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Hell in a handbasket
17 January 2006
[indent]Every time I get righteously angry and then morose over Canada's apparently growing support for Steven Harper, I get yanked back to reality by another Liberal politico or appointee whose high-on-the-hog lifestyle or evident abuses of power embarrass and shame me.
It's not merely the Gomery inquiry, or the Option Canada scandal, although they're still festering in voters' minds.
It's not just the RCMP investigation into possible leaks of confidential tax policy information about income trusts from Finance Minister Goodale's office to stock market analysts, although that still lingers in the wind like a fart at a funeral.
It seems every day we hear some new tale of woe, some new scandal that shakes Canadians and further erodes our faith in the government. That shaken faith has become a landslide down the talus slope of 12 years of Liberal rule.
Take for example our limo-boy Joe Volpe:
A round trip to Buffalo - about 60 miles or 94 km away - and for that we taxpayers shelled out more than $1,000 per trip. According to Statistics Canada, the average salary for a Canadian male is $39,100, and $24,800 for a female. On an average year, working 250 days a year, a man gets $156 a day, a woman $99. Volpe's $1,000 limo rides to cities two or less hours away are 6.5 to 10 times more than the average Canadian makes in a day.
But Volpe's not only big on riding in true plush-Liberal style on the taxpayers' back. He eats off us, too. The same story noted that between March 2 and June 1 - three short months - Volpe "charged more than $7,000 in meals to taxpayers." What meals is he charging for such a huge amount in such a short time? That's equivalent to three months' income for many Canadians! Don't we pay him enough salary? He gets $230,000 a year, after all!
Must be nice to be able to dip into someone else's pockets instead of your own salary when you're wining and dining, eh? If Paul Martin speaks for honesty and accountability, how could he allow this to go on without taking action to rein in Volpe's spending?
And then there's David Dingwall, former president of the Royal Canadian Mint, whose attitude to spending taxpayer's money on his own luxurious well-heeled life was second only to the former Liberal-appointed Governor General Adrienne Clarkson (a.k.a. Queen Adrienne - Canada's answer to Marie Antionette had Canadians wishing she had brought the guillotine along with her lavish lifestyle - see note 1).
When his expenses were made public and the whiff of scandal bit the wind, Dingwall resigned from his Liberal-appointed patronage post befoer he could be taken down by public outrage.
Dingwall's tenure has been exposed for his posh lifestyle and exorbitant expense account claims on our nickel. You remember: he's the guy who charged taxpayers for everything, even for a package of gum. I guess it's tough trying to live on only $277,000 a year.
Dingwall and two of his cronies managed to rack up $740,000 in expense claims in only two years. That averages to more than $8,200 a month per person - 2.5 times what the average Canadian male makes in a year, almost 4 times what the average Canadian female makes. Wasn't it enough that his salary was more than seven times greater than what the average Canadian male makes, even without his lavish expense account?
According to the Calgary Sun, Dingwall is fighting for a rich and meaty severance package, despite the fact that he quit. Legally he's entitled to only $10,000 tops (if you or I quit our jobs, we get nada, but if a patronage boy quits, he's entitled to suck just a little more from the public teat - $5,000 per year of employment). Word is he's trying to grab $500,000 - that's right: half-a-million tax dollars - instead.
Dingwall is the poster boy for the Liberal "Culture of Entitlement." The award for the "Biggest Snout in the Trough" goes to David Dingwall. But why, we ask, has the government not taken legal action against his prolifigate waste of taxpayers' money and made attempts to recover our losses?
Tony Valeri, Liberal House Leader, purchased a property in April 2005 for $225,000. In less than three months, he sold it to a Liberal financial supporter sold for $500,000. But the 2005 property tax assessment listed the value of the property at $201,000. (See the Conservative site).
Is this the sort of financial behaviour condoned by the party? If not, why has Valeri not been publicly chastised?
Lest we forget about Liberal MP Sarmite Bulte, who is pushing for major changes in the Copyright Act (i.e. the "Americanization" of the Act), changes supported (one might say "demanded") by the lobbyists for the American entertainment industry - the very people, Michael Geist reports - who are funding Bulte's campaign and hosting a big fundraising dinner for her this week. See also this item.
Bulte's pro-lobbyist stance towards copyright even led her to shut her own colleagues out of meetings on copyright issues.
Adding to the fire, the executive director of the Canadian Publishers' Council is one of the hosts of the upcoming fundraiser for Bulte. Last year, the CPC was given a $20,000 contract to implement a “copyright awareness initiative.” That's $20,000 of your money given to the people paying for Bulte's dinner, the people pushing Bulte to make the changes to the Act, so that they can spread THEIR message on the Internet. Not bad what a dinner can buy, eh?
Paul Martin says he stands up for Canadian rights against American corporate interests - yet his own MP is actively working to support the goals of American corporate lobbyists against Canadian interests, and Martin has done nothing to restrain her. Do words count more than deeds?
It's not merely the recent revelations that Canadian taxpayers paid $1 million of our money to Liberal-friendly advertising firms to develop the "Canada" logo - the word Canada with a small Canadian flag above the last letter "a".
Then we learned that the very same wordmark had been in use in federal ads as far back as 1977. Oops.
One of the firms that got a share of the $1 million was Groupe Everest, owned by Claude Boulay, a friend of Prime Minister Paul Martin, and whose firm worked on Martin's 1990 leadership campaign. Boulay's firms received $55 million in federal government advertising contracts - but neither Judge Gomery nor Auditor General Sheila Fraser could uncover any work they did to justify the money. But they did find out that, between 1996 and 2003, these companies donated more than $173,000 back to the federal Liberal party funds.
Maybe $1 million given to Liberal-friendly companies isn't a huge waste of your tax dollars. But it's a lot more than I'll ever have. More to the point, these companies also got $55 million in contracts for...? No one seems to know. All we know for certain is that it was our tax dollars that they took, and the Liberals didn't seem concerned about handing it over. Why is no one being punished?
Nor is it merely the accusations that Liberal MP Bob Speller is using fake endorsements - all written by fellow MPs or campaign organizers - saying people want him back in office.
Is this the ethical standard Martin expects of his MPs? Canadian voters expect better, however.
What about Mike Klander, the bigwig Liberal campaign manager who was forced to quit when he published a tasteless "separated at birth" image comparing NDP Jack Layton's wife, Olivia Chow with a "Chow Chow" dog? He even called Layton an a**hole, which may be his private opinion, but has no place on the blog of a campaign executive. Even former Liberal minister, Sheila Copps, slammed Klander's blog comments.
But then, she's slamming everything to do with martin these days.
Or Industry Minister David Emerson's comment to BC supporters about Jack Layton's "boiled dog's head smile." Layton, however, was mature enough to brush off Emerson's insult as a "descent into silliness."
And no, it's not just the accusations of financial impropriety in Liberal candidate Blair Wilson's past.
Or accusations that Liberal MP Anne Maclellan claimed to have spent more money in damaged signs than she admitted spending in her entire advertising budget in 2004.
Perhaps it's the exposure of a $700,000 federally-funded Liberal program to allow prison inmates to get free tattoos. Or another Correctional Services program that pays convicted murderers $41,000 a year to escort other prisoners on community outings. I don't make $41,000 a year. It seems what I need to do to get that sort of salary is to kill someone. That's some incentive to the minimum wage earner at the local big-box store...
And it isn't just because Ben Trister, the chair of the Liberal-created Society of Immigration Consultants, quit in November, expressing disgust because other board members voted to pay themselves $60,000 a year out of membership funds to attend 12 one-day meetings! The Society is meant to give immigration consultants who charge a fee for their services the right to deal with the three federal agencies involved with immigration matters. It received a grant of $1 million in taxpayer funds for start-up expenses from the Liberals. Two CEOs, a governance expert and another board member all quit the society over its alleged mismanagement of funds and power. But despite the publicity around the resignations, the government did nothing to intervene or correct the abuses.
I'm not terribly upset that the Liberals are apparently deep in debt according to the Toronto Sun: But given their past behaviour with regards to funnelling our money from the public purse back into their party pockets, it does make me nervous about their future behaviour.
No it's not any one thing that concerns me. It's everything.
It's all of the above. It's all of the outrages and abuses combined that really pisses me off.
I really want the Liberals to be good, honest, incorruptible, free of the taint of scandal. The Good Guys. I really wanted the Liberals to be the bastions of freedom, social justice, honesty and defenders of our Canadian way of life. And the stalwart champions who would unseat Steven Harper (it's not the Conservatives, mind you, that I dislike - just Steven Harper, who I worry will imprint the nation a vision very different from what I have grown up believing is Canada and Canadian).
I really wanted the Liberals to defend our national honour, stand up for medicare and against the Americans. I really wanted them to show they cared about Canada and Canadians. Instead they've shown they care a lot - about themselves. About the money they've been able to rake in. About how well-padded their expense accounts are.
The Liberals DO have a record they should be proud of, and have accomplished many positive, beneficial things for Canada. As Maclean's writer Paul Wells notes,
But, as Anthony said of Caesar in Shakespeare's play, the evil men do live after them. the good is oft interred with their bones.
So who will win? The Oracle of Ottawa links to a prediction of a Conservative minority. But the latest Hill & Knowlton prediction says a thin Conservative majority. But at 156, it's a majority nonetheless (there are 308 seats to be won across the country: a majority is 155). Play with the Hill & Knowlton page - you can see that a 5% swing from the NDP to the Liberals could give the Liberals the majority. And who knows how Canadians will react when they get into the voting booth? Maybe they'll get cold feet (as they did last election) and vote for anyone but Harper. Or worse, maybe the lemming-like stampede to the right will continue right through the polling station...
All the polls to the contrary, I hope I don't see a Conservative majority. I might stomach a Conservative minority, however. That would means Harper will have to swallow his pride and work with Jack Layton. That might mitigate some of the damage he can cause.
For more bloggers on the election, see the Infozone, Angry in the Great White North, Small Dead Animals, and Ian Adam's local East End Underground.
Note 1: It's probably merely coincidental that a Haitian-Canadian-Quebecois was chosen as the new GG. Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew was elected by a mere 468 votes in in 2004, only one percent ahead of the Bloc Quebecois candidate. Pettigrew's riding is home to 4,400 Canadians of Haitian heritage. Could the appointment of Michaelle Jean to the patronage trough, I mean the GG, be mere vote-buying? Nah, that's too cynical... the Liberals wouldn't stoop to anything that blatant... probably nothing to do with the accusations that Canada interfered in Haitian elections either...
[/indent]
It's not merely the Gomery inquiry, or the Option Canada scandal, although they're still festering in voters' minds.
It's not just the RCMP investigation into possible leaks of confidential tax policy information about income trusts from Finance Minister Goodale's office to stock market analysts, although that still lingers in the wind like a fart at a funeral.
It seems every day we hear some new tale of woe, some new scandal that shakes Canadians and further erodes our faith in the government. That shaken faith has become a landslide down the talus slope of 12 years of Liberal rule.
Take for example our limo-boy Joe Volpe:
Quote
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Joe Volpe rented limos to ferry him on long trips from Toronto last year, with one ride to Buffalo and back costing more than $1,000, Sun Media has learned.
From Canoe News
From Canoe News
A round trip to Buffalo - about 60 miles or 94 km away - and for that we taxpayers shelled out more than $1,000 per trip. According to Statistics Canada, the average salary for a Canadian male is $39,100, and $24,800 for a female. On an average year, working 250 days a year, a man gets $156 a day, a woman $99. Volpe's $1,000 limo rides to cities two or less hours away are 6.5 to 10 times more than the average Canadian makes in a day.
But Volpe's not only big on riding in true plush-Liberal style on the taxpayers' back. He eats off us, too. The same story noted that between March 2 and June 1 - three short months - Volpe "charged more than $7,000 in meals to taxpayers." What meals is he charging for such a huge amount in such a short time? That's equivalent to three months' income for many Canadians! Don't we pay him enough salary? He gets $230,000 a year, after all!
Must be nice to be able to dip into someone else's pockets instead of your own salary when you're wining and dining, eh? If Paul Martin speaks for honesty and accountability, how could he allow this to go on without taking action to rein in Volpe's spending?
And then there's David Dingwall, former president of the Royal Canadian Mint, whose attitude to spending taxpayer's money on his own luxurious well-heeled life was second only to the former Liberal-appointed Governor General Adrienne Clarkson (a.k.a. Queen Adrienne - Canada's answer to Marie Antionette had Canadians wishing she had brought the guillotine along with her lavish lifestyle - see note 1).
When his expenses were made public and the whiff of scandal bit the wind, Dingwall resigned from his Liberal-appointed patronage post befoer he could be taken down by public outrage.
Dingwall's tenure has been exposed for his posh lifestyle and exorbitant expense account claims on our nickel. You remember: he's the guy who charged taxpayers for everything, even for a package of gum. I guess it's tough trying to live on only $277,000 a year.
Dingwall and two of his cronies managed to rack up $740,000 in expense claims in only two years. That averages to more than $8,200 a month per person - 2.5 times what the average Canadian male makes in a year, almost 4 times what the average Canadian female makes. Wasn't it enough that his salary was more than seven times greater than what the average Canadian male makes, even without his lavish expense account?
According to the Calgary Sun, Dingwall is fighting for a rich and meaty severance package, despite the fact that he quit. Legally he's entitled to only $10,000 tops (if you or I quit our jobs, we get nada, but if a patronage boy quits, he's entitled to suck just a little more from the public teat - $5,000 per year of employment). Word is he's trying to grab $500,000 - that's right: half-a-million tax dollars - instead.
Dingwall is the poster boy for the Liberal "Culture of Entitlement." The award for the "Biggest Snout in the Trough" goes to David Dingwall. But why, we ask, has the government not taken legal action against his prolifigate waste of taxpayers' money and made attempts to recover our losses?
Tony Valeri, Liberal House Leader, purchased a property in April 2005 for $225,000. In less than three months, he sold it to a Liberal financial supporter sold for $500,000. But the 2005 property tax assessment listed the value of the property at $201,000. (See the Conservative site).
Is this the sort of financial behaviour condoned by the party? If not, why has Valeri not been publicly chastised?
Lest we forget about Liberal MP Sarmite Bulte, who is pushing for major changes in the Copyright Act (i.e. the "Americanization" of the Act), changes supported (one might say "demanded") by the lobbyists for the American entertainment industry - the very people, Michael Geist reports - who are funding Bulte's campaign and hosting a big fundraising dinner for her this week. See also this item.
Bulte's pro-lobbyist stance towards copyright even led her to shut her own colleagues out of meetings on copyright issues.
Quote
During Bulte' s tenure as chair of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in 2004, the committee was perceived to be decidedly pro-copyright lobby with panels stacked against user interests.
Adding to the fire, the executive director of the Canadian Publishers' Council is one of the hosts of the upcoming fundraiser for Bulte. Last year, the CPC was given a $20,000 contract to implement a “copyright awareness initiative.” That's $20,000 of your money given to the people paying for Bulte's dinner, the people pushing Bulte to make the changes to the Act, so that they can spread THEIR message on the Internet. Not bad what a dinner can buy, eh?
Paul Martin says he stands up for Canadian rights against American corporate interests - yet his own MP is actively working to support the goals of American corporate lobbyists against Canadian interests, and Martin has done nothing to restrain her. Do words count more than deeds?
It's not merely the recent revelations that Canadian taxpayers paid $1 million of our money to Liberal-friendly advertising firms to develop the "Canada" logo - the word Canada with a small Canadian flag above the last letter "a".
Then we learned that the very same wordmark had been in use in federal ads as far back as 1977. Oops.
One of the firms that got a share of the $1 million was Groupe Everest, owned by Claude Boulay, a friend of Prime Minister Paul Martin, and whose firm worked on Martin's 1990 leadership campaign. Boulay's firms received $55 million in federal government advertising contracts - but neither Judge Gomery nor Auditor General Sheila Fraser could uncover any work they did to justify the money. But they did find out that, between 1996 and 2003, these companies donated more than $173,000 back to the federal Liberal party funds.
Maybe $1 million given to Liberal-friendly companies isn't a huge waste of your tax dollars. But it's a lot more than I'll ever have. More to the point, these companies also got $55 million in contracts for...? No one seems to know. All we know for certain is that it was our tax dollars that they took, and the Liberals didn't seem concerned about handing it over. Why is no one being punished?
Nor is it merely the accusations that Liberal MP Bob Speller is using fake endorsements - all written by fellow MPs or campaign organizers - saying people want him back in office.
Is this the ethical standard Martin expects of his MPs? Canadian voters expect better, however.
What about Mike Klander, the bigwig Liberal campaign manager who was forced to quit when he published a tasteless "separated at birth" image comparing NDP Jack Layton's wife, Olivia Chow with a "Chow Chow" dog? He even called Layton an a**hole, which may be his private opinion, but has no place on the blog of a campaign executive. Even former Liberal minister, Sheila Copps, slammed Klander's blog comments.
But then, she's slamming everything to do with martin these days.
Or Industry Minister David Emerson's comment to BC supporters about Jack Layton's "boiled dog's head smile." Layton, however, was mature enough to brush off Emerson's insult as a "descent into silliness."
And no, it's not just the accusations of financial impropriety in Liberal candidate Blair Wilson's past.
Or accusations that Liberal MP Anne Maclellan claimed to have spent more money in damaged signs than she admitted spending in her entire advertising budget in 2004.
Perhaps it's the exposure of a $700,000 federally-funded Liberal program to allow prison inmates to get free tattoos. Or another Correctional Services program that pays convicted murderers $41,000 a year to escort other prisoners on community outings. I don't make $41,000 a year. It seems what I need to do to get that sort of salary is to kill someone. That's some incentive to the minimum wage earner at the local big-box store...
And it isn't just because Ben Trister, the chair of the Liberal-created Society of Immigration Consultants, quit in November, expressing disgust because other board members voted to pay themselves $60,000 a year out of membership funds to attend 12 one-day meetings! The Society is meant to give immigration consultants who charge a fee for their services the right to deal with the three federal agencies involved with immigration matters. It received a grant of $1 million in taxpayer funds for start-up expenses from the Liberals. Two CEOs, a governance expert and another board member all quit the society over its alleged mismanagement of funds and power. But despite the publicity around the resignations, the government did nothing to intervene or correct the abuses.
I'm not terribly upset that the Liberals are apparently deep in debt according to the Toronto Sun:
Quote
According to Elections Canada, in their last annual filing, the Liberal Party of Canada was $34,818,257.32 in debt, by way of 13 bank loans. The Bloc Quebecois has more than $10 million in outstanding loans, mostly from the Caisse Desjardins. The NDP has several modest loans outstanding, totalling a little more than $3 million. The Conservatives are debt-free.
No it's not any one thing that concerns me. It's everything.
It's all of the above. It's all of the outrages and abuses combined that really pisses me off.
I really want the Liberals to be good, honest, incorruptible, free of the taint of scandal. The Good Guys. I really wanted the Liberals to be the bastions of freedom, social justice, honesty and defenders of our Canadian way of life. And the stalwart champions who would unseat Steven Harper (it's not the Conservatives, mind you, that I dislike - just Steven Harper, who I worry will imprint the nation a vision very different from what I have grown up believing is Canada and Canadian).
I really wanted the Liberals to defend our national honour, stand up for medicare and against the Americans. I really wanted them to show they cared about Canada and Canadians. Instead they've shown they care a lot - about themselves. About the money they've been able to rake in. About how well-padded their expense accounts are.
The Liberals DO have a record they should be proud of, and have accomplished many positive, beneficial things for Canada. As Maclean's writer Paul Wells notes,
Quote
The ironic thing of all of this is that the Liberal Party has done wonderful things for research and education in this country over the past decade. By and large, they have a record they should be proud of: through their policies, they have positioned Canada for future excellence in a number of key areas. Meanwhile, the NDP and the Conservatives have been ominously silent on research and education, enough to give any academic administrator serious anxiety as the polls currently veer towards a Conservative majority government.
But, as Anthony said of Caesar in Shakespeare's play, the evil men do live after them. the good is oft interred with their bones.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
So who will win? The Oracle of Ottawa links to a prediction of a Conservative minority. But the latest Hill & Knowlton prediction says a thin Conservative majority. But at 156, it's a majority nonetheless (there are 308 seats to be won across the country: a majority is 155). Play with the Hill & Knowlton page - you can see that a 5% swing from the NDP to the Liberals could give the Liberals the majority. And who knows how Canadians will react when they get into the voting booth? Maybe they'll get cold feet (as they did last election) and vote for anyone but Harper. Or worse, maybe the lemming-like stampede to the right will continue right through the polling station...
All the polls to the contrary, I hope I don't see a Conservative majority. I might stomach a Conservative minority, however. That would means Harper will have to swallow his pride and work with Jack Layton. That might mitigate some of the damage he can cause.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
For more bloggers on the election, see the Infozone, Angry in the Great White North, Small Dead Animals, and Ian Adam's local East End Underground.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Note 1: It's probably merely coincidental that a Haitian-Canadian-Quebecois was chosen as the new GG. Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew was elected by a mere 468 votes in in 2004, only one percent ahead of the Bloc Quebecois candidate. Pettigrew's riding is home to 4,400 Canadians of Haitian heritage. Could the appointment of Michaelle Jean to the patronage trough, I mean the GG, be mere vote-buying? Nah, that's too cynical... the Liberals wouldn't stoop to anything that blatant... probably nothing to do with the accusations that Canada interfered in Haitian elections either...
[/indent]
