Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Unraveling File # 8-10-(2012-06)

So Albertans said no to the climate-change denying, white-supremacist, Lake of Fire minions of the Wildrose party and hip-hip-hooray for that.

But is there hope for the rest of us?

At the federal level, it’s getting to be the kind of country Joe Stalin might have liked. The Harper government continues to perform information liposuction on the body politic, dispense its own justice, and mint its own facts. The latest example is the decision to send “media minders” to an international polar conference in Montreal. Not Mogadishu, not Tehran, Montreal.

Really, media minders. Usually it’s kids, not grown up federal scientists who need minding. The only other time I’ve seen media minders is in those videotapes of hapless hostages who praise their grinning captors and traduce their own country in the sensible attempt to keep their heads in the usual anatomical configuration.

Scientists are picked on because they are the guarantors of objective reality. The government on the other hand specializes in revealed truth otherwise known as the Harper Vision. It is important to turn scientists into taciturn chumps so objective reality doesn’t get in the way of all that revelation – you know, tar-sands good, environmentalists bad, Mullahs crazy, Western leaders philanthropists, corporations benefactors, unions leeches, etc.

Canada is now a place where the government misleads Parliament, vilifies public servants whose faith in the Great Navigator is less than absolute, allows torture intelligence, protects mendacious ministers, caricatures the “bad” countries, dry-cleans the “good” ones, and treats all opposition as bed-bugs in the national sleeping bag.

Getting information out of the Harper government is only surpassed in difficulty by getting information to it – which brings me to the strange story of File Number 8-10 (2012-06) over at the Ethics Commissioner’s Office. It also goes by the designation CRM:0046001.

Before opening the file, a word on parliamentary watch-dogs. Telling on the government is becoming one of the only ways of getting even a token measure of accountability out of this regime. It no longer comes in Parliament or committee because the government doesn’t answer questions and doesn’t approve inconvenient witnesses. It no longer comes on television because every TV panel is infested with party hacks who must make their own mothers queasy with their pathetic casuistry. And with a few glorious exceptions (Stephen Maher comes to mind, as does Tim Naumetz), it doesn’t happen in the newspapers. They would rather run stories about elephants getting contact lenses than hold the government to account.

Which is why so much about accountability in Canada is left to that ragged band of whistleblowers who operate on the arcane principle of the public interest. These heroic/suicidal worthies, people like Allan Cutler, are smitten with the quaint notion that the taxpayer, not the minister, or, God help us, the deputy minister, is the most important person in the land.

But being a whistleblower in Canada is like being a turkey at Thanksgiving. All too often, the government watch-dogs view complaints as the invitation to wring the complainant’s neck. Think of it as the Christiane Ouimet school of oversight. Occasionally, there is a truly heroic effort not to flop at the feet of He Who Must Be Obeyed.

Marc Mayrand at Elections Canada comes to mind in his Herculean exertions over the In-and-Out scandal. There, the Conservatives were caught cheating on election expenses after years of irksome denials and a defiant trip to the legal mat.  But Mayrand’s courage, like that of PBO Kevin Page, is exceptional.

And so to Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson. How shall I put this? As a bureaucrat, Dawson does not move faster than a speeding bullet and does not leap tall buildings in a single bound. In the Christian Paradis-Rahim Jaffer affair, tectonic plates moved faster than the Ethics Commissioner on the hunt. It took her four months from the date of receiving the complaint about Paradis to actually meet with the subject of her investigation face-to-face. It took Dawson 21 months to interview 21 witnesses. Like astrophysics, cronyism is apparently all but impenetrable stuff.

Even at that, molasses oversight was followed by quicksilver theatre of the absurd. After Commissioner Dawson found that Paradis had in fact violated the Conflict of Interest Act, Stephen Harper pronounced that it didn’t matter. Why? No harm had been done. The upshot? Nothing happened to the miscreant, just as nothing happened when the same minister, this time in the Industry portfolio, took out his machismo on a poor moose in Marcel Aubut’s hunting camp. Never mind that Aubut was importuning Ottawa for $400 million at the time to build a new hockey arena in Quebec City. We are to believe that no real harm was done here either, except to the moose. Once again, Commissioner Dawson is investigating. But will Stephen Harper care what she decides?

None of this can come as very good news to Richard Lorello. More than a year ago, Lorello sent the Ethics Commissioner documents which purported to show that a sitting Harper cabinet minister had offshore bank accounts that did not show up explicitly on his declaration of assets. Lorello tracked his package, which included purported bank accounts and wire transfers under the minister’s name. He was advised that it had been signed for in Ottawa. Nothing happened. When he re-sent his documents, Lorello inquired about his previous mailing. He was told that the Ethics Commissioner’s Office had no record of the information, even though someone had indeed signed for it – a certain S. Marleau. Did it ever make it out of the parliamentary mail room? If it did, where did it go?

Lorello’s second mailing did make it into the system all the way to Mary Dawson’s desk. Two investigators were assigned, Marie-Josee Smith and the Director of Reports and Investigation, Mr. Eppo Maertens. Emails were exchanged to set up an interview. Lorello noted something unusual: “…for some reason, I am receiving your emails six hours after they were sent. This occurred with your previous emails as well. I am not experiencing this issue with any other emails.” The explanation is obvious. These emails were from the Ethics Commissioner’s Office, where everything moves at the speed of tree sap in February.

Then things began to improve.

“Hi Mr. Lorello – Hopefully whatever technical glitches that caused the delays yesterday have been rectified. Wednesday April 18th at 3 pm works on our end. Could I please have a telephone number where I can reach you. Thank You, Marie-Josee Smith.”

Solid progress. This time the email arrived just 11 minutes after it was sent. Though they were in receipt of the purported bank documents, the Ethics Commissioner’s investigators wanted more: “We are in need of additional information…” they wrote on April 16th 2012. They wanted the source of Lorello’s information.

He was not prepared to give it to them and said so at 12:36 PM on April 20th in a message sent from his iPhone:

“The source has provided the information to me in good faith and I as a citizen have provided the information to the proper Canadian authorities, including the Office of the Ethics Commissioner, because I feel it is my duty to do so. Regardless of who the source is, I believe that the documents should stand on their own merits and the test of yours and the Canada Revenue Agency’s investigation techniques…”

The reference to the CRA is interesting. The agency, which also received the package, has investigated hundreds of Canadians with offshore bank accounts under Project Jade. That’s because Canadians have an estimated $100 billion stashed in offshore banks. Then-minister of national revenue, Jean-Pierre Blackburn didn’t just want to get tough about tax compliance between 2008 and 2010, but also about tax havens. He wanted investment banks like UBS to hand over lists of Canadian offshore bank account holders, the way it shared such information on Americans with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The ministers who have followed in Blackburn’s wake, Keith Ashfield and Gail Shea, have pursued the same policy.

It is worth noting that if the documents Lorello forwarded are authentic (something he told investigators he doesn’t know himself) and a Harper cabinet minister indeed has or had offshore accounts in Nassau and Grand Cayman Island, it may be perfectly legal. One of the three types of offshore accounts is used for offshore tax planning. Account holders in this category make legitimate tax savings by moving their assets offshore legally.

Then there is “aggressive offshore planning” which can straddle the line of disclosure, fairness and legality. Finally, there is illegitimate offshore activity where the goal is to hide undeclared income without paying tax. As a result of targeted projects involving international audit work, Ottawa collected an extra $738 million in tax in fiscal 2008-2009.

Obviously, the Ethics Commissioner needs to conduct a professional investigation into Richard Lorello’s information, both in the public interest and in the interest of the minister who may be being unfairly accused. But the search for the facts need not take place on the long hours of the geological clock. The case could be cleared up faster than you can drink a glass of $16 orange juice. For starters, Dawson could simply go to the banks in question to see if the documents are for real.

Even better, why not just ask Julian Fantino?

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris

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