Can you hear me now? I only have one bar left.

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

Aung San Suu Kyi*

Freedom From Fear

  

Can you hear me now? 

Go read Creekside ... then read Northern Reflections.  

*Aung San Suu Kyi is a renowned Burmese opposition leader. She has spent a long portion of her adult life under house arrest imposed by the Myanmar military junta. In 2007, she was made an honourary Canadian citizen.  

Elmer Derrick appointed to Prince Rupert Port Authority Board

Elmer Derrick doesn't live in Prince Rupert. His Gitxsan Nation's land isn't in Prince Rupert. What makes this so "odd"? Well, take a look at this:

The northern B.C. First Nation chief who signed a controversial deal to support Enbridge's $5.5-billion oil pipeline has been appointed by the federal government to the Prince Rupert Port Authority.

They're not even attempting to hide the corruption.

The attempt to minimize something massive

Anyway you slice it, the testimony of Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand, before the House and Procedural Affairs Committee on 29 March was bombshell stuff.

Overshadowed to some degree by the detail deficient and ideological platitude spouting of Jim Flaherty, what Mayrand had to say carries a level of importance that shouldn't be lost in loudness of a so-called budget from the Harper rodentia. (There will be some comment on that later).

I've already covered, by simply allowing Kady O'Malley to do the heavy lifting, the most serious revelation: the enormous scope of the election fraud which occurred in May 2011. (Keep that link on a separate tab if you want to follow).

It wasn't one riding; it wasn't 23 ridings; it wasn't 37 ridings. It wasn't even the "possible" 100 ridings which many observers (including myself) believed might have been at issue. That latter number would have put us in massive "hijacked" territory and the subverting of one-third of the electoral districts in Canada. It was 200 ridings - two-thirds of the federal electoral districts. 

The next thing that jumped out was the geographic breadth. If the whole effort had been perpetrated in a cluster of ridings in one province it could be attributed to the efforts of one person or perhaps one small group. However, Mayrand made clear just how wide it was: Ten provinces and one territory. The material breadth of the act was nationwide.

The timing and the modus operandi is also important. In almost every case we know of so far, people receiving calls on the day before or the day of the election had been contacted by some element promoting the Conservative Party of Canada. The next call directed them to bogus voting places.

The scope and the timing are more than a little significant. They're huge.

Perhaps it's decades of military training and my experience as a front-line "death technician" that routes my thinking, but I cannot think of any way to pull off a geographically massive, narrowly timed operation without at least four things in place: planning, coordination, deception and delegation1. In a criminal enterprise it is described with one word: conspiracy. 

So, now we come to the evidence of an attempted spin from the likes of Harold Albrecht and Tom Lukiwski. Both of them, after hearing the breadth and scope of complaints being investigated by Mayrand's office suggested that they were not trying to minimize the the importance of the complaints nor the numbers being discussed. (11:53 and 11:55 of Kady's report).

Yes, they were.

The fact that they actually suggested they weren't attempting to do so meant that the questions they were posing would be viewed as an attempt to minimize and then they went on to ask them anyway. Clearly, they were shocked by what they had just heard.

All the signs point to a planned, coordinated and specifically-timed national effort to suppress the opposition vote using illegal means. And to add to the elements required to pull off something as large as this appears to be, the direction of such an effort has to come from well up in the hierarchy of a group. In a disciplined, authoritarian-led organization, independent action over a wide scale usually fails.
---------------------

1 For those so inclined: You can draw some interesting parallels by reading this. I would draw your attention to page 110. The belief that nobody would violate the seeming reverence of an idea, held to be universally sacred, has tripped up more than one strategist.

Lose the election?

We'll just give you the job anyway.

A government employee described by Liberal Irwin Cotler as his “shadow MP” working on the federal payroll has offered some clues about his job and his publicly funded salary.
Mr. Cotler has raised concerns that Saulie Zajdel, the Conservative candidate he defeated in last year's election, is earning a government paycheque while trying to undermine him in his Montreal riding.

The significance of the riding of Mount Royal? Take a look and see if you can figure it out.

As an added feature, take a look at the yapping  Zajdel was doing a little while ago.

Saulie Zajdel, the former Côte des Neiges/NDG councillor and Conservative candidate, has been appointed by the federal government as a regional advisor for community outreach and relations.
“I’m going to be working under Christian Paradis, minister of the Montreal region, and Canadian Heritage minister James Moore in the Ministers Regional Office in Montreal,” Zajdel told The Suburban last week.

Christian Paradis ... well, isn't that just too special. 

Christian Paradis should be snooping the back benches for a place to sleep (Updated)

The Ethics Commissioner throws a marshmallow at a corrupt minister of the Crown. If you read this you get the overwhelming desire to hose down Mary Dawson for failure to perform. It took her two years!

So, you should read this instead. Impolitical cuts right to the chase and highlights the serial breaches committed by Paradis.

Update: No surprise here. Accountability and ministerial responsibility don't actually harmonize with the corrupt nature of the Harper crowd. 

Industry Minister Christian Paradis is refusing to resign after being found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act for helping Rahim Jaffer secure a meeting with senior bureaucrats after his former caucus colleague’s arrest on driving and drug charges.

...

Mr. Paradis refused to step down, saying in a written statement he will take “further precautions” in his future dealings with people seeking government funding.

Illegitimate minister in a supposititious government. 

Toto. I don't think we're in Guelph anymore.

A short summary (with links).

Where are we? Well, right across the country. Only now, instead of just watching the TV news and wondering about the veracity of the reports, you can go look for yourself at archived comments that were posted one and two days before the last federal election.

Starting with the statement from the Chief Electoral Officer, then moving on to the digging done by one of The Gazetteers readers we move out of Guelph completely.

From the online comments of two people posted on 30 April 2011 and 1 May 2011 we have Halifax, Nova Scotia originated calls from the Conservative Party of Canada that went out to Fredricton, New Brunswick and to Mission, British Columbia.

Not robocalls - live calls. In both cases the caller attempted to mislead voters by announcing a change in voting location.

Does the thought, "centrally coordinated national voter-suppression strategy" start to drift through your brain?

More pretty dots. More evidence

Go over to The Gazetteer and watch the video of the CBC report. Then go down and read the first comment from the very diligent North Van Grumps.

On the video a Lori Bruce is interviewed and stated that she had a call from the Conservative Party telling her that her voting place had moved. She googled the number, 902-800-1015, as can be seen during the interview.

Now go here where the number 902-800-1015, the one on Lori Bruce's screen, is the subject of some complaining. Scroll down to a comment left on 30 Apr 2011 by one LoriB.

Here is what she said then:

I just got a call from this number. They told me the location where I vote on Monday has changed.  I called Elections Canada and was told the location has not changed and I was not the first call they had today asking the same thing.

Lori Bruce is in Fredricton New Brunswick.

Now go to the comment just below by Astrid back on 1 May 2011.

Received the 6th or 7th call in two weeks from the Conservative Party. This last one, about an hour ago, she told me locations to vote had changed, Told her no, I know where it is, this is after I declared "oh, no, not again". Are these people just so desperate?
Worst call came form Randy Kamp's (MLA) office in Mission, the man actually demanded that I tell him who I am voting for. Made it perfectly clear that that was NONE of his business.
Am going to contact Elections Canada and register a complaint too.

Astrid appears to be in the riding of Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission, British Columbia where Randy Kamp, Conservative, is the MP.

Comments left on a site a few days before the last election, from ridings on either side of the country - not Guelph.

Must add:  Area code 902 covers Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Fredricton is in area code 506. Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission is in area code 604 and 778. The prefix 800 in area code 902 is in Halifax.
 

And into the valley of The Vanished rode the 2700

Ah, the lyrical pleasures enjoyed in the energy of the poetry of historical calamities. How Victorian.

Well, it's not the 19th Century, Rotten Boroughs are supposed to be a thing of the past and ... stuffing ballot boxes, carousel voting and direct diddling of the sytem is so much more 21st Century.

What's new is that an influx of unregistered voters somehow got on the voters list in Eglinton-Lawrence without providing the address information that Elections Canada requires. At least 2,700 such applications were approved and signed by an elections official so that the applicant could vote. But an examination by CBC News shows most of them have address problems. Some give addresses of a bank or a UPS store, where nobody lives. Others have no address at all. And most have no previous address — which is required to ensure that voters aren't on the list at both old and new residences.

And as for the MP representing the riding?

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is calling allegations that Elections Canada rules were violated in his riding during the last election "unsavoury," and says he will co-operate with any investigation into the matter.
"We conducted a completely clean campaign in Eglinton-Lawrence. I was very pleased that we won by over 4,000 votes," Oliver told reporters at an event in St. John's on Thursday. "I have no idea what this is about."

Oh yes. Joe Oliver is simply aghast! And he's hardly taken to exaggeration. He who suggests that anybody who speaks in opposition to his plans at a public hearing on moving tar are "hijacking" them.

My BS detection meter just pinned.

Welcome to the World Stage of Harper. He now stands accused, possessing the reins of government, with those who engaged in cooping, caging, stuffing and smearing. 

It is one thing, as repugnant to me as it is, to cavalierly treat my tax remittances as though they are some freely given gift for government inners to spend on themselves. It is quite another, and far beyond the realm of forgiveness, to perform a rape on the inaliable treasure that is the power of a single legitimate vote.

Regardless of the reforms in the electoral system myself and other may seek, there is no thing more sacred than that one guarantee that I, and every other voter possessed: The right to particpate in the determination of the direction of my government, undiminished.

Any REAL prime minister would defend that guarantee to the detriment of his/her own position, foresaking party politics, defending, to the death if necessary, the electoral foundations on which the democracy resides.

Not so, Stephen Harper.

If I were but the only one so angry. But I'm not.

And now, they're going to celebrate.

Why do I think the Conservatives are dirty?

Here's one reason. They violated the Elections Act in 2006, paid a fine for it and then tried to sue Elections Canada.

Today they lost.

I'm sure there will be people drifting by who suggest that dropping an appeal is not a loss. Let me just put it this way: Bullshit.

They lost. Ask any lawyer, ask any judge. They broke the law and got caught.

Now go read Impolitical for even more juice on this one.

The dirtier it is, the dirtier it gets

McGregor and Maher pull out another one.

Elections Canada investigators probing the robocalls scandal are interviewing workers on the Conservative campaign in Guelph, Ont., and trying to determine why payments made to an Edmonton voice-broadcasting company were not declared in financial reports filed with the agency.

In recent days, the agency has spoken to at least three workers from the campaign of Conservative candidate Marty Burke, including the official agent responsible for ensuring the campaign's financial report was accurate.

Elections Canada wants to know why the costs of automated calls the campaign has admitted sending out never appeared in the campaign's expense report, as required by law.

Oh... dear. It actually gets better. Read the whole thing. 

The novel Cooking The Books, by Bonnie S. Calhoun is available at your local bookstore.

And on the maple flag side...

There's this from Cathie.

Oh dear! Did the Harper government lie to us again?

A federal agency created by the Harper government with great political fanfare in 2008 is costing millions of dollars to achieve pretty much nothing.

The Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board has just about everything a budding government agency could want.

So far, it has spent over $3.3 million for new offices, computers and furniture, well-paid executives and staff, travel budgets, expense accounts, board meetings, and lots of pricey consultants.

All that's missing is a reason for it to exist at all.

Personally, I hate it when that happens. 

Now that it's over, let's get started. BC Rail ain't near dead yet

The sudden termination of the BC Rail trial, convenient in that it comes just days before BC premier and convicted drunk driver Gordon Campbell addresses the citizens of British Columbia while they're washing up from supper on 27 October, doesn't mean it's all over.

As The Gazetteer points out, with the sham over and the judicial gag order ended, we can start asking questions again and we can start pointing at facts and timelines which were hitherto subject to a publication ban.

One of the mysteries of the whole BC Rail sale scandal was the sudden and unexpected departure of BC Rail point man and then BC Finance Minister, Gary Collins. There is speculation that Collins was about to be interviewed by the RCMP regarding certain cabinet documents. Indeed, Collins was to be next into the witness box when the defendants of the corruption trial suddenly changed their pleas to "guilty" and prevented the defence examination of Collins.

Convenient. And it remains just as mysterious. The question now centers around whether certain lawyers and deputy ministers were involved in an obstruction of justice and whether there was a violation of the Dhom Protocol, a court ordered procedure to allow police access to cabinet documents. If there was such a violation then the parties involved were in contempt of court.

A further question exists: Was Gary Collins warned in advance that he was to be questioned by the RCMP? And if so, who warned him?

Well it’s over now.  So where’s the investigation into obstruction of justice and other violations of the Criminal Code with respect to the Premier’s office handling of documents at the heart of the investigation?

What we really need to know is this.  Could Dobell have warned Gary Collins that he was about to be interviewed by the RCMP regarding key documents in the case?  After all he met him in cabinet at least once a week.  And doesn’t that constitute contempt of Justice Dohm’s order?  Or maybe even obstruction of justice?

Gary Collins was supposed to be next up.  Wouldn’t those be questions the defence might have wanted to ask?  How convenient for the Premier’s office that that won’t take place now.

Back to that 27 October, 7 pm address by Campbell on Global TV. You can make book that the BC Rail sale and the corruption which surrounded it won't be mentioned. This will be Campbell pleading for his political life over the fiasco created by the introduction of Harmonized Sales Tax. While that event has cut the residents of BC to the quick, it is nothing to compared to the waste laid to the province by a bunch of right-wing ideologues who regularly demonstrate that they hate all but the wealthiest of BC's citizens.

For a list you have to read Laila Yuile. And we should all read Laila Yuile.

US Supreme Court unravellings

Oh yeah. When the togas come off the Bush appointees look pretty much like every other corrupt conservative.

John Roberts.

I'm investigating articles of impeachment against Justice Roberts for perjuring during his Senate hearings

But that doesn't even touch what Clarence Thomas is facing. 

The ex-girlfriend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says he was "obsessed" with pornography and made lewd sexual references to the women he worked with.

Nearly two decades after Anita Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her, Lillian McEwen, who dated Thomas in the 1980s, says Hill's allegations are not unfounded.

That's so cool. Especially since Thomas' wife made an early morning (couldn't have been drunk) phone call to Anita Hill demanding she apologize for her testimony at Thomas' confirmation hearings.
Tea Partiers have a habit of doing stupid things. And they are pretty good at finding their way around a law. You see, the decision which John Roberts handed down, in a case that was not before the Supreme Court, has a direct impact on Ginni Thomas, whose paycheque comes from anonymous financial donors now permitted to remain anonymous thanks to Roberts and his activist interference in a case the Supreme Court should never have heard.

Liberty Central, the organization founded by Virginia Thomas, has accepted a great deal of money from secret donors, all of which is legal under the Supreme Court's 2010 decision striking down many of the previous limits on campaign spending. But Gillers notes Virginia Thomas is CEO and president of the group and that an opportunistic donor, by giving money to an organization that pays Virginia Thomas' salary, is in fact giving a financial benefit to Justice Thomas, too. And that could constitute a financial conflict.

Divorce will occur, of course, only if the rules of the spouse swapping party are violated. Even conservatives have their limits.