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Nadeem Esmail

Director, Health Policy Studies, The Fraser Institute

   Bulk Buying Pharmaceuticals Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be Posted: 05/24/2013 5:30 pm

 

OOOHHHH….a warning from a minion of the Fraser Institute..couldn’t be his Big Pharma puppeteers steering him into this scary-sounding piffle…now, could it?
The facts are that even Big Pharma screws up, or else all those massive lawsuits would be fairytales..nope, they stand to lose out on all their billions, so naturally, who else but the Fraser Institute, good buddies of corporations and the rightwing whackadoodles out there (who equate the  gathering up  of filthy lucre with goodness and purity) would be sounding the alarm about a better use of our tax dollars than lining the pockets of their corporate masters…and  looking over his bio, it appears Mr. Esmail is neither a medical practitioner or a pharmacist, but that most august of  professions (just ask Steve Harper) an ‘economist’…..

Perhaps Mr. Esmail should be directing his ‘concern’ towards such luminaries as Rob Ford…who should be tutored on pharmaceuticals, both legally-obtained…and otherwise…

"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
Charles Darwin


On this one I agree with him.

The Globe and Mail has published the Ford family’s history with drug dealing.
Its like reading a movie script -- a beefier Kiefer Sutherland playing the suburban drug dealer with the dysfunctional family who uses his drug profits as the foundation for his more charismatic and electable younger brother's meteoric political career, thus becoming the power behind the throne but then watching helplessly as said brother destroys himself and all they achieved through his own addiction and hubris:In the 1980s, anyone wanting to buy hashish had to know where to go. And in central Etobicoke, the wealthy Toronto suburb where Mayor Rob Ford grew up, one of those places was James Gardens. In the evening, the sports cars often wound along Edenbridge Drive, past the gated homes and the lawn-bowling pitches, until they reached the U-shaped parking lot. By nightfall, the public park was a hash drive-thru. One former street dealer, whom we will call “Justin,” described the scene as “an assembly line.”
There were usually a number of dealers to choose from, some of them supplied by a mainstay at James Gardens – a young man with the hulk-like frame and mop of bright blond hair: Doug Ford.

Oh, this idea I like very much. And the tactic is easily adaptable in situations that could best be described as 'fluid':





H/t Sylvia Wilson Canadians Rallying To Unseat Stephen HarperRecommend this Post

The day after Rob Ford publicly denied using crack cocaine, The Globe and Mail runs a story claiming that his brother Doug used to traffic in hash:

Ten people who grew up with Doug Ford – a group that includes two former hashish suppliers, three street-level drug dealers and a number of casual users of hash – have described in a series of interviews how for several years Mr. Ford was a go-to dealer of hash. These sources had varying degrees of knowledge of his activities: Some said they purchased hash directly from him, some said they supplied him, while others said they observed him handling large quantities of the drug.
The sources are unidentified; and local police don't seem to recall any of the details. But in his youth, the Globe reports, Doug was a member of a local group called the RY Drifters:

But long before he took over the family business and pursued public office, Doug Ford’s circle of friends was a group of young people who called themselves the RY Drifters, after the Royal York Plaza, a strip mall many of them frequented.
They came from prosperous families. But money and comfort did not mean they did not have problems:

But the prosperity disguised a disturbing trend among many of the area’s young adults – an attraction to crime that went beyond typical teenage rebellion. Former Ford associates interviewed for this story identified at least 10 RY Drifters who became heroin addicts, some of whom turned to break-ins and robberies to support their habits.
It's not an unusual story. Lots of boomers -- including me -- grew up in comfort. The problem the Fords face is the same problem that Stephen Harper faces. People are beginning to think that they are not who they say they are.

Conservatives like to say that they stand for the primacy of the individual. But rampant individualism leads to a shipwreck. Mayor Ford's ship is on the rocks.

…scumbag extraordinaire… Why one of Harper’s most vile attack mutts thought it was OK to use the stabbing in London as fodder against Justin Trudeau is beyond me. Stay classy, JK, stay classy. (1) Trashy, Ottawa, Ontario

For eight days he turned  Canada's largest city into a circus, and the laughing stock of the world.

For eight days he refused to answer any questions about whether he was caught on camera smoking crack and making racist and homophobic comments.

Only to emerge today, with his head shaved like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, and deliver a short rambling  statement.
Read more »

It appears to the regina mom that the City of Regina would rather fill that new pie in the sky, outrageously overpriced, not yet built football stadium with ticket-buyers than fund events for writers in the Queen City.  The Vertigo Series, Coteau Books and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild will receive nothing, as it stands. From the member newsletter, eBriefs:

SWG NEWS

City of Regina Slashes Literary Funding

For many years the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild has successfully applied to the City of Regina for about $24,000 annually to assist with literary programming in Regina. This year, our funding request was denied in its entirety.

SWG is one of at least three literary organizations denied funding by the City of Regina grant program. Coteau Books and the Vertigo Reading Series have also been cut. The rationale provided for the cuts is that the SWG application “scored low in the area of community need.” We have been advised that SWG also scored low in the area of “financial need.”

Meanwhile, performance, film and music organizations that run festivals generating ticket sales have received more funding than in previous years.

The Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild has a rich history of literary programming in Regina, some of which we have provided for over thirty years. We offer a wide array of free programming to writers and the public, raise literary awareness, raise writers’ profiles, and enrich the lives of hundreds of people, including key identified targets of youth and Aboriginal constituents.

A new application process that groups all disciplines and former community grants into one is partly responsible for the cuts. The literary arts and the community will suffer heavily in Regina this coming year.

As a result of these cuts, beginning August 1st or earlier, the following Guild programs will be affected and/or suspended:

·         City of Regina Writing Award (sponsored by the City for 32 years)

·         Words in the Park (3 years)

·         Writer-in-Residence at a Regina school (10+ years)

·         First Nations Reading series (5+ years)

·         Signature Reading series (15+ years in various editions)

·         Aboriginal Storytelling Month (2 years)

·         Aboriginal History Day/Month (4 Years)

·         Talking Fresh (11 years)

·         Regina Workshops (25+ years)

·         Apprentice Readings (15+ years)

·         Windscript Launch (4 years)

·         Playwrights Reading series (5+ years)

·         Historic Walking Tours (4 years)

Guild staff will be meeting with the City Community Consultant responsible for the grant programs on Tuesday next week to see if there are any options for alternate funding. We will inform you of the results shortly thereafter.

We encourage you to contact Regina City Council to voice your concerns about literary arts being cut from cultural funding, and to raise their awareness that the literary community is strong and viable, and this programming serves an important community need. You may email Regina City Councillors and/or Mayor Michael Fougere at the following link:

http://www.regina.ca/site/contact/contact-your-city-councillor/

 

trm has already let her Councillor, Shawn Fraser, know about this abomination.  He’s a good guy and has not heard about it but is looking into it.  However, it would be very useful for people “from away” to chime in and let Mayor Fougere know how they feel about the big #YQR #fail!

 

Well, boys ‘n’ girls, after 8 days of playing cat and mouse with the media and pretty well the world at large, Fordzilla crawls out and denies the crack smoking allegations.

“I do not use crack cocaine,” Ford told a jam-packed news conference at Toronto City Hall. “Nor am I an addict of crack . . . → Read More: Mayor Fordzilla Finally Slithers Outta His Hole, But Does Anyone Buy His Denial?

Please welcome Senators David Tkachuk, Marjory LeBreton and Carolyn Stewart Olsen to the growing family scandal of Steve's Parade of Perps with Perks.  Click to enjoy.

While Steve is still going with the lone topgun chief of staff on the Duffy knoll with the chequebook story from his temporary hideout in South America, his perps at home are busy fucking that up for him. 

We were most relieved to hear from Senator Tkachuk that even though he was soliciting advice from the Prime Minister's Office on how to do his audit of Duffy, and Nigel Wright was calling him up wanting to know "When is this thing over with?", Senator Tkachuk assures us that "no one came to my room and told me what to do."

Well that's good to know but with Steve's former-press-secretary-now-Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen spearheading the Duffy audit whitewash/rewrite in the steering committee for you, your own room was pretty well always safe, wasn't it? 

That whitewashed audit is now winging its way back to the same perps for further review and Steve's buddy, government leader in the senate Marjory LeBreton, has refused to open the hearings, complaining she lives in a town "populated by Liberal elitists and their lickspittle media” and is not getting enough credit for opening up the senate to Steve's scandal.

Previous editions and bios of Perps with Perks.
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Today we fulfilled a travel wish we've harboured for many, many years. We saw two sets of paleolithic cave paintings.

* * * *

The day started out a bit interesting, with an early-morning phone call that appeared to be from our dogsitter, scaring me (although it turned out to be a mistake), and a non-working shower. While we ate breakfast, the desk clerk wanted to tell us the shower was fixed, so she wrote this on a scrap of paper: "The bath this one are repaired. Forgives the inconvenience." I have no doubt my Spanish sounds equally amusing.

We had to wait for the tourist information office to open in order to get a regional map; our large road map of Spain is useless for local driving. This meant getting a later start than we wanted, so we were unsure if we'd get to the first cave in time for our 10:40 reservation. As it turned out, the cave was much further away than we thought, and after we found the town, we then had to drive past the town, leave the car on a trail, and walk up steep switchbacks - a good 20 minute walk uphill - to the cave entrance. At the top of the trail, there was a little cabin, locked up, and we assumed the tour had left without us.

As it turned out, this was great. When the "tour" came back, it consisted of one park ranger tour guide, and only one tourist. For this tiny cave, only six people can go in at a time. Because we missed our appointment, we had the next scheduled tour to ourselves.

This was Cueva de Covalanas, the Covalanas Cave. It's one of the least developed in the region in terms of tourism. The guide spoke only Spanish, but I told her if she spoke slowly, I could understand. And when she remembered to speak slowly, I did! I translated for Allan as best as I could.

The guide unlocked the entrance with a key, and we all walked in. The only light was her little pen flashlight. We walked for a few minutes, then she turned off her light so we could see how dark the cave really was. It is the darkest dark you can experience. Total blackness. Even after a few minutes, your eyes don't adjust, because there is nothing to adjust to. You literally cannot see your hand in front of your face.

Then she clicked on her light and there on the wall: a deer. It's drawn in vivid red. It was drawn 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, and it looks like it could have been put there yesterday.

The guide traced the form of the deer, using the shadow of her finger as a pointer, showing us how the artist used the natural contours of the cave as part of the animal's form. By moving her flashlight, she showed us how the animal form is better seen with indirect light. With her flashlight above the figure, rather than directly in front of it, the shape really came alive.

The guide explained how people didn't live in these caves, they lived in caves below, closer to where we parked our car, and only used these caves above for some special significance. She told us how they would make light with fire (burning animal fat) and how they made the paint out of minerals. The paint isn't found naturally, it was a painstaking process, very deliberate. And of course the painter was drawing from memory, without a model or a photo in front of him.

Using her light and the shadow of her finger, the guide showed us several more animal forms. The animal's name translates as deer in English, but it looks more like what we would call an antelope. There was also a horse that the artist portrayed with its mane flowing and legs running, the front legs not drawn but formed by the rock.

There are 18 paintings in all. They are all red, and made with a distinctive style: the painter used his or her thumb to make dots or daubs. You can get very close to the paintings, and they are incredibly well preserved.

Our guide told us about how the great cave paintings at Altamira are now locked up - the irony of permanent preservation, but their gifts no longer reaching the public. She said, there are the reproductions, but it's not the same. To her, the best cave is Covalanas, because it's dark, and not developed, and you can be so close, and the red is so vivid. She was clearly passionate about her work, and often she would forget to speak slowly, and I would get only the barest gist, but it didn't matter. It was just a privilege to be there. Allan and I were both very moved.

Since you can't take photos in the cave, we bought a book. The text is only in Spanish, but the photos are wonderful. We took a few photos of the surrounding mountains, with sheep grazing in mountain pastures. As we left, two people had arrived for the next tour.

* * * *

We weren't sure if we could make our next appointment, which was in the complete opposite direction, and over the provincial border in Asturias, plus there was some road construction along the way. But we did make it, just in time, to the little town of Ribadesella, to see the Cuevas de Tito Bustello, named for one of the cavers who stumbled on them in 1968.

This was an entirely different experience, and an excellent counterpart to our first tour. At Tito Bustello, as many as 20 people can go in the cave at a time. There is a specially constructed tourist entrance, with a cement floor and artificial lighting on the floor. It is still dark, and wet, and slippery, but the cave has been transformed for tourists. There's a large interpretative centre that (supposedly) will one day replace the caves when they are closed to tourism.

At this cave, the group walked a long way in, through large open rooms full of stalactites and stalagmites, and strange, beautiful rock formations. The guide talked quickly and incessantly. We were the only non-Spanish-speakers in the group, and mostly we just didn't understand anything. I could generally understand the subject of the talk - now he's describing how the cave was formed by the river, now he's describing what paleolithic people ate - but that was about it.

We walked a long ways in, towards the originally entrance to the cave, which has since been closed by a landslide. The guide turned off his light so we could experience the darkness, and also asked for silence, so we could hear the rushing water of the river (which you can't see). Then the guide used the same techniques - the flashlight and finger shadows - to show us a large area painted with red and black deer, antelope, bison, and geometric shapes. Above them all, too high for a person to paint without some type of ladder or scaffolding, is the beautiful image of a horse's head: the image that has come to symbolize cave paintings in the north of Spain.

There are many more paintings in Tito Bustillo, but they are in small spaces that are now closed to the public.

After the tour, we spent time in the interpretive centre, which was truly excellent, signed in both Spanish and English. There was an exhibit on how the paintings were discovered by a group of cavers purely by chance, and a lot about the painting techniques, and the lives of the people who created them.

* * * *

I love to think about these people, fully human, just like us. People who are the ancestors of all of us, people who made tools, who learned how to survive - but who also made and wore jewelry, and made art, and fashioned tools that were not only useful but beautiful. This means we share something with these long-ago humans, we have a commonality with them. They are part of our shared heritage, the heritage that links all humans as one. And, as far as we know, they were the world's first artists.

I can go on and on about this stuff. If you haven't yet seen the Werner Herzog movie "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," I hope you will. He captured and expressed the wonder I feel about this work.

* * * *

After we drove back, we walked into the little town centre for dinner. Dinner was better tonight - cocido montenes, a local stew with white beans, greens, and sausage, and some pork medallions, and more flan, and dinner always includes water, wine, and bread.

We end the day the way it began, with a mistranslation. On the menu, a dish is described as "loin of pork, including its landfill".

If Stephen Harper wants to operate a quasi-criminal enterprise on the public dime then he has to take full responsibility for it.

The Prime Minister's Office is his and his alone.  He decides who works there and he decides what they do or don't do.  It is funded from the public purse but is accountable to no one save the prime minister.

The Harper PMO is not only unaccountable, it's opaque.  What goes on in there goes on behind closed doors.   There is no transparency whatsoever at least until something leaks out or erupts.  In other words, it's perfectly designed for corruption.  It is the perfect vehicle for someone like Stephen Harper to have done what he cannot risk being caught doing himself.

In the wake of the latest scandal there was utter shock in the media about the resignation of Harper chief of staff, Nigel Wright.  The universal take on Wright was that he was the ultimate straight arrow, a great guy.   That might have been true, at least before Wright became entangled with the Harper PMO but then everything changed.

Put it down to the culture of corruption that inevitably emanates from the Grand Corrupter himself, the prime minister.  Stephen Harper is the poster boy of sociopathy.  He is a ruthless and amoral character who refuses to accept restraint or responsibility.  He showed us he was bent at the outset when he removed portraits of the prime ministers of Canada from the foyer of the House of Commons and replaced them with photographs of himself, the narcissistic hallmark of a sociopath.  In his daily life he shows a cold, detached and utter lack of conscience.  His two most frequently observed character traits are mean-spiritedness and vindictiveness.  Stephen Harper does not play well with others nor does he play by the rules which is why an organization like the PMO will inevitably devolve into a criminal enterprise.

The current scandal is a three-part affair.   The minor scandal deals with the Cavendish Cottager.  The intermediate scandal lies in the Senate itself and the Conservative senators who control it and have allowed it to be corrupted.   The major scandal lies in the Prime Minister's Office through which Stephen Harper has pulled the strings in all three scandals.   Follow those strings back and you're sure to find them in Harper's very own hand, or at least you might but for his cut-out, his font of plausible deniability,  his PMO.

Mike Duffy was Stephen Harper's pick to serve as a senator for Prince Edward Island.   The statutes were clear enough.   Duffy obviously wasn't "resident" in Prince Edward Island as stipulated but rules, for Stephen Harper, are inconveniences to be circumvented or bent wherever necessary.  In this way a statutory requirement was treated as an irrelevant formality.

Duffy was a loyal and energetic servant of his Master.  He was a fundraising machine.  In his many appearances across the country, when Duffy spoke he usually did it with the venom of the man he served.  He really dished out the ridicule.  Harper must have loved it.  Of Harper's many Senate appointments, Duffy was the highest-profile by far.

Then arose a controversy about certain senators and their expenses, particularly extra housing allowances claimed by senators who seemed to be resident in Ottawa, Duffy foremost among them.  The rules, bent by Harper at the outset, were now to be examined, tested.   This promised to be not only bad news for Duffy but a huge embarrassment for the prime minister.  A little string pulling would be in order.

When the Senate appointed independent auditor, Deloitte, to review the suspect senators, their claims and status, the PMO brought Duffy in-house.  As Duffy's unfortunate e-mails of the time indicate, he was given a 3-part deal.  He would be given the cash to clear his Senate tab, to reimburse the expenses he had improperly claimed.  He was ordered to stay silent and not to cooperate with the auditors.  "They," as in Stephen Harper, would intervene with the Senate committee and see to it that their report on Duffy "went easy on" him.

Three pieces, sublimely sociopathic - an under the table payment, subversion of an audit process and corruption of a Senate committee.  Now tell me that was Nigel Wright's doing.

It all worked.   Duffy dutifully handed the Senate someone else's cash.  Duffy spurned the requests of the independent auditors for information and documents.  The Senate committee, or at least the Tories in charge of it, laundered the report, removing in particular the damning finding that Duffy was not nor ever had been since childhood resident in Prince Edward Island.

And it all worked, right up until one or more dissidents, believed to be from the Senate, began feeding information and documents to a CTV parliamentary reporter.

The leaks were staged in such a way as to elicit denials or admissions that tied the principal actors to their stories.  Layer by layer leaks were fed to the CTV reporter as the cement hardened around the feet of Duffy and Nigel Wright.  The final straw was the leak to the CBC of the original Senate report on Duffy that, read in the context of the official version, revealed how the Tories who controlled the committee had been compromised, corrupted.  The story of just how that happened is still to come out and may be the most telling of all.

When Stephen Harper addressed the Conservative Parliamentary caucus on Tuesday morning, he displayed all the aplomb that might be expected of a sociopath in his circumstances.  He took no responsibility whatsoever.  He portrayed himself as the victim and blamed the whole mess on everyone else, right up to and including staff in his own PMO.

Curiously, he didn't seem to single out Duffy.  Why not?  After all he was spreading the blame pretty thick on everyone and anyone else he could think of.  Presumably because Duffy can't be scapegoated lest people ask too many questions about his "special handling" throughout this affair.   Duffy also probably knows too much, the sort of stuff that could dissolve Harper's plausible deniability of his role in all three scandals.   For this is Harper's doing, front to back, start to finish, and it reveals him to be utterly corrupt, head to toe.

Harper isn't going to bring in fresh blood to the PMO, not at this point when so much is at stake.  He can't trust new people.  That's why he fell back on his principal secretary, Novak, his young but fiercely loyal confidante.

It is right that Harper doesn't have to account or report on the activities of the Prime Minister's Office.   The PMO can't function without plenty of privacy.  It is a partisan agency and every prime minister needs that to do the job.   But a PMO  that has no accountability is a PMO, just like Harper's, that is ripe for corruption.  That's why prime minister Harper must be held personally responsible for everything that comes out of his PMO, good and bad alike.  He doesn't get to play victim and point fingers.  The skullduggery that goes on inside his personal enclave is his, in full.

Harper lost any benefit of the doubt after the Bruce Carson scandal.  From that point on he had a special obligation to stay on top of his PMO and ensure nothing like that happened again.  Even if you're willing to accept his absurd claim that he knew nothing of  the Wright-Duffy dealings, it doesn't matter.  That's on Harper, squarely on him.

As Stephen Harper said of then prime minister Jean Chretien: "He is the leader and a leader is responsible for the actions of the people he leads.  If he had a right or honourable bone in his body, he'd admit that and resign immediately."

Well put, Steve.  
 

It's not a big problem, yet, in Canada and most of us wouldn't know there's a problem at all.   But much of our world, including the United States, is already experiencing serious freshwater challenges.

Global warming plays a huge role in the worsening freshwater crisis.  A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour and that triggers a variety of consequences from providing additional energy to fuel severe storm events to disruptions of the very precipitation patterns that enabled the creation and growth of our civilization.  In the future places that already have enough or too much rainfall will get more and places that don't have enough will get less.

We're familiar with the projection that mankind's population will swell to over nine billion within this century.  A new report forecasts that a majority of those nine billion will live with permanent water shortages.

Welcome to the Athropocene:

We are about to go out exploring downtown Edmonton, so just a little something for your viewing pleasure today. It might be useful to bear in mind the context within which this should be viewed, the decision by Mike Duffy in 2008 to show the false starts and stops of Stephane Dion, then the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, a decision that some say was a significant contributing factor in the Liberal electoral woes that ensued.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found that CTV Atlantic violated the Radio Television News Directors Association Code of Ethics in a broadcast on October 9, 2008:

The CBSC has concluded that CTV violated Article 8 of the Code, regarding decency, consideration and conduct, for broadcasting the interview outtakes after it had said that it would not do so.

Hmm... decency, consideration, conduct - seems like the now disgraced Seantor Duffy learned nothing from the decision.



H/t Chrisine Reid, Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen HarperRecommend this Post

For anyone who has been paying attention, it's been evident for a long time that Stephen Harper is a phony. There has always been a chasm between what he says and what he does. The Duffy-Wright Affair has once again illustrated that chasm. Michael Harris writes that Harper is no conservative:

Stephen Harper has forgotten that real conservatives care about values lived, not values espoused. They detest dishonesty, sleaziness and abuse of office. All three of those traits drip from the PMO/Senate scandal like poison from a boil. Before scurrying away to an insignificant Perrier-fest in Peru, the prime minister failed to drain that abscess.
Harper defines conservatism as blind loyalty -- to him. He does not, however, display any sense of loyalty to his underlings.

Consider the prime minister’s ride down the slippery pole of changing stories. When the Mike and Nigel story first broke, the PM’s chief of staff was practically canonized — you know, a saintly friend paying back improperly-claimed taxpayers’ money that a semi-penitent Conservative senator could not repay himself. Why, Pierre Poilievre himself said it. So it had to be true, right?

Then Dubious Duffy morphed into Bad Duffy when he contradicted Nigel Wright’s version of that $90,000 cheque. Out of caucus he went. Next, when it became obvious the St. Nigel story was coming across as bogus stigmata, the PM’s “full support” turned into blaming his former chief-of-staff. It was all Nigel’s fault now and the PM knew absolutely nothing about anything.
Harper has played Canada's real conservatives for fools -- and he has done it for a long time. The backbench should do some thinking. When things got tough, Harper left them to shoulder the burden. If they continue to do that, they truly are fools.

Assorted content to end your week.

- For all the talk of fraud and cover-ups among the Cons this week, the most important story on that front looks to be the release of Judge Mosley's decision on Robocon - featuring findings of fact based on the best evidence presented by the Cons (and affected voters) that the 2011 election was marred by electoral fraud facilitated by the Cons' voter database, and that the first Cons covered it up by destroying the records which would have allowed investigators to determine who was actually responsible, then engaged in questionable tactics to keep the facts from seeing the light of day.

- Don Lenihan sees the glaring gap between spin and reality on the Cons' Clusterduff scandal as a revelation as to the Harper government's contempt for the truth, while Michael Harris also treats the Senate scandal as a comparatively new development. But Paul Wells is right to note that this is merely another example of a long-standing Harper philosophy that facts and other people are to be thrown under the bus whenever it suits his political interests - meaning that the bigger question is why anybody has taken the Cons' word for anything in the meantime.

- And lest anybody think that the Cons' culture of compulsive concealment is limited to scandals, Colin Horgan finds some prime examples of blatant lies about simple facts in Question Period, while Mike de Souza reports that Joe Oliver is trying to keep the contents of a $16 million, publicly-funded oil industry propaganda campaign secret from the Canadian public.

- Finally, the Senate itself is certainly looking all the worse based on David Tkachuk's remarkable admissions that he kept in touch with the PMO to make sure that his committee's report on Mike Duffy's expense claims fit with the Cons' political interests. But Althia Raj reports that there's plenty more ludicrous abuse of public trust and money where that came from - such as substantial annual payments to the chairs of committees even when they're not meeting.

OMG. What did I do to deserve this? So I can do it again, and again, and again.

Because this is just too good to be true eh? 

As if that Con scandal in the House of Pork wasn't already one of the most amazing shows I've seen recently. Right up there with The Bates Motel. Or Rob Ford and the Scary Crack Dealers.

Now if you can believe it, here comes Mike Duffy demanding a full public inquiry !!!!
Read more »

Maude Barlow puts the robo-call decision in perspective.

Just hours ago the long-awaited Federal Court ruling on election fraud was released...

In a clear and bold statement, Judge Richard Mosley wrote: "I find that electoral fraud occurred during the 41st General Election."

While his ruling stopped short of annulling election results, this is a powerful victory for Kay Burkhart, Ken Ferance, Yvonne Kafka, Bill Kerr, Sandra McEwing, Tom Parlee, Jeff Reid and Peggy Walsh Craig – the eight brave Canadian voters who launched their legal challenges and the thousands of us who continue to stand behind them.

The judge raised grave concerns that the fraudulent calls "struck at the integrity of the electoral process by attempting to dissuade voters from casting ballots for their preferred candidates. This form of 'voter suppression,' was, until the 41st General Election, largely unknown in this country."

From the outset, the eight applicants argued that the fraudulent robocalls were widespread, targeted and centrally organized – which is precisely what Judge Mosley found. "I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country, including the subject ridings, and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter identification calls," and that "the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC [Conservative Party of Canada], accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court."

Of course the CPC will try to paint this as a victory, but they have nothing to celebrate. That is unless an attempt to steal the election using their database, to which only senior Conservative Party members have access, is a cause for rejoicing. This is a serious indictment of the CPC.

Judge Mosley himself praised the eight applicants for their virtue, while chastising the Conservative MPs. "It has seemed to me that the applicants sought to achieve and hold the high ground of promoting the integrity of the electoral process while the respondent MPs engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits."

And Mosley even made special note of their shameful obstructionist tactics, stating, "Despite the obvious public interest in getting to the bottom of the allegations, the CPC made little effort to assist with the investigation at the outset despite early requests. I note that counsel for the CPC was informed while the election was taking place that the calls about polling station changes were improper. While it was begrudgingly conceded during oral argument that what occurred was "absolutely outrageous", the record indicates that the stance taken by the respondent MPs from the outset was to block these proceedings by any means."