumstances, other countries came to the fore. The rest, well, not so much. The paternal protection that the United States, by necessity, offered continental Europe throughout the Cold War seems to have lulled them into a Pink Floyd-like “comfortably numb” state of mind. Europe had best snap out of it. As surely as they would have been the first to fall in Warsaw Pact hostilities before its dissolution, they will be the first to fall to the extreme elements of Islamic terrorism. You train like you fight and you fight like you train. We are relearning this lesson again.

On we’re not really sure WTF he is on about in this one… (National Post, February 23, 2008)

  • “We hit the satellite” crowed the Americans on Wednesday. And on the same day, there were reports from around the world that the moon “disappeared.” Hello? Am I the only one capable of putting two and two together? Quite obviously, the Americans blew Earth’s only natural satellite to smithereens to ensure nobody ever finds out about their faked moon landings.

On comparing Stephane Dion to a squeaking  mouse who in the library (National Post, March 29, 2008)

  • “I’m leader and I want discipline” is the latest pathetic squeak to come from library lion Stephane Dion. Oh, Stephane, when will you ever learn? Nobody can demand discipline or respect or love. But keep this up and Liberals may soon demand something of you — resignation.Once again, the left-wing lame-brains have been proven wrong. As the article states: “one of the most comprehensive science reviews in Canadian history, carried out exclusively by Health Canada scientists” has proven again that the leading pesticide in Canada, 2,4-D, “does not pose unacceptable risk to human health or the environment.”

On lawn watering restrictions imposed by Guelph’s “Stalinist” city council  (National Post, June 21, 2008)

  • I live in Guelph. Our beautiful city is not so beautiful these days. You see, our socialist city councillors — well renowned scientists all — recently pronounced that in addition to the usual Stalinist restrictions on lawn watering most of the summer, a total ban on the cosmetic use of pesticides is required. The result? Our marvellous city now looks in part like the post-apocalyptic set of “I am Legend.” Two-foot high weeds on city parks? No problem. Pricey houses surrounded by brown matts of dead grass? Take that, capitalist. Just shut up and fork over $5000-plus a year in property taxes. I am sure this story can be repeated across Ontario and Canada. But, of course, let’s not let scientific fact get in the way. Being a socialist means never having to say you’re sorry.

On being an airline pilot and flying with “Captain Harper” (Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Oct. 9, 2008)

  • I am an airline captain; when we run into turbulence, we follow procedures to minimize the effects, calmly inform the passengers and carry on with the flight.  Similarly, Canada is undergoing financial turbulence. “Captain” Harper is taking steps to minimize the effects of this disruption; he has calmly informed Canadians and is carrying on with governing our country.  It would be entirely inappropriate for either of us to hysterically over-react to circumstance or make rash decisions that defy the laws of flight/economics.  Steady as she goes!

On more unintended irony about election finances (National Post, November 28, 2008)

  • In 2003, Jean Chretien, without debate, forced Canadians to hand over tax money — to the tune of $1.75 per vote per year — directly to political parties. In 2008, Stephen Harper is attempting to correct this disgusting, involuntary subsidy.  Liberal Scott Brison whines that “[Stephen] Harper is putting the boots to his political adversaries.” Au contraire, he is taking the boot out of the face of hard-working taxpayers desperately concerned with paying their own bills rather than those of political parties. Political parties must be self sustaining through their own fundraising efforts. If they are not then they perish — and that’s no loss. After all, if they can’t manage a party successfully, why should we trust them to manage our country?

On “I’ve been everywhere” and how the harmonized sales tax got its name…  (National Post, March 28, 2009)

  • My family lived in Nova Scotia in 1997 when the federal and provincial taxes were combined. At that time it was known as the blended sales tax or — more colloquially as the BS tax. Shortly thereafter the name was changed to the harmonized sales tax –I don’t know why.

On the “hateful and despicable tactics” of immigrants  (National Post, May 13, 2009)

  • In Sri Lanka, refugees like Veena Dhanalakshmi report that the Tamil terrorists are using civilians as human shields. In Canada, the police report that Tamil supporters used their children as human shields during the recent Gardiner Expressway blockade. I believe that Canada’s good nature is being taken advantage of once more. When are we going to put our foot down and insist that immigrants are welcome in our country, but their hatred and despicable tactics are not?

On rights of airline passengers and did I mention that I was an airline pilot, too?  (National Post, May 29, 2009)

  • As an Air Canada captain, I have read with great interest the series of columns this week concerning a potential airline passenger bill of rights. I would like to emphasize a point that I believe is shared by all airline pilots in this country.  A couple of the commentators have mentioned the perceived pressure that flight crews will be under due to the enormous financial penalties that airlines will be obliged to pay should a flight delay occur. Nothing could be further from the truth. The flight operations motto at my airline is: safety, integrity, service. In that order. All the airlines follow similar principles. No pilot I know would compromise flight safety for supposedly better “service” as outlined in a wooly-headed edict.  A couple of examples. The bill requires “aircraft on the tarmac to return to the airport terminal after one hour.” We will not do that if the safety of our passengers could be compromised even slightly — and it could in a multitude of different ways.  The bill also requires “carriers to inform travellers of potential delays within 10 minutes of acquiring information.” Given that airline flying is a very fluid environment, involving complex machines and a well-orchestrated global support system, I could spend all day informing passengers of potential delays which of course would lead to…further delays.  It may be good politics to put out rubbish like Bill C-310, but I assure you it is not good piloting.

On despising Michael Ignatieff  I: for using the 1st person singular more than I do (National Post, June 19, 2009)

  • A long time ago in my military officer training, I remember being told that when things go right “we did it” and when things go wrong “I am responsible.” But in the civilian world, and more pointedly in the political world, Michael Ignatieff seems to be unintentionally indicting himself. Even after a news conference this week — when he reportedly “used the first-person pronoun 100 times” and “in a subsequent five-minute interview … said “I” 30 times” — I get the feeling that he is not taking responsibility for anything. I think the overuse of a self-referencing term like “I” is a dead giveaway displaying his overwhelming pomposity and overweening desire to become prime minister.

On despising Michael Ignatieff  II: again with the Star Trek comparisons  (National Post, June 19, 2009)

  • Mr. Ignatieff’s arrogance is displayed in his weariness with all things we common Canadians (or colonials, as perhaps he regards us) deal with daily. Standing at a podium, staring Vulcan-like into the camera with that rictus grimace, he goes through the motions of trying to show concern for EI reform. All the while, I imagine his mind drifts off to a comfy couch on a BBC set where he is exchanging clever bon mots with England’s tweedy set. Should his parachute jump to the prime minister’s office be unsuccessful, I am sure it will be rapidly followed by another jump to Harvard or Cambridge, where he can sniff contemptuously about those ungrateful Canadians over a glass of sherry.

On Fly Me to The Moon… (National Post, July 21, 2009)

  • Charles Krauthammer is bang on in summarizing our moon exploits with the phrase “we came, we saw, we retreated.” Some people believe mankind never went there. I can’t believe we haven’t returned.

“Earth to egghead”: more ranting at the Nation of Iggy (National Post, September 3, 2009)

  • Once again we are being treated to Liberal leader Michael Indulgent’s latest “Mr. Tough Guy” tirade about how he and he alone will bring about the next election, defeat the Conservatives and save Canada for socialism. What a guy! There is only one problem — it takes three to dance this tango. And there is almost no chance the NDP, the Grits and the separatists will all feel the time is right for an election this fall.  Having been comfortably parachuted into the Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding, then into the Liberal leadership, Mr. Ignatieff now wants to be parachuted into the Prime Minister’s Office.  Earth to Egghead: Canadians don’t want an election now. They don’t want one less than 11 months after the last. They don’t want to spend $300-million to cater to Grit egos and possibly jeopardize our economic recovery.  And they certainly don’t want to be led by a quasi-American popinjay who has stopped by Canada to try his luck as ruler.

On shamelessly sucking-up and a bizarre reference to Archie comics (National Post, November 3, 2009)

  • Hurray for the National Post! Thank heavens my favourite newspaper lives to praise the praiseworthy and torment the tormentworthy. As a subscriber from day one in 1998, I possess the acrylic obelisk containing the first-day front page. I now fully expect a 50th anniversary obelisk to bookend my impressive collection of Archie comics (that Veronica is so snooty!).

On I’m sure I mentioned I was an airline pilot and airline security  (National Post, Dec. 31, 2009)

  • As an airline captain, if I or a member of the crew detects unacceptable or disturbing behaviour by a passenger prior to flight, that passenger will not fly. I’m no gumshoe, but we call that using a “clue” to prevent potential incidents on the airplane.  Similarly, we know that the wicked little man who tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day demonstrated unacceptable behaviour prior to flight to the extent that he was on the so-called flight “watch list.” Pretty good clue. Applying the same principle that we use, he should never have been allowed on that flight.  Some might say that since there are more than 500,000 people worldwide on the watch list, we can’t possibly prevent all everyone listed from flying. Ground them all, I say. A good first step toward increased airline security would be to immediately add the watch list to the no-fly list.  In this day and age, no one has the “right” to fly if there are questions surrounding his behaviour. Commercial flying is a vital part of our global way of life and must be protected. One incident out of 500,000 is already one too many.

On the “anti-Christian bias” in Canada’s House of Commons (National Post, June 2nd, 2010)

  • Re: Why Is It OK To Pick On Christians?, Ezra Levant, June 1.  Incredible. The leader of a political party in Canada, under the cowardly cover of House of Commons immunity, feels he has the right to name political volunteers and state their religious affiliation. What will Gilles Duceppe do next? A listing of all Freemasons in Parliament? All Knights of Columbus in the Commons?  Ezra Levant is right. There does seem to be an anti-Christian attitude prevalent in Canada today. The proof? Mr. Duceppe would never have had the balls to say such a thing in its absence.

More anti-Ignatieff venom (National Post, July 14, 2010)

  • How rude. Count Michael Ignatieff: my nominee for Upper Class Twit of the Year.

Why Canada doesn’t need the approval, “incompetence and waste” of the UN (National Post, October 14th, 2010)

  • Last year I toured the United Nations in New York. Our giddy tour guide breathlessly asked if we could name the only two countries (out of 188 member states) whose financial contributions were paid up in full and on time. Reflexively and correctly I said Canada (Norway I believe was the other). In fact we are the seventh-largest financial contributor to the UN. While our manpower contribution to UN peacekeeping operations has dropped to 50th or so, our ongoing contribution to the UN-sanctioned operations in Afghanistan has been enormous in terms of blood and money–far outstripping almost all other countries.  I worked for the United Nations as a peacekeeper for a year. I can still dine out, and dine well, regaling one and all with stories of the incredible UN incompetence and waste we encountered away from the front lines on that operation. Do we need the approval of such an organization? I think not.

…and even though I was pissed to the gills in an Aussie touch-bar, I empathized… (National Post, Sept. 11th, 2011)

  • I was an Air Canada pilot on layover in Sydney, Australia, on 9/11 (actually 9/12 due to the time difference). Turning on the TV, the headline said two 767s had crashed in New York. Hey, wait a minute, I fly those. The next headline was that an Air Canada flight was missing over the Pacific – the flight we were to take back to Canada. Thankfully, the flight crew merely had trouble getting a position report acknowledged, and landed safely in Australia a couple of hours later.  What was not an overreaction was the measured reponse of the Australian government the events of 9/11. Australian prime minister John Howard (left) was in Washington that day. Within minutes of the tragic events, he went on TV to reassure Australians, before flying back home…Rarely have I been more impressed by the performance of a national leader in time of crisis than I was by Mr. Howard. His actions were instinctive, decisive and resolute. It must be said that this was in shocking contrast to the lethargic, lead-from-the-back approach taken by Jean Chretien in the same circumstance.

On Justin Trudeau, MP (National Post, December 16th, 2011)

  • Like father, like son. Middle-aged Liberal boy wonder Justin Trudeau updates his dad’s parliamentary “fuddle-duddle” with the cutting edge 2011 equivalent “POS” (for polite ears). Ignorant, undisciplined and with no constructive comments to make in our Parliament, he should run for the Liberal leadership. He perfectly embodies what the Liberal Party of Canada now stands for. And Justin, show some respect: Stop wearing jeans in the House of Commons.

On the importance for Canada of the F-35  fighter jet deal (Guelph Mercury, March 31st, 2011)

  • As a former military pilot, present airline pilot, and hopefully the future member of Parliament for Guelph, I feel somewhat qualified to comment on questions surrounding the announcement that Canada will purchase 65 F-35 joint strike fighters to replace our aging CF-18s.  Isn’t it too expensive? First of all the cost is $9 billion not $16 billion. The $7 billion number, which continually gets thrown onto the pile, is a possible figure representing the cost of a 20-year maintenance agreement. Put it this way: if someone walks into a car dealership to buy a car and is quoted an additional number that tallies the cost of insurance, routine maintenance, minor and major repairs over a 20-year life cycle they would rightly freak out. However, this is just the cost of doing business. By including it in the purchase price it grossly distorts the picture. And what would the cost be to continue to fly a somewhat upgraded CF-18 instead? Enormous, but a moot point anyway. The remaining CF-18s have less than seven to10 years of service life left. They need to be replaced…Why would the  Liberals cancel the purchase? Why indeed? Haven’t we seen this before?…Military aircraft procurement is a far less complicated today. Ironically, this is because military aircraft are far more complicated. Fewer manufacturers in fewer countries with the means to develop such aircraft streamline the process. In this case, the F-35 is the best aircraft for the job and the only aircraft for the job. It’s a decision well made.

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LOON EXTRA!! Ontario Superior Court judge orders federal by-election in Toronto riding won by Tory candidate due to voting irregularities

Posted May 18, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Law Law Land, LOON EXTRA!, The Bawdy Politick
Tags: , , , , ,

(left to right) Etobicoke-Centre polling station, Tory MP Opitz getting victory kiss from T.O. deputy mayor, and Ontario superior court judge Tom Lederer (Globe / Toronto Star)

One down, and twenty-four to go…

Mr. Justice Thomas Lederer of the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto has ordered that a by-election be held in the Toronto electoral district of Etobicoke-Centre because of voting irregularities during last year’s May 2nd, 2011 federal election.  The “successful” Tory candidate, Ted Opitz, won the riding over Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the former incumbent Liberal MP,  by a margin of only 26 votes.

The decision is likely to send a tremor through the otherwise smug facade of Tory PM Stephen Harper who has consistently blown off any and all suggestions that voting irregularities, including so-called “robocalls” aimed at suppressing the non-Conservative vote during the 2011 federal election, played a part in his party winning a 24-seat majority over the opposition NDP, Liberal and Bloc Quebecois parties.

The dispute in the Etobicoke-Centre results centred on the complaint by the Liberal incumbent that dozens of votes cast in the closely contested urban riding  were improperly, inaccurately or incorrectly counted.

The losing Liberal incumbent Wrzesnewskyj argued that ballots were cast and counted from persons who were permitted to vote without sufficient credentials (such as being “vouched” by persons whose names were never recorded in accordance with electoral rules)  and by persons who were allowed to vote more than once.

In his 17-page ruling, Justice Lederer meticulously weighed the validity of the disputed ballots on a poll-by-poll basis before concluding that the election results were irreparably corrupted:

This exceeds the plurality of 26. I declare the election null and void as contemplated under s.531(2) of the Canada Elections Act.

As for what was referred to earlier as the conundrum, it should be evident that in deciding these applications, the court walks a thin line in search of a delicate balance.

…On the one hand, people who are qualified to do so should be allowed to vote and to have their votes count. True clerical errors,such as recording the number of ballots cast in the place reserved for the number who were vouched for,do not matter.Some oversights,such as a failure to check off the means by which a voter identified himself or herself, can be accepted, when considered in context of the overall requirements to register. There are irregularities, such as voting in the wrong polling division which, in the absence of any suggestion of double voting, should not impact the result. These should not cause a qualified voter to be disenfranchised.

…On the other hand, there are requirements of the process which are fundamental. We need to be assured that those who vote are qualified to do so.  We need to be confident that those who receive a ballot have been identified as persons who are an the official list of electors or who have registered. If we give up these foundations of our electoral system, we are risking a loss of confidence in our elections and in our government.

If this case can be summarized, in a single observation, it would be that it cannot be good enough to accept that individuals who voted were qualified to do so by registration, in the absence of the registration certificates,in the absence of the poll books recording anyone who registered by vouching and in the absence of the names from the final list of electors. Our system requires more.

The fact of this application demonstrates that our electoral process has the necessary checks and that they can work even where the plurality is as small as 26 votes and the number of impugned ballots is 79. There are places in the world that would wonder that such a result was possible. This is not to say we should be content. This is just one of so many areas where our society is changing more quickly than the ability of our systems to keep up. I repeat an observation made at the outset. This election was conducted by responsible public officials and well-intentioned individuals, who were motivated by nothing less than a desire to do the job properly. What this case represents is an opportunity to learn and for the process to evolve in order to guard against the particular problems that appeared in this case.

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Meet Andrew Prescott, the Conservative Christian Who Shares an IP Address with Pierre Poutine…

Posted May 12, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Four Legs Dumb Two Legs Dumber, The Bawdy Politick, Current Events, LOON EXTRA!, Media, Canadian eh?
Tags: , , , , , ,

Suffer the little Harperites…

Right-wing Christian Zealots and the 2011 Tory Election Campaign

Elections Canada‘s dedicated but underfunded gumshoe, investigator and “public officer”, Al Mathews has been traversing Canada’s hillets and dales in the past twelve months since the Harper Government® cemented the doors on the PMO and proceeded to unveil its blueprint for a Brave New Tory Order in the wake of an ever dodgier-and-dodgier-looking May 2, 2011 federal election “victory”.

While election scandals are often dull and listless matters, the “robocalls” electoral fraud scandal has proven atypically engaging because of Mathews’ periodic reports filed in support of judicial production orders with the Ontario and other provincial courts where his investigation has thus far carried him.

With each fairly regular instalment, Canadians have been treated to a digit-by-digit replication of the electronic and sometimes paper trail that Mathews has been on in pursuit of the elusive Pierre Poutine, the pseudonymous perp who has thus far evaded identification because of his/her use of a “burner” (disposable) cell-phone to carry out his election day voter suppression calls to an electoral district in Guelph, Ontario.

Does The Robocalls Trail Lead to Higher Ground?

But, as they say in the news gathering vernacular (or, used to say), here’s what we (think we) know so far:

According to informations sworn by Mathews and filed with the court in support of his applications for telephone record production orders, the thousands of calls that were sent to misdirect non-Conservative Guelph voters on election day last year by an Alberta-based “robocall” company (RackNine) were initiated by someone using a computer with the same internet address as another RackNine account holder and Tory customer and campaign organizer for local Tory candidate Marty Burke in the 2011 federal election.

That “other” account holder was none other than Mr. Andrew Prescott, a politically savvy and tireless accolyte of his self-proclaimed hero, Prime Minister Stephen Harper (his blog “avatar” is a shot of Prescott next to Harper only hours “before history was made,” or as the event is known to unbelievers, the election of the Harper minority government in 2006) and a campaign apparatchik for the Tory candidate in Guelph, Marty “Letter to the Editor” Burke.

To date, Mr. Prescott has clearly told the media that he used his RackNine account for so-called “legitimate robocalls” on behalf of Mr. Burke’s 2011 campaign and, according to Postmedia news reports, “denies any involvement in the illegal calls.” The self-described “I.T.” specialist was intimately familiar with the sophisticated interfaces that allowed the Tories to use personalized data about individual voters in every riding in the country (stored in the party’s CIMS database) to “get out the vote.”

What is less clear however is why a Conservative Party of Canada campaign functionary in Mr. Prescott’s position would have felt the need to initiate or program his own avowedly “legitimate robocalls” from behind a proxy server (an intermediate computer site or server which masks ef the IP address (and identity) of the source computer user. If one were cynical, one would be tempted to propose a private member’s bill to outlaw masked robocallers during federal elections.

Yet, undeniably, according to news accounts, “both the Poutine and Prescott accounts had used a proxy server in Saskatchewan and the same Rogers IP address in Guelph to connect to RackNine at different times — and on one occasion, within four minutes of each other.” While more recent court documents filed by Mathews now indicate that the Burke campaign headquarters was not the location of the coincidental IP address, it remains a mystery, at least to the public, who the owner of the IP address actually is.

Prescott confidante and another Tory man on a mission, Chris Crawford (l), with God’s Right-Hand Man in Ontario, Tim Hudak (r).

The best that the Mathews investigation has come up with to date is an online trace of the mysterious IP address using an online “whois” website. The results of that query showed, according to Mathews latest affidavit, that the IP address turned over by Rogers under the judicial production order was from somewhere in the Guelph area.

Andrew Prescott, who blogs anonymously under the Blogger account online name of “Christian Conservative,” resides in, and makes his evangelical mission’s work, near Cambridge, Ontario, which is approximately 15 miles from Guelph.

A former Briton who moved to Canada with his parents in the dark ages and was, by his own account, “saved” at the tender age of five–meaning he was converted to his current Christian views–belongs to a vibrant “sect” of Christians known as “The Plymouth Brethren.” So too does his wife Meghan.

According to a recent post in the current affairs blog, Media Culpa, Andrew Prescott, is a Brethren member “who seems to have been similarly exercised about gay marriage.” Indeed, Prescott’s own “pundit” commentaries and discussion threads on the Christian website speak in apocalyptic terms about issues such as same sex marriage and gay rights, such as Prescott’s own comments on the passage of same-sex marriage legislation by the Liberal government of Paul Martin in 2005:

Today, hereby referred to as ‘Black Tuesday’, marks the beginning of the end for Canada as we know it. History shows that as a nation declines morally, its end is near. Let it also be stated that the enacting of this law will result in the imprisonment of Christians within the next few years. As one who may enter Church leadership sometime in the future, and one who may be authorized to perform marriages, this law may end up in my own incarceration. Nevertheless, may God’s will be done.

My Declaration – (to be read at my court hearing at a date yet to be determined)

On this day, ‘Black Tuesday’, June 28, 2005, I, Andrew Prescott, declare that in accordance with God’s Holy Word, the Holy Bible, I do not and will not recognize the validity of same sex marriage.

In accordance with the religious freedoms proclaimed within Bill C-38, it is my right. Prime Minister Paul Martin has indicated that religious freedoms will be protected, and he is to be called as a witness to this fact. Any overturning of this right by any court or tribunal is in direct conflict with the religious freedoms protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

We acknowledge that at a future date, these rights will however be ignored for the ‘greater good’, and let it be known that at every stage of debate, opponents of Bill C-38 warned that the protections for religious freedoms within Bill C-38 were not sufficient.

In other words, we were right. Bill C-38 will in fact be used to target those of faith.

Signed,

Andrew Prescott
‘Black Tuesday’, June 28, 200

“Well, we are well aware that there will one day be such a unity of the globe, but we who study the Bible know that this will only occur during the ‘End Times’, when the dark powers behind the world leaders take final control and proclaim “peace” unto all the earth; when their master, Satan, will in essence be ruling the world. (as fortold by the prophets of the Old Testament, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc, and the New Testament writer John in his ‘Revelation’)

The main question at hand is the role of true born-again Christians in politics. As a background for you, many in our sect of Christianity have in the past felt that we must keep ourselves seperate from the worlds affairs and use our time and resources solely for our King, the Lord Jesus Christ, and seeking to convert the world by preaching His Gospel to all before His glorious return to earth to rule; that will of course be the true ushering in of ‘Peace on Earth’.

Several of us (mostly in the younger generations) have questioned this practice, (of non-involvement in politics) as we see many laws being passed in our home countries that are in direct conflict with the Word of God, the Bible. (in Canada, a law permitting Same-Sex Marriage is about to be passed) Some of us feel that it is partially due to our neglect of politics that these issues that we are faced have arisen.

Of course, some feel (as I do) that the passing of these laws may simply be another sign that the End of Days is almost here, and it should spur us on to proclaim the Truth of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that He alone is the pathway to God, before time is up for the world”.

From left: Prescott’s “new toy”, a 5.4 terabyte SAN (storage area network) used for large-scale data collection, Christian Conservative poses with Christian Conservative on eve of 2006 election, C.C. with Jack Layton , one of few “loonie left” C.C. has a good word for.

Pharmacology as Sorcery

Andrew Prescott’s wife, Meghan, is also an extremely serious religious zealot with strong views about many contemporary political and social issues. Like her husband, Meghan Prescott speaks in the peculiar vernacular of The Brethren, consumed by a sense of distinct calling and evident dedication to the higher campaign.

Yes, I used to smoke, drink, do some soft drugs back in high school, but here’s the thing, I always felt guilty about it. My friends and I corrupted the Scripture by using the “every green herb in the earth I give to you” argument, and we also pervertedly believed that b/c we were the temple of the holy Spirit, we should “feel good” and that the drugs/alcohol was an enhancer of that. However in my heart of hearts/conscience, the Spirit wouldn’t let me get away with thinking that doing stuff that was okay. I lied to myself to allow myself to do that stuff.

The biggest reason why I think pot, hash, and all the other recreational drugs out there are wrong for a Believer to use is because they inhibit a person’s ability to reason fully, and doing these things puts a person into the situation where they certainly cannot be “on guard” “standing firm” “sobre”–and all the other various commands that are similar in the NT.

Also, two instances in Rev. speak of “sorcerers” and the greek words are:

pharmakeus
pharmakon (a drug, that is, spell giving potion); a druggist (“pharmacist”) or poisoner, that is, (by extension) a magician: – sorcerer.

pharmakos
The same as sorcerer.

These words are found in Rev. 21:8 and 22:15. Go ahead and look them up.

The basic point I want to make by bringing in these passages, is that it is obvious that not all drugs are good or approved by God. When Adam and Eve fell in the garden, it was not only humankind that was affected. The very earth itself was corrupted and thus brought forth out of the ground imperfect and even dangerous things. The whole “God created it so it must be okay” argument holds about as much water as a sieve. I’ve never met a dope-head yet who wanted to live to the glory of God.

Now in terms of medical use, I’m pretty well okay with that–proverbs talks about giving wine to those who are perishing (same implications of dulling pain). But recreational drug use–no way. Can you see Jesus and the disciples hot housing it in the upper room? I don’t think so.

“Eunuchs” and Other Deep Thoughts on “Homosexual Marriage”

For Andrew Prescott, the issue that seems to have galvanized his political devotion to Stephen Harper and Jesus Christ is the same-sex marriage debate. In an especially fiery forum posting in July 2005, six months before the federal election that brought his earthly saviour to a minority government in Ottawa, Prescott posted this inspirational message:

…Does God have a problem with gay marriage? Based on what the majority have said here, yes, we think He does….
Sarah, I think the main problem is a difference of opinion, as to whether or not a person is “born gay”. You seem to believe that this is the case… I do not. I believe that as all sin, it is a choice that we make. You did indeed misread my comment earlier… I was referring to those of homosexual orientation who were willingly participating in such an act.I think it comes down to the verse that I stated earlier about eunuchs… there are people who are born who are not attracted to the opposite gender, no argument about that. However, it’s what they then do with that “gift” that is the issue. The world tells them that if they are not attracted to the opposite sex, they must then be gay. Could it simply be that these eunuchs have been sold a lie?

by prescott » Mon Jun 13, 2005 6:30 pm
About Chick tracts and the like… according to present Canadian law, such things, including the Bible, could, if it went before an extremely anti-Christian judge, be defined as “hate literature”.

Because the Bible says that homosexuality is “abomination before God” (Lev 20:13 – “If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.” NKJV) anyone who says such from the platform could, in theory, be prosecuted because the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarentees that no one may be discrimiated against for their “sexual orientation”.

Now, there has only ever been one court case of this nature that I am aware of… a man handed out tracts that were, in my opinion, over the top offensive. He was fined; I think his case is presently under appeal in the courts.

(NOTE: Now, we MUST, as Bible believing Christians, continue to proclaim this as truth, that homosexuality is condemned by God… but we can EASILY do so in love… I’ve been able to witness to a homosexual man on the street, and present the truth, condemning his lifestyle, but not offending him… I heard months later that he was reconsidering his ways, in part due to our converstation)

Hope that clears things up.

Slightly off topic, but good stuff none the less.

On the very question of his activist fusion of Church and State, Prescott has also been prolific in his public rants:

On the one hand, I’m a born again Christian, and on the other, I’m strongly connected to one of the main federal parties here in Canada. (can you guess which one by my photo? LOL)However, I would not consider myself a part of the “Christian Right”, because I’m not seeking to make all the laws “Christian”. As ‘apocryphal’ pointed out, that would only serve to institute a form of legalism, which as we all know from the Bible, God rejects. Trying to do otherwise would be much like what Constantine did in the Roman Empire in 300AD, which lead to the foundation of the “Holy Roman Catholic Church”… a form of holiness on the outside, yet devoid of soul and salvation on the inside.I would like to follow the example of men like Ernest Manning… seek to govern in a Godly way to the benefit of all Canadians, regardless of their beliefs, and on an individual basis seek to change hearts and bring them to a knowledge of their Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Andrew Prescott shares his innermost thoughts with his Plymouth Brethren but also plugs T.O. Mayor Ford’s brother, Doug, on his Conservative Christian blogsite, where he often feels called upon to raise thorny political issues, like “Is Islam Taking Over the World?”

Some Totalitarian Timbits® from the Harperian “Believers”

Here are some other “timbits” of religious pontification from the man many now suspect to be synonymous with Pierre Poutine, the “point-man” for the Conservative Party’s 2011 electoral fraud campaign, popularly known as “the Robocalls scandal”:

by prescott » Sun Jun 26, 2005 10:02 pm
Well, we are well aware that there will one day be such a unity of the globe, but we who study the Bible know that this will only occur during the “End Times”, when the dark powers behind the world leaders take final control and proclaim “peace” unto all the earth; when their master, Satan, will in essence be ruling the world. (as fortold (sic) by the prophets of the Old Testament, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc, and the New Testament writer John in his “Revelation”)

Several of us (mostly in the younger generations) have questioned this practice, (of non-involvement in politics) as we see many laws being passed in our home countries that are in direct conflict with the Word of God, the Bible. (in Canada, a law permitting Same-Sex Marriage is about to be passed) Some of us feel that it is partially due to our neglect of politics that these issues that we are faced have arisen.

Of course, some feel (as I do) that the passing of these laws may simply be another sign that the End of Days is almost here, and it should spur us on to proclaim the Truth of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that He alone is the pathway to God, before time is up for the world.

This brother once heard Bill MacDonald say, “More is accomplished in a prayer closet than a voting booth.”

I agree wholeheartedly with that statement… and I visit the closet far more often than I visit the voting booth. Seriously, I think we as Christians don’t pray for our leaders even CLOSE to enough… and I think we ought to be praying a whole lot about the decision before we ever even think about marking a ballot.

In this vein of thought though, I have a confession of sorts to make… I’ve just been asked today to join the Board of Directors for our local CPC EDA. I look at things this way… I am first and foremost a citizen of Heaven… and an ambassador for Christ. In the meantime, however, until His return, (which I was longing for earlier today while spending time with Him…) I am living in this nation, which grants me certain rights and privilages (sic). I choose to use them in order to try and influence the laws they pass, in an effort to ensure that no (or fewer) ungodly laws are passed.

Thoughts?

I’m of the opinion that as Christians, we should be looking out for our fellow man. I’m involved in politics because I honestly want to see the best platform for the people of Canada get implemented… and I think that my party (“my party” as I’m a card-carrying member, three years next week) has the best set of policies to help out each and every Canadian.

That being said, the only REAL answer to the problems we’re facing in this nation is to turn en-mass to the Lord Jesus Christ… and I acknowledge that I have to get better at proclaiming that agenda.

Alas, Mr. Prescott’s grandiose views about the loving kingdom that is all things associated with Christ, does not extend apparently to a high degree of acceptance for other faiths. On February 27, 2006, he posted the following missive on his Brethren forum encouraging discussion on the issue of whether Muslims were intent on world domination:

Will Islam take over (or try to) the world?
by prescott » Mon Feb 27, 2006 9:00 pm
Mark Steyn, from the Western Standard, wrote an article asking the question of whether Islam will suceed (sic) in taking over the world.

Here’s his article… http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn26.html

I’ve posted some of the debate on my blog… http://canadaconservative.blogspot.com/2006/02/debate-is-islam-taking-over-world.html… but I want to get the discussion going here.

Thoughts anyone? In my opinion, there is a move to take over. All thoughts welcome….The militaristic zealots among the disciples of Mohammed many years ago vowed to take over the world. There is little anyone can do to change their resolve – except pray. It is said that Ishmael is the father of the Arab tribes. If so, it would do well to remember what the Lord hath said:

Genesis 16:11-12 “And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.”

The Arabic disciples of Mohammed claim decendency (sic) from Ishmael. They also claim to have regard for the Hebrew scriptures (which one reasonably doubts). To the extent the seed of Ishmael are mingled with the seed of Esau should give them reason for concern:

Obadiah 1:17-18 “But upon mount Zion shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness; and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.
And the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they shall kindle in them, and devour them; and there shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau; for the LORD hath spoken it.”

But in the Glorious Kingdom of our Lord shall the tribes of Ishmael be a blessing and find grace in His sight:

Isaiah 19:23-25 “In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.”

Jesus Was Against Electoral Fraud

Perhaps the most ironic rant posted by Andrew Prescott (at least, one using his real name and not his “ChristianConservat” Twitter and Blogger moniker, appeared two days before Stephen Harper’s electoral victory on Jan 21, 2006:

How is good is VOTER FRAUD a reason NOT to vote Liberal?

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/003406.html

Small Dead Animals (link above) is reporting that Laurie Hawn, Conservative candidate in Edmonton Centre, has filed a complaint with Elections Canada. HUNDREDS of names of registered voters were found to be registered at post office boxes, self storage yards, truck stops, office buildings (entire familes, no less), etc. AND SOME OF THOSE VOTERS HAVE ALREADY VOTED AT THE ADVANCE POLLS!!! This is the riding of Liberal “Landslide Annie”… has she been hanging on to this riding for YEARS VIA FRAUD???

The Conservative campaign in Edmonton have requested an offical investigation of the results of the 2004 election, and who know’s what’s going to happen with Monday’s results.

http://canadaconservative.blogspot.com/2006/01/possible-voter-fraud-in-edmonton.html

NDP candidate offered bribe to drop out… by Liberals
by prescott » Fri Jan 13, 2006 12:24 pm
You heard me correctly… an NDP candidate in BC was asked to come to a meeting at the local Liberal candidate’s office. There, he was asked to drop out and throw his support behind the Liberal in order to beat the Tory candidate in a close race.

Don’t believe me? Check out the notarized statement written up by his lawyer…

http://www.ccnmatthews.com/docs/npdstat.pdf

Anyone STILL want to support a corrupt party?

For more deep thoughts of Andrew Prescott, former Guelph Conservative Party of Canada campaign worker and acolyte of Stephen Harper and Jesus (though not necessarily in that order), please visit the following web addresses:

http://simplegathering.com/

http://canadaconservative.blogspot.com/2006/02/debate-is-islam-taking-over-world.html…

@ChristianConsrv (Twitter account)

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A LOON SPECIAL “WE TOLD YOU SO” EDITION! How the Harper Government® actually did bail out Canadian banks (despite what they claim)

Posted April 30, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Media

Major organ failure on Canadian bank bail-out

The Canadian media like its global overlords is very much a victim of its own short-term memory and fleeting attention span.  The 24/7 news cycle being what it is, Canadian news consumers are more and more left to blindly trust the major “organs” of our dwindling free press to detect or uncover important events when they first take place.

And when they “miss the boat” completely–as they did in the case of the current day’s digital headlines screaming indignation about a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (which it describes as a “left-leaning think tank”) which alleges that Canadian banks “secretly” “received billions in support during 2008-09 crisis”–it falls to the lesser lights, or, if you will, the proverbial “New Kids on the Block” of citizen journalism to refresh the faded record with some well-deserved choruses of “tell us something we don’t know already!”

Case in point: nearly two years back, on June 6, 2010, LOON ran a blog post about Stephen Harper’s self-hyped global mission to put the boots to U.S. president Obama’s global bank levy proposal that would have seen the leading economic powers pony up a contingency fund to help offset the Next Big bank collapse after the 2008 Wall Street apocalypse.

At the end of that piece, we chided Harper and his finance minister Jim Flaherty for bragging that Canada had “avoided” a huge quadrillion dollar bank bail-out on the order of the Bush administration’s $7 billion handover to the Wall Street kleptoocrats.  In support of that criticism, we alluded to the completely ignored work of one of Ottawa’s other “left-leaning” denizens, University of Ottawa political economist Michel Chossudovsky.

Turns out that Chossudovsky–way back in the summer of 2010–was already calling attention to the failure of just about all of the so-called pundits in our Canadian financial and business media to report on the transfer of a sizable chunk of public moolah to the country’s largest financial institutions in what might have–had it even been noticed, much less reported upon–been described as a “bank bail-out.”

“We join this re-broadcast already in progress…”

…Which is why Harper’s finance minister Gentleman Jim Flaherty was on hand in South Korea yesterday to bathe in the after-glow of the best makeup intercourse that the Canadian conservatives have had with their global Tory confederates since John Diefenbaker took Dwight Eisenhower fishing in 1958.

After being blown off earlier in the itinerary by British stop-gap PM David er….Campbell?…. we know it starts with a “c”…who snubbed Harper’s overtures about ganging up on the bank levy, it was the most political hay they could make out of an otherwise lacklustre sortie.

Apart from giving Harper the old tried and tested opportunity to make like a real world leader and leave his own domestic troubles at home, it also allowed the PM to score domestic points by painting himself as a champion of the “no more taxes” brigade on the home front.

Even before leaving for Korea,  Harper made a big show of saying that–in the words of his canada.com cheering section, at least–”regardless of the outcome on the bank-tax debate…(his) main goal was to ensure that taxpayers, in Canada or elsewhere, will never be on the hook to bail out big banks.”

Econo-clast Chossudovsky: taxpayers already bailed out the banks

If there was less of the unquestioning faith of major Canadian news media in conservative fiscal policy, Canadians might not have gotten left in the fog like players in the 1962 Grey Cup “Fog Bowl”–trying to see where the punts landed.  And as long as we’re misapplying hackneyed sports metaphors, Canada’s news establishment has really fumbled the puck on the “global bank tax”.

According to Université d’Ottawa economist and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Michel Chossudovsky, the Canadian media misapprehension began in October 2009.

Way back then on the eve of the last federal election, er, eighteen months ago, the Canadian news media failed to bat an eye or otherwise utter a peep at the announcement by the Harper government that his minority government (the first one) was budgeting a $72 million dollar deficit.  As Chossudovsky pointed out in January 2009:

In a press statement by Harper on October 10 [2008], the Canadian “bank bailout was casually presented as a commitment by the Federal government to purchase an initial $25 billion in ‘secure’ bank mortgages from the Canadian chartered banks…implemented through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation..to maintain the availability of longer-term credit in Canada.”

In his Chossudovsky’s reckoning, Harper’s announcement–which was accompanied almost instantaneously by personal avowals from Harper that it was “not a bailout similar to recent moves made in the United States and other Western countries”–was implemented “two days following the federal elections…[when]…the first mortgage purchase took place leading to an initial cash injection of 5 billion into the coffers of the chartered banks.”

Then, as Chossudovsky suggested on his website, “barely a month following the federal election, on November 12 2008, another $50 billion allocation was announced” although both then and since, “it received no news coverage” and “opposition party leaders did not analyze the official statement of the Ministry of Finance.”

What burns Chossudovsky (and others, including the more conservative, apolitical bean counters here at LOON’s AccurateFiscalPrognostications©) is that although Harper and the Conservatives campaigned in the last election on the flat assertion that “this is not a bailout” and “will cost the government nothing,” in reality the cost of the manoeuvre was passed along to Canadian taxpayers in a big way.

That’s because to raise the initial $25 billion the CMHC had to, according to Flaherty’s own press statement, “ask the banks and other financial institutions to ascertain how much debt they would like to sell to the agency, using a process known as a reverse auction.”  So in the final result, as Chossudovsky argues:

Flaherty said the action would “make loans and mortgages more available and more affordable for ordinary Canadians and businesses.” The official Ministry of Finance statement confirms that the operation will be financed by the Treasury. Prime Minister Harper claims that “it will cost the government nothing” because the net public debt from an accounting point of view remains the same. While the operation is casually described as a transfer of assets from the banks to the CMHC, what we are dealing with is a cash injection equivalent to 4.6% of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is financed through a massive public debt operation. The necessary funds (requiring the issuing of government debt in the form of T-Bills and government bonds) are transferred to the CMHC, which in turn upon completion of the mortgage purchases, channels the funds to the chartered banks…The total is a staggering $75 billion handout to the chartered banks.

Comments: 1 Comment

LOON EXTRA! How Lockheed Martin is lobbying Canadian politicians to back the F-35 fighter deal

Posted April 24, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, LOON EXTRA!, Media, The Bawdy Politick

The Times They Are a Changin’

Back in the golden era of social activism—those Happy Days of the 1950s—it was not considered inappropriate in the slightest to refer to the military-industrial complex (with a tip of the egghead-shaped hat to Texan elite theorist C. Wright Mills) and its various private sector constituents collectively as “The Merchants of Death”. In fact, it had a certain ring to it that made the phrase a favourite in “left” circles, ad-biz cocktail parties, and the odd Yorkville coffee house.

Today, we have become a far more circumspect and conservative lot and the idea of tarring an entire industry with the cynical brush of nihilistic sarcasm is viewed by the corporate elite and their concentrated media outlets—including the so-called “social networking” platforms like Facebook—as an overt act of anarchism, if not, anti-capitalist, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-and-protects-you-against-foreign-terrorists evil.

With that prefatory disclaimer duly entered, it behooves LOON to warn those of you who are still naively imbibing your news like hooved beasts at the waterhole by reading the morning Canada.com newspapers or trying to stay awake for the entirety of Peter Mansbridge’s dry interplay with weather prognosticator Claire Martin, that you may be missing the big picture.

More graphically, you are missing out on the kind of cutting-edge state-of-the-art “multimedia” propaganda that is being discreetly made available to the non-schlubs and social elites who comprise our elected federal representatives in Ottawa and their phalanxes of executive and parliamentary assistants and advisors.

We’re talking about the highly intensive and expensive ads that the Lockheed Martin corporation has been deploying in Canadian media–and notably, that powerhouse of Parliamentary punditry, The Hills Times online edition–like Joint Strike Fighter Jets to persuade our MPs and their underlings (and even the odd literate member of the Senate) and bolster what they presumably perceive to be flagging support for the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter which some of us have been reading about in the last couple of weeks. That’s the magnificent, screaming “Fifth-Generation” (huh?) lethally-weaponized warbird that our U.S. cousins are intent upon selling at an as-yet-to-be nailed down “sticker price” for the future defence of Canada’s northern frontier, Vancouver islands to the Alberta highlands, etc.

And now a word, er, multimedia aerial assault from our sponsors…

Far be it for a veritable new kid on the parliamentary block like LOON to tell the likes of the Nation’s Capital’s “hot” and “feisty” tip-sheet how to conduct its ethical business. Still it does raise the extremely tiny feathers above our perspicacious, truth-seeking, ever vigilant eyes (as we don’t have eyebrows) to see a self-avowed “independent” journal such as the Hill Times accepting this kind of corporate largesse in the same edition in which it purports to “independently” report upon the plight of the F-35 funding boondoggle.

Not that the U.S. or global aerospace industry is inherently corrupt or sinister (Airbus), or its lobbyists and shadowy agents in league with some demonic host of capitalist avarice (Karl-Heinz Schreiber), but it behooves us to point out that an organ with the overwhelming preponderance of its readership situated in “The House on the Hill,”-some of whom have pledged themselves to the aims of “peace, order and good government” without regard to the selfish agendas of deep-pocketed lobbyists—should perhaps have had greater pause before accepting this ad revenue windfall at the precise moment when the F-35 debate is resurging in the House of Commons.

And before you grab your Hudson Bay blanket and limited-edition Tim Hortons® Canadian Forces camo-ball cap and head for the door with your unregistered long-gun to “stand your ground” against this seemingly unpatriotic and anti-Canadian vitriol, consider that Lockheed Martin is so practiced in this art of mass persuasion manipulation that its latest Canadian propaganda on behalf of the F-35 cash-cow is patterned on its tried-and-tested star-spangled Homeland template.

William Hartung is director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute.

LOON Book Review: William Hartung warns of the Lockheed Martin siren call

In that regard, LOON, as a civil defence counter-strike of sorts, heartily encourages readers to peruse a copy of author William Hartung’s eye-popping history of the policy-dictating and flags-waving behemoth Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Nation Books, 2010), an excerpt from which we reproduce herein:

It is a striking ad. An intimidating combat aircraft soars in the background, with the slogan up front in all capital letters: “300 MILLION PROTECTED, 95,000 EMPLOYED.” The ad – for Lockheed Martin’s F-22 “Raptor” fighter plane – was part of the company’s last gasp effort to save one of its most profitable weapons from being “terminated,”as they say in standard budget parlance. The pro-F-22 ad has run scores of times,in print, on political web sites, and even in the Washington, DC metro. One writer at the Washington Post joked that at a time when many companies have been cutting back on their advertising budgets, Lockheed Martin’s barrage of full page ads were the main thing keeping the paper afloat.

When an arms company starts bragging about how many jobs their pet project creates, hold onto your wallet. It often means that they want billions of dollars worth of your tax money for a weapon that costs too much, does too little, and may not have been needed in the first place. So it is with the Raptor, which at $350million per plane is the most expensive combat aircraft ever built. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested that the F-22 needed to be cut because even with wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan,it has never been used in combat. In fact, in its most daunting mission to date – flying to Japan for deployment at a U.S. air base there – the plane had technical difficulties and had to land in Hawaii, far short of its final destination.

But if Lockheed Martin insists that the Raptor’s unique capabilities more than justify its eye-popping price tag. For example, did you know that it is the “First and only 24/7/365All-Weather Stealth Fighter”? That it has a radar signature “approximately the size of a bumblebee”? Or that it provides “first-look, first-shot, first-kill air dominance capability”? I thought not. But keep listening. Lockheed Martin has a lot to say and they are serious about selling you their most profitable plane. How else to explain the statement from the F-22 Raptor web page stating that “When we meet the enemy, we want to win100-0, not 51-49”? It is hard to take this claim seriously. The Raptor has never seen combat – and is unlikely to do so given that it was designed to counter a Soviet plane that was never built – so at best the score is zero to zero. But the statement has a grain of truth – it describes Lockheed Martin’s lobbying efforts a whole lot more accurately than their fighter plane’s mission success rate.

The Washington Post and Lockheed drew heat for publishing this tacky "memorial" following the death of congressional defence spending booster Pennsylvania Democratic John Murtha in 2010.

They may never get to 100-0support in the Senate, but as soon as there was even a whisper of a possibility that the F-22 program might be stopped at “only” 187 planes – about what the Pentagon wanted, but only half of what the Air Force and Lockheed Martin were striving for – the company started racking up big numbers on their side.

By early 2009, months in advance of President Obama’s first detailed budget submission to Congress – which would decide the fate of the F-22 —- Lockheed Martin and its partners in the F-22 project (Pratt and Whitney and Boeing) had lined up 44 Senators and 200 members of the House of Representatives to sign onto a “save the Raptor” letter. Also signing the letter were 12 governors –including prominent Democrats like David Paterson of New York and Ted Strickland of Ohio– joined by R. Thomas Buffenbarger, the president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The governors’ letter reads as if it was drafted by Lockheed Martin, starting off by saying “We urge you to sustain 95,000 jobs by certifying continued production of the F-22 Raptor – a defense program that is critical to our defense industrial base.” After describing it as “the world’s only operational 5thGeneration fighter” – a popular Lockheed Martin description of the Raptor – the letter returns to the jobs argument asking the president to “consider carefully the economic impact of your decision.”

At the heart of the lobbying campaign was the mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs” – 95,000 jobs in44 states, to be exact. The company barely mounted an argument that the F-22 was needed to defend the country – it was there in the background, but it wasn’t the driving force. Lockheed’s ads for the plane got more and more specific as time went on, with a series showing people at work on components of the plane with legends like “2,205 F-22 Jobs in Connecticut;”“125 Skilled Machinists in Helena, Montana;” “50 Titanium Manufacturing Jobs in Niles, Ohio;” “30 Hydraulic Systems Specialists in Mississippi”; and “SteelForgers in Chicago” [no number given]. All that was missing were ads for “Pencil Pushers, Anywhere, USA” or “132 Lobbyists, Washington, DC.”

There was only one problem with this impressive flurry of job claims: they were fraudulent.

Utilizing standard techniques that estimate the numbers of jobs per billion generated by different kinds of economic activities, the $4 billion or so per year that the federal government was spending on the F-22 would create at most 35,000 to 40,000 jobs. The estimating method – known as input-output analysis – measures all of the jobs involved, from directly working on the plane, to working in plants supplying components, to working in the restaurant across the street from the plant were workers spend their wages, and so on. And it clearly demonstrates that the F-22 creates less than half as many jobs as Lockheed Martin claimed in its promotional campaign.

As for those geographically specific assertions about the locations of the jobs, when pressed the company refused to provide more detailed documentation of those claims. When a USA Today reporter asked for details on where F-22 supplier plants were, the company claimed that information on the locations of the F-22-related facilities represented proprietary information,and refused to provide it. Never mind that Lockheed Martin gets over 80% of its business from the federal government – from taxes paid by millions of Americans – when it comes to coming clean about the claims it is using to get its hands on more of our money, it’s none of our business.

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Council of Canadians files “absolutely ridiculous” application to set aside 2011 election results

Posted April 21, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Law Law Land, Media, The Bawdy Politick
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“They’re ought to be Crowns…well, maybe next year…”

In Ottawa, a gaping void has been left by Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand’s quasi-assurances to a parliamentary committee on March 29th, 2012 that he would report back “within a year” on the results of his agency’s ongoing investigation into allegations of voter suppression and electoral fraud against the federal Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, otherwise known as the “robocalls scandal.”

For the past two months, Elections Canada–itself hobbled by budget restraints imposed by the Harper Government®’s FinMin Jim Flaherty on the same day as CEO Mayrand reported to Parliament–has been conspicuously “out to lunch” or missing in action—presumably while its investigators continue to try to, using the PM’s phrase, “get to the bottom” of the scandal. And without the recommendation of Mayrand, no charges can be laid against the responsible parties.

Against that background–a dilatory investigation of an already unprecedented and expansive volume of electoral fraud complaints entrusted to an under-resourced federal agency—the efficacy of Canadian democracy and the integrity and security of the country’s electoral process hangs in the balance. And with the Harper Government®’s 24/7 “war-room” operatives blithely stonewalling opposition and media attempts to press the issue, continuing delay has only increased the general level of anxiety amongst Canadian voters.

Did Canada's chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand know the job was this dangerous when he took it? (Photo by Chris Wattie/Reuters)

Council of Canadians fill the vacuum left by Elections Canada

With three years plus remaining on their lease, the Tories hope that disquiet will slowly morph into apathy and, eventually, indifference. Unfortunately, as bits and pieces of the “robocalls” or “Pierre Poutine” caper continue to leak out, their expectations have proven whimsical. Though still unconfirmed, media reports of likely involvement by the seniorest of the senior ranks of the Conservative Party of Canada in the mucky mess have only intensified public calls for action.

So, not surprisingly, into the lurch or vacuum of responsibility, has ridden the self-appointed “social justice” group called the Council of Canadians, led by Maude Barlow.

On March 27, 2012, two days before the federal budget was unveiled—48 hours before the Chief Electoral Officer’s perfunctory appearance on the Hill on Budget Day morning–the Council’s legal representatives had filed a notice of application in the Federal Court of Canada. Their action calls for a judicial review of the federal election results in seven ridings across the country—beginning with the constituency of Nipissing-Timiskaming in northern Ontario where the Liberal candidate Anthony Rota lost to the Conservative Party’s Jay Aspin by a margin of only 18 votes.

The Council’s 16-page Federal Court notice of application was simultaneously served on a number of parties including chief electoral officer at Elections Canada, Marc Mayrand, who personally certified the results of the 2011 election as valid; James Mallory, the federal election returning officer in the riding of Saskatoon-Biggar, the Tory, Liberal, NDP and Green Party candidates in Nipissing-Temiskaming, and the Attorney General of Canada Rob Nicholson.

The action is brought on behalf of Ken Ferance and Peggy Walsh Craig, both voters in the North Bay area riding, and requests that the Federal Court grant an order “annulling the results” of the 2011 federal vote in Nipissing-Timiskaming. It is being pursued under section 534 of the Canada Elections Act which sets out the grounds on which any Canadian voter (“elector”) may challenge the validity of their local federal election results, including “irregularities” and “fraud or corrupt or illegal practices that affected the result of the election.”

North Bay voter-turned-judicial-review-applicant, Ken Ferance, is already a decorated national hero having been recognized by the Governor-General and others for rescuing an elderly woman from a burning car wreck in 2004 (www.baytoday.ca)

All Too Familiar Tale For Thousands of Robocall Recipients

The pleadings in the Council’s application tell a tale of suspected voter suppression that has become all too familiar to Canadians in recent weeks. An initial unsolicited phone call received weeks prior to the May 2nd election at the home of Ferance and his wife. On the line, a script-reading voice from one of the Tory party’s call centres, identifying themselves as an agent of the Conservative campaign and asking if the Party can “count on” the Ferances’ “support” in the May 2nd vote.

According to the judicial review filings, the “Applicant’s wife unequivocally indicated to the caller that she would not be supporting the Conservative Party.” Fast-forward to Election Day (May 2nd) and the Ferances receive a second unsolicited “live telephone call” at their residence from someone purporting to be from Elections Canada.” In this instance, the caller advised Mr. Ferance that “his polling station had been moved to a location 19 km from the Applicant’s residence.”

The not-to-be bamboozled Ferance immediately gain-sayed the spreader of false information, advising that (presumably in “unequivocal” language again) he had already voted in the actual, meaning “real” polling booth designated on his Elections Canada voter card located “across the street” from his residence. [As a purely editorial aside, one can only marvel at the arrogance and/or sheer stupidity of the perpetrators of the fake communication in failing to cross-reference the addresses of their victims with the co-ordinates of the truthful polling location.]

In any case, Mr. Ferance, who received a heroism medal from the Governor General in 2004, continued to believe that the fake Election Day call had originated from Elections Canada until sometime in March when the media reports of strikingly similar hoaxes began to surface in the media.

In the case of the co-applicant, Peggy Craig, she received an automated-voice call “a few weeks before the election” asking her if she was intending to vote for the Conservative candidate and asking her to record her response by pressing a designated number using her touch-tone keypad. Like Ferance (and others who received similar calls across the country) Craig responded that she would not be supporting the Tory candiate and pressed the corresponding touch-tone button on her phone.

And like Ferance and the other victims, Craig next received an automated telephone call, purporting to be from Elections Canada, which fraudulently advised her that “due to high voter turn-out,” her May 2nd polling location “had been changed.” Craig, like the other victims, also only discovered weeks later that the call was bogus and on March 1st, 2012 registered a complaint with Elections Canada

The remainder of the court application connects the Ferance and Craig complaints to a “pattern” of electoral fraud allegations that arose across the country in the days and weeks that followed the first media reports of “robocalls” and the role played by the RackNine internet marketing firm that contracted with the Conservative Party federally to provide automated calling services during the 2011 election campaign.

In the red corner, Council of Canadians' light heavyweight Steven Shrybner (l) squared off against the Conservative Party of Canada's trash-talking T.O. counsel Arthur Hamilton (r)

Tories call motion “absolutely ridiculous” and “a transparent attempt to overturn certified election results”

While Elections Canada and the Attorney General of Canada have since responded to the application, seeking the status of impartial intervenors before the Court—presumably so they can “keep an eye” on the pesky lawsuit–the Conservative Party has been, predictably, somewhat less than gracious in response to this manifestation of “direct democracy” by the Barlow Brigade.

For starters, according to the Toronto Star, the Conservative Party’s lawyer Arthur Hamilton called the Council of Canadians’ action “fatally flawed.” And yesterday, the Party’s PR flack, Fred Delorey took it a notch higher on the bombast scale, describing the lawsuit as “absolutely ridiculous” and “a transparent attempt to overturn certified election results simply because this activist group doesn’t like them.”

Although Hamilton insisted he could or would not “disclose” his own strategy for the litigation, he added his opponents “don’t have any backup,” and would be asking the Court judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

Then in a tour de force of humility and professional civility, Hamilton commented that he would refrain from commenting further “out of respect for the case management judge who has not yet been appointed.” Still, Hamilton’s deference was short-lived as he couldn’t resist throwing in a gratuitous and condescending rejoinder that “if you don’t do the pleadings correctly, they don’t even get out of the starting gate.”

Even allowing that the Tories’ counsel Hamilton is paid by his clients to sound nonchalant and cocksure in his media sound-bites, his disparaging public comments about the Council’s judicial review application amount to little more than a bravado-fueled publicity stunt in their own right. Far from being a pleadings dunce or slow-starter, Hamilton’s opposing counsel, Steven Shrybman, is a seasoned public law litigator and appellate counsel (also from the Big Smoke) with an equally respectable T.O. firm and more courtroom experience than Hamilton.

In fact, compared with Shrybman’s numerous appearances in the Supreme Court of Canada on a number of important national public law cases, there is no record (at least, one that a search of the online SCC judgments database could turn up) of Hamilton having ever appeared as counsel in the country’s highest court–despite a note on the Cassels law firm website which claims that Hamilton has “represented clients” in the Supreme Court of Canada.

The "publicity stunt" defence against legitimate public interest legal actions has already been shot down in flames by Ontario's eminent jurist Russell Juriansz.

Tories Try Their Case in the Media

Whoever the “case management judge” turns out to be, they may be less than impressed with Hamilton’s equally presumptuous statements to the media that the Council’s application is “incorrectly”drafted and may not “get out of the starting-gate.”

Apart from being discourteous, Hamilton’s remark flies in the face of section 531 of the Canada Elections Act which, while giving the Federal Court authority to dismiss an application “if it considers it to be vexatious, frivolous or not made in good faith,” precludes a judge from doing so until after the applicants have been afforded the opportunity to prove their alleged grounds in court.

Dubious race-track metaphors aside, Hamilton’s attempt to dismiss the Council’s application as a “publicity stunt” also conjures up a strange feeling of déjà-vu in anyone who recalls the first time Hamilton tried it eight years ago without success in another Tory legal shit-fight.

Back in 2004, Hamilton lost a case while acting for Peter MacKay and the newly-minted Conservative Party of Canada (stitched together in 2002 by MacKay on behalf of what remained of the former post-Mulroney Progressive Conservatives and Stephen Harper’s Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance party or “CRAP” as it was unofficially known).

In that case, Hamilton defended MacKay and the new-fangled Conservative Party against an action brought by a disgruntled member of the “old” Progressive Conservative caucus, David Orchard, to have the Ontario Superior Court block the dissolution and merger.

After Orchard’s action failed, Hamilton went back before the same Ontario judge and asked for a costs order against Orchard. The ground advanced by Hamilton for seeking that penalty were that Orchard had “attempted to litigate the matter in the news media, filed affidavits containing hearsay, misrepresentations, speculation, and irrelevant political rhetoric, and alleged personal bias against the members of the Progressive Conservative Party.”

But Hamilton’s “publicity stunt” argument was cut off at its knees by Ontario Superior Court (now Court of Appeal for Ontario) Justice Russell Juriansz, who could not have been more outspoken in his rejection of Hamilton’s half-baked grounds:

This case raised fundamental questions about the nature of political parties and the interpretation of the new provisions of the Canada Elections Act relating to merger of political parties. These questions were of national significance to the politics of the nation.

[6] While the respondents filed material detailing what Mr. Orchard said about the issues of the case in media interviews, the respondents did not identify how his seeking publicity and speaking to the media had any effect on how the application proceeded and was heard, or how it reflected negatively on the integrity of the court or its process. This was a case in which the public had a great interest, and it was the duty of the media to report on the issues.

[7] I would not give effect to the other submissions of the respondents. In this case, it is my view that the considerations raised by the respondents are outweighed by the highly charged political context of this proceeding. The dominant factor in assessing costs in this case is that the parties were on opposite sides of a political question of national import. The individuals involved on both sides had no personal interest in the proceedings, other than a determination of the nature of the institutions through which they would participate in the political affairs of the country.

[8] I was not persuaded that I should make a costs award that would sanction or inhibit free discussion of political issues. I conclude that this is an appropriate case for each side to bear its own costs

Tories' Twittersome comm guy and "political operations" thingy Fred Delorey

So all the big talk and swagger in the world cannot dislodge the fact that the Council of Canadians and its counsel Steven Shrybman will have their day in the Federal Court, allegations of “publicity stunt” notwithstanding. It is also possible that the “case management judge” who hears the motion could conceivably exercise his or her jurisdiction to set aside the May 2, 2011 polling results in the seven disputed ridings.

What really underlies Arthur Hamilton’s transparent posturing about “fatal flaws” and getting out of the starting gate is an encircled and increasingly fearful client—the national leadership and staff of the Conservative Party of Canada. Try as they might to disparage the Barlow camp, the Tories are confronted on all sides by an uncomfortable reality—Canadians of every political persuasion want answers to what went on behind the scenes during the last federal election, and more specifically, the names of those responsible.

While the judicial review route has the advantage of avoiding the pitfalls of having to identify the voter suppression culprits (individual or corporate) and then proving that they intentionally committed offenses, it falls short of seeing that justice is completely served. That can only occur when the persons responsible for the voter suppression scandal are identified and brought before the courts, something that appears far from imminent right now.

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Deepening shades of Watergate in the Robocalls voter suppression scandal

Posted April 18, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Media, The Bawdy Politick, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , ,

“From those wonderful folks who brought you the Accountability Act…”

How deliciously ironic that the noose of accountability appears to be tightening around the political neck of the Conservative Party of Canada this week.

After a prolonged hiatus—dare we call it a mini-prorogation–of Parliament following the slash-and-burn March 29th Tory budget, quickly followed by the resounding thud of defence minister Peter MacKay’s credibility hitting the tarmac with the $10 billion F-35 “accounting” debacle, we are thrust back to the Robocalls, er, make that “voter suppression” scandal.

This time the caper has resurged with more leaked reports emanating from the Elections Canada investigation, as its gumshoes pursue the identity of the pimpernalian “Pierre Poutine” in hopes of finally providing an answer to Canadian voters as to whether or not the 2011 election was fatally rigged.

On Monday night, the investigative journalists at Postmedia.com—not Woodward and Bernstein–tossed another few pearls of conjecture before their online web readers, suggesting Elections Canada had traced a number of telephone calls made on the eve of the May 2, 2011 federal election from the service-providing RackNine company in Calgary back to the so-called “war room” in none other than the Conservatives’ national campaign headquarters in the Nation’s Capital.

According to the unnamed and unconfirmed leaks, Elections Canada snoops are looking into the records kept of the Constituency Information Management System (CIMS), a the highly secretive and secure computer database that the Conservative Party of Canada created and maintains to keep tabs on the personal views and voting preferences of virtually every voter in every sought-after electoral constituency in the country.

Charges against Tory Senator Doug Finley, were laid under the Election Expenses Act after the 2006 "in-out" affair but later withdrawn when the Party pled guilty.(Toronto Star)

Paging Rose Mary Woods

More specifically, they are said to be after an explanation as to why a portion of the CIMS records appear to be blank, and by implication of some, at least, expurgated. According to Global News, “the logs show blanks between this person’s CIMS logon and logoff on the day the Guelph data was accessed, according to the source.”

One call, in particular, is said to have been made on May 1st, 2011, from a number attributed to one “Chris Rougier,” Tory staffer charged with supervision of the Party’s “voter relations” from his office at the Tory national office at 130 Albert Street in Ottawa. Rougier, according to the same Global report, worked as “a key member of the target seat team, working directly under campaign manager Jenni Byrne.”

It was Rougier’s job, apparently, to “liaise” with companies like RackNine during the course of the election campaign and, again according to Global’s report, the May 1st call “is the only one the party has failed to explain in detail to reporters, in spite of repeated requests.”

And so the Robocalls fickle finger of electoral misadventure points back in the direction of the self-same Conservative Party of Canada national office. And casts a light on the soft underbelly of the Harper Government’s ideological and political nerve centre.

Jenni from the (Langevin) Block…

The aforementioned Jenni Byrne is a media-shy case in point. The mid-30s politico hails from the forested community of Fenelon Falls, Ontario, and is a relatively youthful political animal of some repute, at least within in the corridors of power in Ottawa.

Notably, we are led to believe, Ms. Byrne fancies herself an outspoken proponent of the Newfoundland seal-hunt. So much so, it seems, that at one time a photo of a man clubbing or about-to-club a baby seal adorned her Facebook profile. And if being a wannabe baby seal murderer wasn’t endearing enough, Byrne also proudly displays the specially designed baby seal coshing weapon called a hakapik on her desk in Conservative Party headquarters.

“The most influential woman in Ottawa” keeps a baby seal club on her desk

As Stephen Harper’s rookie but hand-picked national campaign manager last year—although it is reported she was not his “first pick”, and a former girlfriend/significant/other/partner to Ottawa area Tory MP and Harper loyalist, Pierre Poilievre–the 30-something Byrne enjoys a “fearsome reputation” in her albeit abbreviated political journey to the House on the Hill.

In the same deferential terms, national columnists have variously but cautiously described Byrne as “fiery,” a Conservative loyalist,” “the most influential woman in political Ottawa”, “feared and fearless,” possessed of “a volcanic temper with a penchant for yelling at cabinet ministers, staffers and senior bureaucrats alike,” and again, “fiercely loyal to the Prime Minister.”

Still another intimate portrait of the PM’s campaign manager comes courtesy of still another anonymous but purportedly high-placed Tory:

She has cultivated a reputation where most people are terrified of being on the wrong side of her…” says a senior Conservative official who knows her well. No wonder then that many of her colleagues who were interviewed for this article asked not to be identified. Ms. Byrne refused to be interviewed.

But the consensus is, even among those lacking the cojones to say so publicly, that Byrne was picked for the position because she was judged by the lean and minority-fatigued PM during the prorogation era “to get the job done”, meaning get Harper an electoral majority by hook or by crook.

Like most in the Harper inner circle, Byrne is an ideological chip off the old block, though perhaps with more “zeal” than her famously drab and cold-blooded leader. Like the PM, who hails originally from the white-bread inner-burb of Leaside, Byrne is an anti-government Ontario-bred zealot who regularly uses her Twitter account to chide such standby “big government” conspiracies as the long-gun registry (“Stop treating farmers and hunters like criminals,” Byrne tweeted earlier this month even though the registry is now all but a dead letter outside of Quebec.)

As the Conservative Party’s director of political operations since 2009, following her stint as a “public servant” in the regular army of the Prime Minister’s Office, Byrne has managed several by-elections, including four winning efforts, so she has an astute from-the-ground-up and hands-on campaign experience.

As part of her baptism, she served loyally as an assistant to Senator Doug Finley, who was charged in the Elections Expenses Act scandal that arose from the “in-out” financing employed by the Tories during the 2006 federal campaign. Though she apparently eschews publicity, Byrne most recently came to the attention of the media when she issued an unequivocal denial of any Conservative Party involvement in the Robocalls affair.

The extent to which Byrne’s personality may prove both an asset and liability is borne out by the reviews of one of Stephen Harper’s own mentors, Tom Flanagan, himself no stranger to being skewered by his own verbal excesses who conceded shortly after her selection as campaign commandant that Byrne had “to put some of the temper behind her.”

If the foregoing outline leaves one with the impression that Ms. Byrne is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s inner circle, your powers of perception have not deserted you. Earlier in her stint as a promising and upwardly bound Tory functionary, Byrne was accused of sending an e-mail to her then boss, Doug Finlay, in which she savoured the prospect of tormenting an Ottawa Tory candidate for refusing to withdraw from the Ottawa South constituency’s nomination contest in favour of a “star candidate” handpicked by Tory headquarters. “I would love to make (him) sweat,” Byrne allegedly told her boss in the e-mail.

Byrne, who was described by her own crew shortly after being hired for the campaign boss’ job as “wickedly partisan,” also figured more centrally at an earlier stage of the Robocalls affair when she is said to have intervened and persuaded Conservative MP Eve Adams to sack Michael Sona, the parliamentary aide who was initially (and, many believe, unfairly and prematurely) fingered as the lone gunman in the scandal.

Come on, now, admit it. When the man's right, the man's right!

Did Jenni Byrne play Jack Ruby to Michael Sona’s Lee Harvey “I’m just a patsy” Oswald?

Sona, who worked on the Tory campaign in the Guelph constituency where the scandal first arose, had initially been spared from walking the plank but reportedly suffered a reversal of fortunes when Byrne allegedly called Adams and persuaded her that Sona had to go. Needless to say, it is now thought by many Robocalls observers, after successive reports revealing the extent and sophistication of the automated-calls conspiracy, that Sona could not “have acted alone.”

That sentiment was expressed to none other than Ms. Byrne’s erstwhile paramour, Pierre Poilievre during Question Period in the House of Commons on March 12th, 2012 by Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie NDP member Alexandre Boulerice:

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives’ confusing and clumsy explanations for the fraud that occurred in the riding of Guelph are so far-fetched that we get the impression we are listening to Réjean on La Petite Vie. From the beginning, they have been trying to lead us to believe that a single activist orchestrated an election fraud of this magnitude without any help, as though Michael Sona had the money, computer resources or access to the lists he would require to organize thousands of fraudulent calls. It does not make any sense.

Do the Conservatives really believe in this ridiculous theory that a single volunteer transformed into an election super villain? If not, who on the other side of the House are they trying to protect?

Mr. Poilievre: Mr. Speaker, I humbly suggest that it is time for the party to apologize for its actions. I have here a document from the Commissioner of Canada Elections that says:

The contracting party in question is the New Democratic Party. That party broke the law. I urge the hon. member to rise and apologize to Canadians.

Mr. Boulerice: Mr. Speaker, the people who should be apologizing are those who pled guilty to using the in and out scheme in 2006 and who stole from Canadians. When Michael Sona submitted his resignation to the Parliamentary Secretary for Veterans Affairs but she initially refused to accept it. That makes sense, because it is ridiculous to believe that a single employee engineered massive electoral fraud, but according to the Globe and Mail, Jenni Byrne, the Conservative Party’s director of political operations, called the parliamentary secretary shortly thereafter. She must have been very persuasive, because the resignation was suddenly accepted.

Can anyone on the government side tell us what Jenni Byrne knows but is refusing to disclose at this time?

Mr. Poilievre: Mr. Speaker, I just told him that his party admitted to contravening the Canada Elections Act by trying to send money to the Broadbent Institute and force taxpayers to foot the bill with the tax credit. The New Democrats have already had to apologize for the false allegations made by the hon. member for Winnipeg. Now I think the New Democrats should rise in the House to apologize for breaking the law and breaching Canadians’ trust.

Conservative Party of Canada lawyer Arthur Hamilton (CTV)

Bring on the law-talking guys

All of this flies somewhat in the face of assurances from the Party’s head law-talking guy, Arthur Hamilton, that none of the Robocalls taint extends to the Conservative Party leadership.

Hamilton acted as counsel for the Tories in their expansive Elections Canada files, most recently in the 2006 election “in-out” financing scandal that led to a successful prosecution against the Party culminating in a guilty plea and $25,000 fine in return for individual charges against the likes of Senator Finley—the 2006 Harper campaign manager—being withdrawn.

LOON stalwarts may recall, albeit from reading other sources, that it was Hamilton who was called in by the PM himself to “get to the bottom” of the affair back in March, and who very quickly—precipitously, perhaps—declared that nobody in the Party outside of the Guelph constituency in which the Robocalls scandal first emerged was involved.

For many above the baby-boomer cutoff, the parallels to Watergate are too tempting to resist. Like his lugubrious U.S. counterpart, Richard Nixon, our Prime Minister Stephen Harper has responded to the first whiffs of the brewing political stink by foisting his junior officers and counsel on the media armed with glib denials and occasional tinges of righteous indignation.

And like Richard Nixon, or “Tricky Dick” as his detractors never tired of tagging him, our PM has found himself having to quell rumours and worse about an alleged “electronic gap” in the only records that might convincingly prove his own and his supporters’ repeated claims that there is “nothing” to the scandal but partisan sour grapes.

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Smoke and mirrors in Quebec class-action suit against Big Tobacco

Posted April 7, 2012 by looncanada
Categories: Canadian eh?, Current Events, Law Law Land, Our Dying Planet

“When your heart’s on fire, smoke gets in your eyes…”

A fascinating development in the sordid history of anti-smoking litigation being played out as we live and (hack) breathe in the law courts in Montreal.

Home-town legal beagle, Simon V. Potter, currently of the mega-law emporium that is McCarthy Tetreault, late of the equally high rolling corporate-commercial firm of Ogilvy Renault, a former national President of the Canadian Bar Association, firebrand litigator on behalf of the Charter rights of his homicidal industry, and sometime serial-Letter-to-the-Editor author, is back in the headlines.

Not that he was ever as much of a media-friendly mouthpiece as many of his big business lawyer pals who readers may be more familiar with. But unlike Earl Cherniak, a Law Society medalist and hired legal assassin for the likes of, inter alia, Conrad Black, or Harvey T. Strosberg, the gritty class-action kingpin from Windsor, Ontario, our demure S.V.P. has been wont to stay in the shadows for much of his private litigation career, at least, the part that involved him acting as a point-man for the global cigarette cartel that is known aptly as “Big Tobacco”.

Especially as concerns his decades-long professional consort with Imperial Tobacco. Potter’s career, while notable for stints in international trade and even as an unlikely proponent of “civil liberties” for the corporate class, has been served most assiduously on behalf of the hang-together-lest-we-hang separately fraternity that is Big Tobacco.

This tenacious, highly secretive business consortium has been compared unfavourably by respected international legal minds as similar, if not identical in structure and strategy to traditional organized crime entities such as the Mafia. Indeed, Big Tobacco’s survival of a half-century or more of concerted, front-line political, economic and legislative onslaughts by public health-conscious (or fearing) governments on every continent would make the real-life Sopranos crowd envious.

Simon Potter, like so many other otherwise respected members of his stalwart profession, succumbed to the allure of Big Tobacco lucre to dedicate his unique corner of litigation labour to one objective above all others–making sure that everyone and his three-year-old grandchild could be freely exposed to the moral carcinogen that is cigarette advertising in one or other of its sinister forms.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Potter was plying his clients’ “cigarettes don’t kill smokers, smokers kill themselves” message in the Quebec courts as legal proxy for his Imperial Tobacco overseers along with Earl Cherniak and a slew of other blue-chip litigators who have since gone on to garner prestige and reverential honours within the profession.

U.S. District Court Justice Gladys Kessler was unimpressed with the conduct of Ogilvy Renault senior counsel Simon Potter in the destruction of smoking research documents.

U.S.A. v. Philip Morris

But like so many other aspects of Canadian law’s “branch-plant” mentality, those early battles did not attract much media attention until parallel developments in the American side of the tobacco regulation war brought them to the fore. In 1999, a District Court judge in Washington, D.C. named Gladys Kessler, ruled in favour of the plaintiffs in a civil class-action against the U.S. tobacco behemoth, Philip Morris.

The ruling by this Clinton-appointed jurist sent shock waves around the nicotine-stained quarters of every Big Tobacco law firm in the world, including Simon Potter’s comparatively modest digs at Ogilvy Renault in Montreal. Justice Kessler found as a fact that:

In the summer of 1992, Simon Potter, an attorney with the law firm Ogilvy Renault in Montreal, which represented BAT’s Canadian affiliate, Imperial Tobacco Limited, sent a letter to Stuart Chalfen, Solicitor of [British American Tobacco]…David Schechter, General Counsel of [British American Tobacco U.S.]…and John Meltzer, a lawyer at BAT’s outside counsel Lovell, White, Durrant….[indicating]…that unless he received instructions to the contrary, Imperial Tobacco Limited planned to destroy sixty documents, including scientific studies. The letter includes a list of documents to be destroyed, including one document with the notation “not destroyed because never received by Imperial.”….In an August 7, 1992 letter to Chalfen, Schechter, and Meltzer, Simon Potter confirmed that “the documents mentioned in my letter of July 30 have indeed been destroyed.”

Justice Kessler’s finding of facts went on to draw several conclusions that were, to put it mildly (sorry, unintended use of tobacco marketing jargon), critical of the underhanded attempts by Big Tobacco to spike the guns of prospective litigants:

It is patently clear …that…the 1985 Document Retention Policy which… protected all BAT Group affiliates, subsidiaries, sister and parent corporations, was a contrivance designed to eliminate potentially damaging documents while claiming an innocent “housekeeping” intent. . . . The whole purpose was to keep evidence out of the courts…. Moreover, it is also patently clear that the Foyle Memorandum, which purported to re-examine the effectiveness of that 1985 Policy, was intentionally drafted to further its purposes and to ensure that it was adapted to the demands of an ever-more threatening litigation environment….Finally, members of the BAT Group, in furtherance of the Policy’s purposes, destroyed documents, routed them from one country or BAT facility to another, erased a useful litigation database as well as the fact that the documents it contained had ever existed as soon as the pre-existing judicial hold was lifted, and constantly exhorted their many employees to avoid putting anything in writing. All these activities were taken for one overriding purpose — to prevent disclosure of evidence in litigation.

Roger Ackman forgets to remember to forget in Montreal courtroom last week (Cyberpresse).

Trying to Remember to Forget

And so it was that Simon Potter, was thrust into the heat of the latest and perhaps most critical battle in the historic class-action suit being brought against his procurers in Big Tobacco.

What led to the revival of Potter’s dormant notoriety was the reluctant return of one Roger Ackman, formerly the Vice-President and General Counsel for Imperial Tobacco in Montreal, and himself, another veteran of the Big Tobacco legal brigades who probably thought he had retired into relative obscurity and opulence when he took his buy-out a few years back and left the cudgels of cancer-stick championing to the likes of the slightly younger Potter and his ilk.

Ackman, now 73, had fought like the bejeezus to avoid this date with destiny–having to testify about his decades-long involvement in the campaign to persuade right-thinking governments and their public health commissars to tread lightly on the Big Tobacco file and to think once, twice, ad infinitum, before fettering the liberties–freedom of exhalation–of cigarette manufacturers to ply the public with pro-smoking ads, not to mention, bogus “research” supporting BT’s claims that the scientific jury is somehow still “hung” on the connection between smoking and lung cancer and related fatal illness.

So last week, into the Quebec superior courtroom in Montreal marched Mr. Ackman, looking none the worse for wear, ready to prevaricate and evade as many pointed questions about his involvement in the anti-Anti-smoking efforts of his BT employers.

The smoking gun: confidential letter from Simon V. Potter to Imperial Tobacco's Ackman confirms destruction of research docs that plaintiffs claim help their case...

To noone’s surprise, the questions centred on Ackman’s knowledge of the industry’s wilful and deliberate destruction of research and related documents which, according to the plaintiffs, were by and large supportive of the destructive and lethal effects of the industry’s cigarette products on the health of human beings in Quebec and around the globe. Something that was a matter of record as far back as 1999 when Justice Kessler ruled on the Philip Morris case.

Ackman’s answers were vague, and more than once he resorted to the time-worn technique of less than forthright witnesses–sometimes termed “testi-lying”–in which he was confronted with wall-screen sized projections of letters he had sent to various BT confederates–including, notably, Simon V. Potter, then senior litigation counsel at Ogilvy Renault‘s Montreal cabinet.

In a performance that the media charitably attributed to a “failed memory”– Ackman was asked about his involvement in an agreement existed between Imperial Tobacco and its major shareholder, British American Tobacco, “to destroy documents on condition we were given access to the documents.”

Jean-Yves Blais, one of 1.8 million plaintiffs in a class-action suit against Big Tobacco that is claiming the equivalent of roughly the real cost of an F-35 fighter plan in damages.

Why were lawyers involved in the destruction of research documents?

Questioned under oath by the plaintiffs’ counsel, Gordon Kugler, as to how he still knew about the existence of other undestroyed copies of the research, Ackman played it like Tony Hayward did in front of the U.S. congress in May 2010 when grilled about BP’s negligence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

“I don’t know, it was a long time ago,” came the underwhelming answer.

Pressed by Kugler as to why “lawyers were involved in the destruction of research documents,” the former general counsel, Ackman appeared at times as if he wished he were in Washington or New York so he could “take the Fifth.¨

But the former law-talking guy for Imperial Tobacco–who was privy to most of the significant pieces of legal correspondence to be circulated in the 1980s and up to his retirement in 1999–seemed stymied as if, in a twisted variation of the old Elvis tune, he was trying not to forget to remember to forget.

Incredibly, though, despite his Waldheim-like selective lapses in memory of his participation in document destruction, Ackman told Justice Brian Riordan that he had actually never read any of the research docs he organized for annihilation, which consisted of research studies and materials that the industry was obsessed with concealing from the public, in general, and prospective plaintiffs.

In truth, Ackman was caught out in his industry’s own carefully laid out and executed pattern of deception. And the proof of that complicity lay in the host of documents that survived Big Tobacco’s redaction–for no reason other than that copies were kept, just in case. Those documents were resurrected following the Philip Morris ruling and along with others now live on in virtually eternity in the numerous tobacco-settlement websites that dot the Information Highway.

Inaccurately, though, much of the mainstream news media’s coverage of the early innings of the trial last week was unduly deferential or circumspect in referring to Simon Potter as “outside counsel” to Imperial Tobacco. Given the degree and extent of his connection to the legal campaign by Big Tobacco as a consortium to rationalize and legitimize cigarette advertising, Simon Potter can scarcely be referred to as someone who was “called in” by Ackman on a one-off basis to destroy research.

Say what you will about "litigation-happy" Americans but many of the U.S. class-action settlements won by plaintiffs required Big Tobacco defendants to set up and provide free public access websites containing the evidence relied on by the Court in reaching its verdict.

Relentless Litigation Campaign Aimed at Legitimizing Cigarette Consumption

In that regard, readers should avail themselves of any one of the numerous free websites (which Big Tobacco was ordered to set up after losing the landmark U.S. District Court judgment in 1999) and do a word search on Mr. Potter to see how truly engrossed in this unseemly business Mr. Potter really was.

Whether attending international conferences and seminars to provide battle dispatches from the Big Tobacco litigation front or writing friendly letters to various tobacco regulatory bureaucrats around the globe, Mr. Potter was a pivotal force in Big Tobacco’s relentless campaign to sanitize the role played by cigarettes in millions and millions of human deaths.

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