Time for the Maple Leaf Revolution?

[a_majoor]

We have seen the Orange Revolution, the Cedar Revolution, the Tulip Revolution, a Velvet Revolution many years ago...why not a Maple Leaf Revolution?

We have all the elements: a seemingly corrupt government and political establishment (note, the Liberal Government and Liberal parties havn't been proven corrupt by a court of law, but it is very difficult to find innocent explanations to the events we see unfolding around us), a political process which fails to unseat those who are demonstrating a lack of fitness to govern, and, vital to these kinds of revolutions, lots of really good looking people who would make a very attractive crowd filling the lawn of the parliament building and most of the downtown Ottawa area. (This is only semi facitious. Look at pictures of the Ceadar Revolution crowds, and compare them to the Hezbolaah's "pro Syria" demonstration, then ask yourself which one would seem more attractive to the uncomitted?)

Read on:

http://myaisling.blogspot.com/2005/04/maple-leaf-revolution-eh.html

Maple Leaf Revolution, eh?  I read a piece over on instapundit called, â Å“WILL THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT FALL?â ? and followed the links, then the links within the links, then googled the key terms, and then just had to write. It's different than when you are driving on the freeway and see an accident â “ this one is like having a front row seat to an accident about to happen.

This story is getting new life because of the culmination of hearings (the â Å“Gomery Commissionâ ?) discussed here. A ruling is expected this Wednesday.

Here's a good summary of claims and defenses from a Canadian blogger.

All of the events occurred on Jean Chretien's watch (Nov 4, 1993 to Dec 11, 2003). According to the site linked immediately above, â Å“Chretien shut down parliament to prevent the presentation of the report (reviewed below) in November and then quit.â ? Oh my.

So why is Paul Martin, the present PM in danger? According to his biography, â Å“Liberals were returned to power in the 1993 vote and Martin was sworn in as Minister of Finance. He served in that role from November 1993 until June 2002.â ? Um, gulp, eh?

It seems that in 2003, the Auditor General of Canada (eh?) issued a report. Here (pdf format) is an Executive Summary equivalent of this writing entitled â Å“Government-Wide Audit of Sponsorship, Advertising, and Public Opinion Research.â ? Apparently Chapters 3 and 4 of the broader report are the key sections.

The opening salvo: â Å“ ... federal government ran Sponsorship Program with little regard for Parliament, the Financial Administration Act, contracting rules and regulations, transparency, and value for money.â ? Oh my.

But wait, the opening paragraph continues: â Å“These arrangements â “ involving multiple transactions with multiple companies, artificial invoices and contracts, or not written contracts at all â “ appear to have been designed to pay commissions to communications agencies while hiding the source of funding and the true substance of the transactions.â ? Gulp, eh?

It seems that the amount of money, um, pissed away is $100 million (Canadian). Contrary to popular belief, that is not a buck two eighty American. At current exchange rates, that is US$82.4MM. (I forget, how much money flowed through the Iran-Contra operation all those years ago? Oh yes, US$47MM (about half way down the doc).

This fuller writing provides more detail. You can almost picture a seated man weaving the end of a rope in and out as he fashions a noose.

The set-up (verbatim):

3.5 In November 1997, a new branch of Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) was created as a result of concerns about the federal presence and visibility across Canada,

3.6 One vehicle for delivering that mandate was the Sponsorship Program, created in 1997. Sponsorships were arrangements in which the Government of Canada provided organizations with financial resources to support cultural and community events. In exchange, the organizations agreed to provide visibility by, for example, using the Canada wordmark and other symbols such as the Canadian flag at their events, and on promotional material.

From 1997 until 31 March 2003, the Government of Canada spent about $250 million to sponsor 1,987 events ... Over $100 million of that (40 percent of total expenditures) was paid to communications agencies as production fees and commissions.

Observations (verbatim):

3.14 When it created the Sponsorship Program, the federal government did not inform Parliament of the program's real objectives; nor has it ever reported the results. (Ed. â “ oh!)

3.17 We were informed that the program was promoted in Quebec but not elsewhere in Canada. As people outside Quebec became aware of the program, the government received some applications and approved some sponsorships of some events in other provinces. However, from 1997 to 2000, the vast majority of regional events sponsored were in Quebec. (Ed. â “ rather Q-centric, eh?)

3.18 We reviewed PWGSC's performance reports. None of them mentioned the program until 2001, even though sponsorships accounted for more than half of CCSB's annual spending. The 2001 Performance Report discussed the Sponsorship Program but made no reference to its objectives and its emphasis on events in Quebec. It simply stated that 291 events had been sponsored across Canada. Parliament was not informed that the primary focus of the program was on Quebec. (Ed. â “ but, why would such a thing be kept quiet?)

3.19 Given the importance of the objectives described to us by officials and the significance of the program's spending (more than $250 million from 1997 to March 2003), we would have expected the government to provide Parliament with at least a description of the program, its objectives, its expenditures, and the results it achieved. (Ed. â “ so European in their understatement!)

So what type of situations actually occurred? Here are detailed transactions complete with flow charts of where the money went. Verbal agreements, payments for past expenditures based on present faked invoices, â Å“unusual methods of funding.â ?

Here is one of the more straight-forward sets of transactions (verbatim):

Old Port of Montrealâ ”Sponsorship. Screen, Visibility Plan, and Productionâ ”2000-01

As part of its operations, Old Port of Montreal wanted to purchase a giant screen for its Science Centre but lacked sufficient funds. ... Following a presentation by Old Port to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, CCSB offered verbally to provide $1.5 million in sponsorship funds in return for federal visibility.

Rather than make a direct payment, CCSB contracted with Lafleur Communication Marketing and Media/I.D.A Vision (CCSB's agency of record) to transfer $1.5 million to Old Port. The files contain nothing to support the selection of these agencies. CCSB paid the agencies $225,000 for facilitating the transfer. The files did not show what, if any, value the Crown received for the $225,000.

Although Old Port had not signed a contract with the agencies or with CCSB, it was informed by Lafleur that it would receive $1.5 million in April 2000. Old Port decided, with no involvement from Media/I.D.A Vision or Lafleur, to launch a process for issuing a $1.5 million contract to acquire a giant screen and related programming services. In August 2000â ”after it had issued the purchase order to the supplierâ ”Old Port received $1.2 million as the first payment from Media IDA Vision. At the time of our audit, Old Port had not received the remaining $300,000 it had been promised.

CCSB awarded additional contracts to Lafleur to create visibility for the government on the giant screenâ ”for example, $100,000 to develop a visibility plan and $57,000 to produce video clips, $40,000 of which work was subcontracted out. In total, CCSB paid Lafleur $297,000 in various fees to transfer money, to produce a visibility plan, and to subcontract production work. We found nothing in the file to show specifically what CCSB expected to receive from Lafleur or what it did receive.

In large part, the substance of the transaction was a transfer of funds from CCSB to Old Port of Montreal to buy a capital asset for Old Port. CCSB should have asked the Treasury Board for the authority to transfer funds to Old Port. By not doing so, CCSB violated the intent of the Treasury Board's transfer payments policy, which was designed to ensure that a grant or contribution is not used as a substitute for financing a Crown corporation's operating or capital requirements. The Treasury Board Secretariat was not consulted or given a business case to support this purchase.

In our opinion, CCSB did not have the authority to transfer money from PWGSC's appropriation to support the operations of a Crown corporation. It spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars on commission fees to two agencies for transfering money between two government entities. CCSB paid fees to the same agency for the transfer, for production, and for subcontracting work, with no supporting business case and no written agreement with Old Port of Montreal.

(Emphasis added)

So ... who are the principals of Lafleur? Note that their name comes up with money attached in all but one of the detailed transactions. They are, afterall, the â Å“agency of record.â ?

Well, Jean Lafleur seems to be integral to the present inquiry. This charming writing is a google translation from French. It opens, â Å“Jean Lafleur Communication Marketing (JLCM) invoiced more of the double to the federal government for the creation and the installation of logos and flags of Canada on the fleet of Via Rail, in 1998-99, a possible case of surfacturation that the advertising executive could not explain, yesterday at the time of the audiences of the Gomery commission.â ? (Ed. â “ chuckle, eh?)

So much scandal, so little time. Time for a Maple Leaf Revolution, eh?

The links reffered to within are from the Auditor General:

http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/domino/reports.nsf/html/20031103ce.html

http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/domino/reports.nsf/html/20031103se01.html

 

[tomahawk6]

I would guess that if the voters get fed up with the party in power they will give another party the chance to do better. Of course the political pressure could force the party in power to reform itself.

 

[TCBF]

It wouldn't be a "Maple Leaf Revolution", more like a "National Mutton Movement", as Canadians are all sheep. ;D

Oh well, ballots or bullets, countries get the governments they deserve.

Tom

 

[pbi]

I would guess that if the voters get fed up with the party in power they will give another party the chance to do better. Of course the political pressure could force the party in power to reform itself.

Tomahwak: the problem is that over the last few decades, the voters keep putting these people back in power (albeit as a minority this time...). We have only ourselves to blame, as TCBF pointed out. We are a country with too many diverse local agendas, which allows sharp operators to divide and conquer by exploiting these issues.

Cheers.

 

[squealiox]

A "Maple Revolultion"! Brilliant!
It's time for the Canadian people to stand up to ... the majority of voters.
:

 

[vangemeren]

This is an intersting proposition. However, there are too many factions to make it work. Hypothetically if the government was kicked out, what would replace it?

 

[TCBF]

Why, another government of course. ;D

Tom

 

[Trinity]

Replace the government..

Well, it can't be the military.. cause we all know how efficient we are....

Liberal government  vs  Canadian Military  running the country.....

tough choice.... I go for the liberals though...

: : : ;D

(hey, I served with some of you... I'll go with the strangers!)

 

[TCBF]

To bad Reform sold it's soul to the Central Canadian Devil.  ;D

Tom

 

[DJ]

Buyer Beware eh?! ;D 

DJ

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

A "Maple Revolultion"! Brilliant!
It's time for the Canadian people to stand up to ... the majority of voters.
:

I still don't know what this means ...  ???

 

[Infanteer]

Since when is 32% a majority?

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

Since when is 32% a majority?

Or, as of this morning, 25% http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1113219907936_21/?hub=TopStories

... but Martin has a "moral authority" to govern: why let a little thing like the will of the people get in the way of 'eliminating the democratic deficit'?

 

[squealiox]

I still don't know what this means ...   ???

it means the Liberals are in parliament because voters put them there (and no, they did not get my vote, fwiw). the govt may be incompentent, even corrupt, but the masses are not about to storm the barricades and overthrow a brutal dictatorship, like in ukraine or lebanon, etc. that is the comparison that was made at the top of this thread. or do you really believe that martin is about to abolish elections and a revolution is in order?

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

it means the Liberals are in parliament because voters put them there (and no, they did not get my vote, fwiw). the govt may be incompentent, even corrupt, but the masses are not about to storm the barricades and overthrow a brutal dictatorship, like in ukraine or lebanon, etc. that is the comparison that was made at the top of this thread. or do you really believe that martin is about to abolish elections and a revolution is in order?

The point of the article is not that our system is a brutal dictatorship, but rather that depth and extent of corruption that is being revealed is not unlike that of far more totalitarian regimes: one *could* extrapolate that to suggest that our system is more (perhaps far more) authoritarian than the average Canadian believes (or at least has believed until now).

While we like to tell ourselves that we have the *best* democracy in the world, after years of Gerrymandering our electoral system is such that a larg-ish minority can put a huge majority in Parliament: it's *not even* mob rule.  Our Parliamentary system is such that the PMO controls the legislature and makes all of the judicial and senatorial appointments and thus hold almost all of the power, as Lord Acton said: "All Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

 

[squealiox]

OK, OK, "major shift in the electorate" or "revolution", you say tomahto i say tomato. but i assume we can both agree it will be nice see the liberals suffer a massive rout at the polls, of the kind that struck the tories back in 93. i just happen to be cynical about all the parties out there.

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

David Frum, in today's NY Times:

Woe Canada
By DAVID FRUM

Published: April 19, 2005


"I  LOVE Canada: It's so clean!" Visiting Americans may be about to lose their favorite cliché about their chilly neighbor. Over the past few weeks, a judicial inquiry in Montreal has heard charges that Canada's governing Liberal Party was running a system of extortion, embezzlement, kickbacks and graft as dirty as anything Americans might expect to find in your run-of-the-mill banana republic.

Just last week, for example, Canadians learned that one of the closest friends of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was paid more than $5 million for work that was never done and on the authority of invoices that were forged or faked. It is charged that this same friend then arranged for up to $1 million to be kicked back in campaign contributions to Mr. Chrétien's Liberal party.

Corruption charges have dogged the Chrétien Liberals for years. Mr. Chrétien left office in 2003 under suspicion that he had pressured a government-owned bank to lend money to businesses in which he held an interest. But until recently, nobody was able to prove anything worse than carelessness and waste. Now, though, the improper flood of money from the public treasury is being connected to a reciprocal flow of money to the Liberal Party and favored insiders, including Mr. Chrétien's brother.

And because Mr. Chrétien's successor, Paul Martin, failed to win a parliamentary majority in last year's federal election, Mr. Chrétien's old survival strategy of denial and delay no longer works. Together, the opposition Conservative and Bloc Québécois parties could force an election call at any time. Opinion polls suggest that if an election were held now, the Liberals would lose decisively.

The discrediting and defeat of Canada's Liberal government would constitute a grand event in Canadian history: after all, the Liberals have ruled Canada almost without challenge for the past 12 years and for almost 80 of the past 109 years. But the kickback scandal could reverberate outside Canada's borders too.

Many Americans see Canada as a kind of utopian alternative to the United States: a North American democracy with socialized medicine, same-sex marriage, empty prisons, strict gun laws and no troops in Iraq.

What they don't see is how precarious political support for this alternative utopia has become among Canadian voters in recent years. From World War II until the 1980's, Liberal power rested on two political facts: its dominance in French-speaking Quebec and its popularity in the immigrant communities of urban Ontario.

Over the past two decades, however, the Liberals' Quebec-plus-the-cities strategy has worked less and less well.

As French-speaking Quebecers have become more self-confidently nationalistic, they have turned their backs on the intensifying centralism and paternalism of the Liberals. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rewrote the Canadian Constitution in the early 80's over the objections of the Quebec government of the day. In none of the six federal elections since have the Liberals won even half of Quebec's seats in Parliament.

Luckily for the Liberals, the Conservative Party split into warring factions in 1993. Consequently, the Liberals were able to return to power that year even though they won only 37 percent of the vote.

Almost everything that Jean Chrétien did as prime minister over the next decade can be understood as an effort to reverse his party's long-term problems. He edged to the right on economic issues in the hope of appealing to middle-income voters alienated by Mr. Trudeau's economic mismanagement. He veered leftward on social issues in the hope of finding a new constituency among wealthier Ontarians and Quebecers. After 9/11, he struck anti-American and anti-Israel attitudes that he hoped would resonate in isolationist Quebec and among certain immigrant communities.

And it was presumably for these same reasons that Mr. Chrétien set in motion his kickback scheme. As Liberal strength in Quebec has decayed, the Liberals have found it more and more difficult to hold together an effective political organization in the province. How do you sustain a political party without principles or vision? Sometimes you do it with graft.

So in 1995 a multimillion-dollar emergency national unity fund was established. The fund was justified as a way to win Quebecers away from separatism by sponsoring sporting events and cultural projects across the province. The fund failed in its ostensible purpose. But what the scheme did do was create a huge unmonitored slush fund from which key political figures in the province could be rewarded. A large portion of those rewards, the judicial inquiry in Montreal is being told, were then kicked back as campaign contributions to the Liberal Party and as payments to Liberal insiders.

Some Liberals defend the scheme as a noble plan gone wrong, an attempt to beat back separatism that was unfortunately corrupted by a few bad apples. But when so many apples go bad, you have to suspect that the barrel is rotten.

Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain's Labor Party, Canada's Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India's Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.

As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It's an exchange that is long past due.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/opinion/19frum.html?ex=1271563200&en=b229d3f9ccc6df41&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss


It's sad that this "modernizing" of the Canadian electorate wasn't spontaneous (if indeed, it actually happens) but rather the realization (hopefully) of the consequences of political lethargy.  One hopes that this serves as a real wake-up call and that Canadians won't be voting Liberal simply because the CBC and TorStar tells them to ... "all of the people some of the time ..."

 

[larry Strong]

How would you getall those complacent sheep up off of their couched and out to the streets. We did not even raise our voices when the GST came in, just signed the odd petition, that probably was not worth even being used as TP, (now thats real revolution) and that involved going directly to our wallets, not some abstract thing like the government wasting $250 mil (most people cant even grasp how much that is).

Unless you work in a sub contractor situation, most people don't even see their tax dollars, all it is is a number on your pay stub, (makes my blood boil as I watch that number grow over the year). All they do is say "Oh well" and go back to watching "American Idol" or some other brain rotting thing on the idiot box.