Shenanigans

Did government officials agree with Bev Oda's decision to cut off funds to KAIROS? No. 

Did the chief statistician tell Tony Clement to abolish the long-form census? No. 

Did Derrick Snowdy give crucial information to the PMO about alleged criminal conduct of former minister Helena Guergis? No.

Did Richard Colvin and other officials say everything was A-okay with treatment of Afghan detainees? No.

Did the Senate refuse to pass the budget bill, or any bills, before last year's wave of Tory appointments? No. 

 Last summer, a former communications director to the Prime Minister laughed off a matter of forgery and impersonation as "shenanigans." If this is how the government and its friends get their kicks, they should find a new hobby. 

 

 

 

We've lost that polling feeling

On this Valentine's Day,  we've received the gift of several stories, which should dim our ardour for polls. Two stories from Joan Bryden at Canadian Press, here and here, should make us pause before we ever breathlessly report a poll again. Then Alice Funke at Pundits' Guide puts it all in her (supremely informed) context. 

To all this, I would also urge a look at  this much-circulated blog post  from a person well-known to me (as they say.) 

 What's important about Joan Bryden's stories is that it's the pollsters themselves putting warning labels on their products. We are being told, as if we didn't know already, that poll results are not the same as public opinion. Will it make a difference to how we're reporting them? I hope so. 

Which way should the stampede go?

The National Gallery of Canada hosted a  talk yesterday with Roxy Paine, the artist/creator of the shiny new  One Hundred Foot Line, installed last fall on Nepean Point, behind the gallery. Thanks to the organizing skills of Macleans' columnist Paul Wells, a few of us attended the talk and then had a drink, bite to eat later with the gallery's director, Marc Mayer. 

Mayer was chatting about the gallery's plans for this year, including the installation of another sculpture out front of the building. It's this one (see right, image courtesy of the National Gallery) by renowned Saskatchewan artist Joe Fafard (whose nephew, Michel Liboiron, works in the office of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, incidentally.) 

 Mayer  posed an installation question to  the group. Should the horses be positioned running toward Parliament Hill, or away from it? Perhaps because most of us work on the Hill, and we like horses, Mayer's question was greeted with an enthusiastic chorus of "AWAY!!!" (well, Kady O'Malley and I were definitely of that view.) The director, however,  seems to be leaning  more to the idea of having the horses stampede toward the Hill. On reflection, that too seems to be an intriguing prospect. 

It's an interesting question, and I don't think anything's been decided, so I thought I'd toss it out there to a wider audience. I'll let Mayer know the results of  the informal survey, and whether there's any kind of consensus or persuasive arguments either way. 

Update: Below  are some initial replies, gathered up on Facebook and Twitter. (Note: from Sunday afternoon on, if you have suggestions/comments, it may be best to throw them in the Comments section of the blog, so we have them all in one place.) 

@nationalnewswatch: West

@misterdevans: East, toward the sunrise... looking toward the future.

@debalap: Circling

@AnnaAnthro: Can we lead horses to water but not make them drink? Have them run towards the river!?

Donna Jacobs (via Facebook): Towards!

Emily Hazlett (via FB): In light of recent events Egypt, I think they should be stampeding toward the hill.

Jan Lou (via FB): Towards Parliament Hill, definitely. I can see them racing towards those copper roofs in my mind's eye. Then, bring Fafard's gorgeous 'lying down cows' up from Toronto's financial district and put them on Parliament Hill's front lawn > now that's a picture...

@markdjarvis: do they have to go in same direction? if so, towards!

@acoyne: Always twirling, twirling towards freedom. 

@AmandaBurcul: Brilliant Simpsons reference!

@kady: And I'm sticking with "Away!"

@Ken_Donnelly: I think it should be placed behind Parliament, with the horses running away, over the cliff!

@natnewswatch: To the Stones tune Wild Horses

@BrianAKilgore: RE:Horses -- so the most people see, most of the time, the front of the horses. Good project!

@ViewFromTheLeft: towards b/c away suggests disengagement & we don't want that w our politics it let's the politicans get away w too much

@BrianAKilgore: Plus so sun shines on heads and nicest background for visitors' photos

From Rick Anderson and Michelle Williams (who know quite a bit about horses)

@RickAnderson: Michelle says: "to water, def not toward traffic“ 

@RickAnderson: Rick says: towards real Stampede! 

@Chris_Holcroft: Perhaps some horses running towards the hill, others away from it to reflect our conflicted attitudes towards government.

@FaithGoldy: Away or towards the Hill... So long as no one approaches the horses from behind.

Kathy Vey (via FB): Madly off in all directions, of course.

Juliet O'Neill (via FB): Like Louis Archambaut's geese sculptures at the Ottawa airport, which are moved to point south in winter and north in summer, the horses could run towards the Hill when in session and toward the GG's when not.

 

Troubling, indeed

The former chief statistician of Canada, Munir Sheikh,  resigned last summer after he realized that the government was misrepresenting his expert, learned opinion to the media. 

Now we realize it could have been worse -- the government simply could have released a document, brazenly edited to turn his opinion upside down. This is -- incredibly -- what happened in the case of a controversial funding decision by International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda. Here, from the Globe story, is the summary of what happened. 

The case concerns the Conservative government’s controversial 2009 decision to cut off church-backed aid group Kairos from federal aid funding. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney initially told an Israeli audience that Kairos was cut off because the government didn’t like its views on Israel, but Ms. Oda and other Tories insisted it was a routine decision.

Aid groups and opponents charged that the Conservatives have decided to cut off aid to groups whose political views differ from theirs – but the Tories said bureaucrats at the Canadian International Development Agency concluded Kairos no longer matched their priorities.

But new documents that emerged last December show that CIDA’s top officials signed a memorandum recommending new funding for Kairos before someone – the government won’t say who – inserted the word “not,” overruling the recommendation.

Seriously. Someone needs to be fired for this. I can only imagine it's someone who is regularly in the practice of altering the birth date on his/her ID to get into bars. It's pretty much the same modus operandi. I'd thought, however, that all the 14-year-olds in this government were busy doing the TV ads.  

And while we're talking about troubling, do have a look at our story today on the Cold-War file-gathering that's going on over at the University of Ottawa. 

Stuff like this happens when the government thinks the voters are too stupid or afraid to protest. "Troubling," said Speaker Peter Milliken yesterday. Yep. Or simply  banana-republic. A country where this happens rapidly loses its ability to  authority to lecture other countries on democracy. 

On losing a virtual friend

Several months back, one of my regular correspondents on Twitter sent me a direct message. She was looking for a copy of a book I'd written. She introduced herself as a retired librarian from Stratford, who simply liked politics. She wanted to read more about Shaughnessy Cohen, the MP who died on the floor of the House of Commons in December, 1998.

By chance, I had a box of 20 or so Shaughnessy books in the basement (this is unusual; authors are usually only given 10 free copies, and they're given away quickly to friends and family). So I sent Penny Langshear in Stratford one of the books. For some reason, I thought Shaughnessy, also from Southern Ontario, might be happy to think of Penny wanting to read about her.

In the weeks and months afterward, Penny and I talked (via Twitter) about Shaughnessy and politics in general. Not a lot, but the sight of a message from her always made me smile.

Today, via one of my other Twitter friends, Liberal Arts and Minds, I learn that Penny, aka @penlan, was found dead this week. Arts and Minds has done a very lovely blog post about her, complete with a picture.

I too would just like to mark that small friendship and its passing on this blog -- it meant a lot to me. Penlan  was funny, bright and passionate about politics, much like Shaughnessy, who would have turned 63 tomorrow.  Next week, it's the annual Politics and the Pen dinner in Ottawa, where a book prize is awarded in Shaughnessy's name.  I think I'm going to imagine that my old friend will be watching, along with her new librarian friend. I also want to believe that Penny would have been quite pleased to see that a piece of political fiction, Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, won the Canada Reads competition this week.

My condolences to all of Penlan's friends and family, even the virtual ones, like me.

Who can't handle the truth?

The Globe and Mail reminds us again today that if the Conservative government has a cost-cutting plan, it's a secret. Just like the Canada-U.S. perimeter deal, and actually, a whole host of complicated issues on the national agenda. While this may be yet another illustration of this government's secretive tendencies, I also think it may be a larger  sign of the times. 

A while back, a friend  who was deeply involved in the Liberals' tough, deficit-slashing 1995 budget told me that a similar exercise couldn't be pulled off today. Why? Because of the changes in my business -- journalism, which no longer seems to have the attention span or appetite to handle an ongoing story line. (Or "narrative," if you prefer that rapidly-becoming-overused term.) 

The Liberals spent a considerable amount of time preparing the ground for the 1995 cuts, which were deep and severe.  Read Double Vision, by Edward Greenspon and Anthony Wilson-Smith,  for just what was involved in that PR spadework. It required an ongoing interest and debate in the public sphere; journalists who could spend days, weeks, months getting their heads around government spending priorities. It depended on a sophisticated, respectful  relationship between journalists and politicians, which didn't send the reporter rushing to print with sky-is-falling stories every time he/she heard details of the cuts to come. 

Today, with a diminished journalistic workforce on Parliament Hill, handling multiple deadlines and shrinking news space, it's harder to keep any  story in the frame of attention, let alone a dry, complicated fiscal debate.    Note the revolving controversies of the past few years. Remember the Afghan-documents issue? Prorogation? We're also told that the public has no interest now in "process" stories -- which pretty much describes most political stories. I'm old enough to remember a time when I covered a story for months at a time -- years, in the case of the national-unity struggles of Meech and Charlottetown.  Now that prospect seems almost ridiculous. 

 And an important note -- on that public reluctance for "process" stories --  I think that's also a product of a political system that now rewards those who best talk to citizens as consumers. Anything that negatively affects the wallet is bad news. Anything that doesn't affect the wallet is simply not news. 

I don't note this phenomenon to wax nostalgic or whine for a return of what journalism/politics  used to be. It is what it is.  The folks grousing about the Internet today remind me of the grumpy old-timers in the 1980s, saying that nothing good would come of television journalism. 

But if the government isn't telling us about what cuts are necessary in the coming budget, that may not be just the government's fault. It could have a lot to do with journalism, and you, the public, too. 

Inside Harper's PMO: some numbers

 

 

You may be wondering: what the heck do they do over there in the Privy Council Office?
Well, managing Stephen Harper's business is a mammoth task, according to the spending estimates just tabled today in the Commons.

And if you look in particular at the departmental estimates for the PCO, you can learn some interesting things.  If nothing else, it may explain why Yann Martel had trouble getting the Prime Minister to read the books he was sending -- they were among more than 2.5  million (!) bits of correspondence sent to Harper last year. Have a look at some of the other factoids, lifted directly from the estimates.

 

 

 

    A total of 204 meetings of Cabinet and Cabinet Committees were organized in 2009-10. As well, there were 71 Deputy Minister meetings, of which two  were day-long sessions.

 

From April 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010, the Government introduced 55 Bills in Parliament, and 32 Bills received Royal Assent.  In 2009-10, PCO managed a total of approximately 2,300 Parliamentary Returns, including the preparation of responses and tabling of answers to 799 Order Paper Questions posed to the government by MPs and the coordination and tabling the response to 1498 petitions to the Government.

 

 

Whether it’s a letter from US President Obama or a drawing sent by a child, all of the non-partisan mail addressed to the Prime Minister is processed by PCO.  In 2009-10, PCO received 2,475,573 pieces of correspondence.

 

During 2009-10, the total number of requests received under the Access to Information Act was 492.  The total number of requests completed during the reporting year was 545 (include the requests that were active / incomplete as of April 1, 2009)

 

In 2009-10, the Prime Minister participated in 10 international summits, and conducted 7 incoming visits and 12 outgoing visits.