“The federal government has approved plans to build a magnificent $42-million glass dome on Parliament Hill as a new home for the House of Commons — a temporary one.”

Uh, but don’t worry, they’re not letting politicians expense out for iPads yet.

I noted the Conservative government must done something wrong today when I saw the needle throttling deeply into the red of the internet outrage meter. Every web story pointing to International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda and her now famous insertion of the word “not” in a departmental memo is hemorrhaging unpleasant comments about the autocratic tendencies of the Conservatives. To wit, hyperbolic leftwing polemicist Murray Dobbin wasted little time in comparing Canada’s government to Egypt’s Mubarak and “political thuggery worthy of a dictatorship.”

Yes, well, while I’m sure it tickles some people to no end to compare Canada to the third world, the truth is that in most countries like Egypt the people would never have heard about this at all.

“Any reasonable person confronted with what appears to have transpired would necessarily be extremely concerned, if not shocked, and might well begin to doubt the integrity of certain decision-making processes,” said House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken.

Well, it’s true that I’m shocked and concerned, but not immediately about the insertion of the word “not” on a document that revoked the funding for the anti-Israeli organization Kairos. No, I’m shocked and concerned that it actually requires the unilateral oversight of the minister herself to stop the government from needlessly and wastefully funding organizations with federal tax dollars that have little to no benefit for Canadians.

What surprises me is that a government can spend $1 billion for security on a wasteful and unnecessary economic summit with G22 countries, but what really riles people up is the idea of cutting off $7 million in federal aid to an insignificant and obscure church with clear and unequivocal political biases.

I can only really shake my head that it’s come to this. Did Bev Oda really feel that the only way to remove funding from Kairos was to overrule her department? And if so, what does this tell us about the difficulty of dismantling the welfare state? When cutting just one organization from the taxpayer trough requires this kind of ministerial interference and registers this level of public outrage, it is demonstrative of our entrenched culture of entitlement.

Shocked and concerned? Yes, that CIDA had signed off on continuing to fund this blatantly partisan organization despite the clear evidence that it had become vocal in “Israeli apartheid” rhetoric and “buycott” activism. It goes to show that the governmental Leviathan is so riddled with tiny suckerfish like Kairos that they don’t even know how to begin to identify the waste. It’s the reason that Tamil aid fronts in Canada were able to fund the Tigers in Sri Lanka for so many years.

I’m sure I don’t know why the minister even needs to provide a reason for cutting off the organizations sponsored by CIDA. But certainly one can argue with her methods. The problem isn’t the perfectly reasonable discontinuance of funding, but that she did so by misrepresenting her department.

“In particular, the senior CIDA officials concerned must be deeply disturbed by the doctored document they have been made to appear to have signed,” Milliken said in the House of Commons.

Though it has come to light today that the inclusion of the word “not” in the memo was only a departmental shortcoming whereby there was no space for the minister to reject the recommendations of her department, she made it sound as though the decision for the cuts had been departmental. I can understand the bureaucrats being upset at being pointed at for a decision they never made. In this respect the criticisms of Oda are justified. Added to this is the appearance she deliberately lied to Parliament and might now be found in contempt for her earlier answers to MPs.

It casts into question the competency of the minister when she considers it a reasonable thing to misrepresent other people. Surely she could have found the support of the government and the public at large to simply overrule the bureaucracy. Following this decision by lying about not knowing who put in the “not” speaks to her character.

[This blog entry has been significantly edited from its original form to reflect ongoing developments]

MORE TO THE STORY

It would appear that some people have done some deeper investigation and came up with an interesting, if not entirely satisfactory, reason for the insertion of the word “not”. From the minutes of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development that grilled Bev Oda on Dec. 9:

Mr. Jean Dorion:

Ms. Biggs, was the word “not” handwritten on the form that you signed on September 28, two months before the minister signed it?

Ms. Margaret Biggs:

No, it wasn’t, sir.

Mr. Jean Dorion:

So then, when you signed the form, you were in fact giving your approval. You were recommending approval, since the form states:
“Recommendation: That you sign below to indicate you approve a contribution of $7,098,756 over four years for the above program.”
So then, on September 28, you were recommending that the minister approve the project.

Ms. Margaret Biggs:

Yes, I think as the minister said, the agency did recommend the project to the minister. She has indicated that. But it was her decision, after due consideration, to not accept the department’s advice.
This is quite normal, and I certainly was aware of her decision. The inclusion of the word “not” is just a simple reflection of what her decision was, and she has been clear. So that’s quite normal.
I think we have changed the format for these memos so the minister has a much clearer place to put where she doesn’t want to accept the advice, which is her prerogative.

What’s interesting is that if you continue to read the transcript, it does indicate that Oda previous assertion that Kairos didn’t meet CIDA’s funding criteria was false. Oda defended by arguing that it was her decision that the best value for taxpayers’ dollars was not being achieved by continuing to fund Kairos as recommended by her department, and she overruled them. She did, however, appear to lie about being the author of the word “not” on the document that she has admitted today was her word. The question now is why did she not simply explain this on Dec. 9?

Of all the esoteric rules in Ottawa to hunt down, Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis seems to have found the winner. Apparently, the MP has emailed the ethics commissioner over the only Conservative Party TV ad that isn’t offensive, because it appears to have been filmed in the prime minister’s office.

Presently the rules forbid parliamentarians from using the House of Commons “as a prop for election and party purposes.” But, in a surprising defence of the ad, Kady O’Malley notes an April 29, 2010 report from Mary Dawson, the federal ethics commissioner, which states “the Code refers only to persons, and not to entities.” So the Conservative Party appears safe from this latest Liberal thrust.

That isn’t the only controversy arising from the Conservative ads that haven’t yet aired on television. According to the Chronicle Herald, the CBC is upset that the Conservatives are using file footage from the broadcaster without permission. A little strange, considering the footage can hardly be identified as being the CBC’s, and besides the broadcaster is a crown corporation. So surely the footage belongs to everybody.

”The journalistic integrity of CBC-Radio-Canada — of the national public broadcaster — and its political neutrality require that our material not be used in partisan advertising,” CBC spokesman Marco Dube said Tuesday.

Excuse some of us in the bleachers for guffawing at the mention of the CBC needing to defend its “political neutrality.”

But what’s strange about Karygiannis’s request to have the ad with the House of Commons footage banned is that it’s the only one that really inspires a positive message and doesn’t depend on half-truths and character assassination.

Although the claims about the stimulus spending, saving jobs and GST benefits are debatable, the image of the Prime Minister working late, by himself, in the dark hallways of Parliament Hill are very effective (though they do seem to invite a Rick Mercer spoof). And by all accounts, it’s fairly accurate. The prime minster isn’t exactly known as a slacker.

Compare that one to the attack ad that asserts Ignatieff will jump into bed with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois at the first opportunity to form a coalition government. Does anyone actually believe this is still a possibility?

Worse yet, the quotes from Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff being used by the Conservatives are taken out of context, and suggest not only a lack of proper patriotism but an active will to destroy Canada. Indeed, it’s exactly the kind of yellow journalism that most conservatives are accusing the media of perpetrating on a regular basis. It’s an utter waste of political donation dollars.

I’d like to see more ads like the one Karygiannis wants banned. The kind that talk about the positive aspects of the Conservative record. The rest is just mud-slinging in the playground.

…then the lower house of our Parliament is confirmed in its massive mediocrity.  Take a look at this post by David Akin of QMI Agency (Sun Media):

My picks for the year’s top MPs

Might Mr Akin also perchance be currying up a bit of favour, i.e. sources?

Mark
Ottawa

Photograph: The Globe and Mail

The ugly, divisive, politically motivated “Afghan detainee scandal” came to a head today in the House of Commons, after House Speaker Peter Milliken gave the government two weeks to hand over the documents which the federal Conservative government say are state secrets. The ruling has precipitated the expectation that the government will not comply with the demand, forcing a confidence vote and an election.

If it does come to that, there will be hell to pay for downing the government over such a peripheral, unimportant issue. It’s bad enough that Canada has completely dropped the ball on the Afghan mission, turning what was supposed to be a Parliamentary Commission on the mission in Afghanistan to report on and recommend changes and improvements in the country, into something of an arm of the opposition party to investigate ridiculous second-hand torture claims.

But to actually defeat the government over something that happened over three years ago, and mainly because of a flawed transfer agreement initially created in haste by the dithering outgoing Liberal-Martin government, is just too much. To watch the opposition play political games over a mission as important as the one in Afghanistan is nothing short of disgusting.

The Special Parliamentary Committee on Afghanistan initially created in 2008 on the recommendations of the Manley Panel, was supposed to travel to Afghanistan and investigate the direction that Canada should take on the mission there, based on observations and discussions with experts and military personnel. In short, it has done none of that. All it has accomplished is to listen to testimony from people complaining that Canada is “complicit” for torture that may or may not have happened after Canadian Forces obligingly turned over captured enemy combatants to the NDS, as per the terms of the transfer agreement with the sovereign nation of Afghanistan.

The women and children struggling against the Taliban in Afghanistan must be looking to our obsession about the treatment of bearded fanatics for whom a favourite pastime is burning down girls’ schools, and wonder to themselves what we can possibly be doing. The insignificance of the treatment of detainees is ever more apparent as one juxtaposes it to the seemingly ceaseless suicide bombings against civilians and IED’s planted on roads by the Taliban.

If Canada had been besieged by such concern for the treatment of Nazi prisoners of war sixty years ago, there is no question that our country would have abandoned the war effort. This postmodernist, MTV-raised, attention deficit disorder generation of pacifists masquerading as the voting age public of Canada has no idea what it takes to win a war, so susceptible to the propaganda of the enemy are they that they would rather defeat the government over the alleged second-hand treatment of prisoners than win.

“This is a huge victory for democracy,” NDP Leader Jack Layton said ironically, after the statement by the House Speaker.

Yes, democracy. But for whom? Not for Afghanistan, ignored for the past two years as we rifle through tens of thousands of documents about detainee treatment. If we paid one-tenth the attention to the treatment of the innocent in Afghanistan, we might have a more stable, secure country right now.

There will be a backlash if the government is defeated over the issue, although there have been some hints that a “compromise” will be reached. Those paying attention, however, will note that the opposition has repeatedly used extremely unethical wedge issues to play political games in the past several months.

The detainee issue is but one of several wedge issues intended to create the kind of atmosphere ripe for bringing down the government on manufactured outrage. Another one is the backdoor abortion debate Michael Ignatieff started with the maternal health plan for CIDA. Yet another is the gun registry, that blew up in Mr.Ignatieff’s face as not even the Liberals in his own party could contend with such a vote-killing position. Omar Khadr is yet another uncomfortable wedge issue for the opposition, which is quickly gaining a reputation for throwing their support behind brigands and terrorists.

Some Canadians who already think that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are what’s wrong with this country, will welcome such wedge issues with open arms, jumping at the opportunity to defeat the government and go to the polls, just to return yet another minority government. After all, with a public debt of $517 billion and counting, what’s a few hundred million more?

But there will be plenty of us who watched the opposition orchestrate this outrage for nothing more than political benefit. And we will swallow whatever dislike we have for the government record, and punish the opposition for choosing to go to war on detainees, rather than support the war that matters.

OTHER OPINIONS ON THE MATTER

The Speaker took the easy way out:

This opposition fury has too much personal political gain within it to be credible. They are not going to compromise. They are entitled to their entitlements you know.

The Milliken ruling is not a win for anyone:

Every time the redacted documents were released, what did the members on the opposition benches do? They immediately invited the media in to take a look and spoke about what they saw on the televised politics shows.

Nip the institutional game in the bud:

Give Ignatieff, Duceppe and Layton five days worth of meetings. Following that, table a series of proposals on how to arrange document access while waiting for the mission to finish, and make the approval of at least one a matter of confidence.

We shall see then how much the opposition is willing to play games with the institution of the Speaker. Before the two weeks are up we will either have a sworn committee or a dissolved Parliament.

The Shorter Peter Milliken:

Witch hunts do more damage to the hunters. The Libranos’ quest for a smoking gun to lay low the Tories hasn’t yielded the results they wanted. It’s not just a matter of finding something to make the government look bad; it’s finding something to make themselves look good in comparison. They haven’t done so yet, and it’s not likely that this lot ever will.

It may interest you to know that the former Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, is still a Member of Parliament in Ottawa earning $157,731 in basic sessional indemnity, to represent the people of Saint-Laurent—Cartierville.

No, I’m not joking or making fun of him. I merely point out the fact because the former leader has been beyond invisible in the House of Commons this year. Mr.Dion’s statistics in the House put him at the bottom of the list of 308 MP’s, tied in a 9-way last place for words spoken in the 40th Parliament, third session.

Along with Lynne Yelich, Maurizio Bevilacqua, Rob Anders, Peter Goldring, Jean-Yves Roy, Greg Thompson, Roger Gaudet, and Rob Moore, Mr.Dion has said nary a word in this session. Among those 9 MPs, he also holds the second worst attendance record, deciding to skip work 12 times out of the 26 times Parliamment has been in session since March 3. Not a bad way to earn a six-figure salary for the people of Saint-Laurent—Cartierville.

Of course, this was probably all agreed upon within the inner circles of the Liberal caucus when Mr.Dion stepped down to make way for the anointed one. But that still doesn’t say much for the democratic institution.

Liberal MPs have been notably absent since Parliament reconvened after a lengthy prorogation. Leader Michael Ignatieff has missed 18 days; John Cannis 14; Todd Russell 14; Mario Silva 15; Ruby Dhalla 16; Marlene Jennings 19; Jim Karygiannis 15. For all the melodrama surrounding prorogation and a crumbling democracy, the Liberals don’t seem particularly inclined to show up.

If you think adding 30 more overpriced pillow-fighters in the House of Commons is a waste of time, money, space or all of the above, you’re not alone. An Angus Reid poll released yesterday shows that very few people in Canada welcome the idea of increasing the number of seats in the Lower House.

Less than half support the plan, with the strongest opposition coming from the province who stands to lose the most, Quebec. Only 17% of Canadians believe that adding representatives will be a good thing for the nation. The poll was conducted from April 6-7 among 1,006 randomly selected Canadian adults with a margin or error of 3.1%.

The plan is to increase the number of seats in the Lower House of Parliament from 308 to 338. This would give Ontario 18 new seats, British Columbia 7, and Alberta 5. 38% of Canadians outright support the proposal, with 45% opposing it. The largest benefit of the increase is to the Conservative Party with this proposed measure, with 39% of respondents voicing this opinion.

But it doesn’t matter what you think, because the legislation proposes changing the formula for seat distribution in the House of Commons based on the release of the 2011 census. The representation of the provinces is updated after every decennial census according to a formula established in the Constitution. Since Quebec can’t lose its base of 75 seats, the only option is to grow the government.

Here are the vital statistics:

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Right. Because when I think of what Canada needs right now it’s more politicians. If you thought that the House of Commons wasn’t already an incoherent mess of bloviating bloc-voting squabblers, with about 20% of the 308 MP’s ever bothering to actually get up and speak, imagine what adding 30 more to the pile would result in. Other than the 30 more six-figure salaries with generous full-indexed pensions and free air travel added to the burden of taxpayers, is this the government’s idea of increased democracy?

How about this: less is more. We don’t want bigger government. We don’t want “more representation”. It’s already ridiculous to have a riding for Spadina street in Toronto, and then one for Lansdowne as well. It’s already silly that elections are decided before people in British Columbia even get to the polls because Toronto already voted. It’s already blatantly obvious that Ontario runs Canada’s interests without adding 18 more politicians to represent them.

There are 36 federal ridings in British Columbia with about 15 being represented by the Greater Vancouver Area. The Greater Toronto Area has 47 ridings alone, 11 more than the entire province I live in. Just because southern Ontario’s population density is the highest in Canada, why should Toronto have 15% of the say in this country? There’s a reason that the big smoke is called the centre of the Universe, because we’re all forced to revolve around it.

The main problem with representation by population distribution is that even if 20 million people lived in Ontario, it still has nothing to do with addressing the needs of people in other regions of the country. Each province has specific needs and regional issues that cannot be addressed by stacking the Parliament with people from Toronto. The salmon in British Columbia, or the ranchers in Alberta, or the grain mills in Saskatchewan aren’t helped by adding more representation to urban ridings in Canada.

Increasing the size of representation in the House of Commons is a 9.7% increase in the size of Parliamentary administration. It is safe to assume that this is an increase of a minimum of 10% to the expenditures of running the government. And the question you have to ask yourself is whether you, as a taxpayer, will be getting an increased value for that expense. And can we, as a nation running $20-billion structural deficits, really afford to add 30 more jobs to the public service?

What happened to those “symbolic” wage freezes? The average cost of paying a Member of Parliament who is not a Cabinet Minister is $157,731 a year. Increased salaries alone would go to $4.7 million, without including staffing, expenses, travel, and all the rest of the perks of the sunshine club.

Ontario’s “representation” would rise from 34% to 37% under the adjustment, while Quebec would fall from 24% to 22%. If you add in the Atlantic provinces, Eastern Canada has 64% of the vote before we’ve even hit Manitoba. British Columbia’s 7 new MP’s sounds impressive, although it’s really just adding more urban representation because of the population boom here, and raises BC’s national proportional representation from 12% to 13%.

This move is also sure to inflame Quebec, who would be getting nothing out of the deal by remaining at 75 seats, and nothing irritates Quebec more than feeling like they’re being excluded. The optics of reducing Quebec’s influence in the House of Commons while giving Ontario 18 new MPs could even precipitate the backlash the sovereigntists have been searching for.

“The Conservatives are unable to obtain a majority government,” MP Claude DeBellefeuille said. “The only way they found is to increase the number of seats west of Quebec.

“This reform is nothing but a partisan maneuvering at the expense of the Quebec nation.”

Spend one day watching Question Period – just one – and then come back and tell me if you want 30 more people like that working for you.

Following up the sanctimonious hand-wringing over degraded democracy when Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament in later December, the Liberals decided to take an extended vacation on exercising that democracy by abstaining on the budget vote. Citing the need to both oppose the budget, but not defeat the government because, as we all know, “Canadians don’t want an election right now”, 29 Liberals abstained from representing their constituents on the budget.

In early January, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff called the prorogation of Parliament a “crazy way to run a democracy”, and said the Liberals would return to work in Ottawa on January 25 as scheduled.

The Conservatives took a considerable amount of heat in the polls from their decision to cancel Parliament. In an Ekos poll taken in early January, 59% opposed prorogation with 41% of that number “strongly” being in opposition to the idea. The outrage had multipartisan support, and even conservative supporters felt that the Prime Minister was using extraordinary powers for his own personal advantage.

The opinions on the reason for prorogation were divided, but most opposition supporters believed it was to avoid questions on the detainee affair in Afghanistan. Conservative supporters speculated that it was a move to reconstitute the Senate in order to gain control of committees, and appoint five more Senators to control the Upper Chamber.

To fight against the backlash, the Conservatives announced before the Olympics that they were cancelling the March and April parliamentary breaks.

“Sure! We’ve been at work since Jan. 25,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said at the time. “Now he’s scrambling to catch up to the Liberals.”

Well, that time has come for the leader of the Official Opposition. Except he isn’t at work as promised. No, the far more pressing issue for the Liberal leader this afternoon was addressing students at O’Donel High School in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland.

The former Harvard Professor, who has at times been called arrogant and aloof, too often relying upon his comfort zone in academia, is once again seeking support in his comfort zone. Telling high school students that Canada has to become the “most educated society”, his address marks part of yet another cross-country speaking tour leading up to his famous “thinkers conference” in Montreal at the end of the month.

The news that Michael Ignatieff wasn’t in Parliament had even partisan Liberal supporters concerned today, as the blogosphere was alight with questions on his absence. Many Liberals feel the need for Mr.Ignatieff to be in the House of Commons is greatest at this time, to hammer the government on issues like the budget, Afghanistan, and unemployment. Unfortunately for many of his loyal supporters, however, it is Mr.Ignatieff who is avoiding work this time.

Photograph by: Chris Wattie/Reuters

CPAC has a video feed which allows Canadians all over the country who don’t live in Ottawa, to view the proceedings of the House of Commons. This live feed, previously available on television, has migrated to the internet, and can be viewed by political observers of all stripes. This fits in well with the modern citizen journalism of bloggers, who will often report on events that occurred in the House before even the major media do.

But unfortunately, unless you hold a digital recorder to your computer speakers, you have to wait 24 hours to get the Parliamentary transcript. And that would be just fine, except that the elite members of the Press Gallery who go to Parliament Hill and sit in the House of Commons, are emailed a transcript by the House of Commons media manager by the late afternoon [or early, if you live here on the west coast]. This elite little club, with notable members being Aaron Wherry from Macleans, and Kady O’Malley from the CBC, then write up their reports based on transcripts they receive a day earlier than the rabble.

This is great. If you happen to be a member of the press, and you happen to live in Ottawa, that is. Such rules seem embedded in 1910, not the year 2010. A nice little club they have there.

And by the time the transcripts are available, which is usually the next day, the next session for the House of Commons is sitting, making the transcript mainly irrelevant except for historical purposes. In the immediate demand of up-to-the-minute political blogging, these elite members of the “Press Gallery” have a huge advantage. But it’s not just some kind of exclusive journalist club. My contacts in the National Post say they can’t get the transcripts either:

Good afternoon,

The blues are only available to Press Gallery members.

Thanks.

Collin Lafrance
Acting Manager,
Multi-Media Events and Broadcasting Services
Gestionnaire Intérimaire,
Activités multimédia et télédiffusion
Tel./Tél.: 613-992-6517
Cell.: 613-290-8891
Fax / Téléc.: 613-996-2076
lafraco@parl.gc.ca
Feel free to give me a call if you need more information.

To which I asked the obvious question: “So what happens if a journalist lives in Vancouver?”

I email the blues to Gallery members. This is following an agreement that the Press Gallery
has with the House of Commons.

Thanks.

Collin

Well, isn’t that special? This little rule makes all the technology in the world completely irrelevant, since you have to be physically present in the city of Ottawa, and in the House of Commons, and a recognized and certified member of the Press Gallery, to get their little “blues” transcript.